Chapter 4: New Year, New Problems
Personal System Calendar: Year 00014, Day 1-28, Month I: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6858, 1st to 28th day of the 1st Month
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Celebrating a New Year
While it was grim inside the camp, the last batch of supplies had included some things that were kept secret for the time being.
What it was, were the materials needed for celebrating the new year. It wasn't going to be a grand feast or anything close to one, but it was something that could at least lift the spirits of the people here. The village leadership had read through the reports coming out of the camp and felt for them. It wasn't much, but everyone needed a bit of hope for something to hold onto, no matter how small that glimmer of hope was.
The reports themselves had been short, mostly numbers. Headcounts, ration usage, the occasional note about someone who hadn't made it through the week. But numbers only told part of the story, and the people reading those reports back at the village knew that better than most. They had been on the other side of numbers like that once, years ago, when Maya itself had been little more than a handful of survivors with nothing but each other.
They surprised everyone at midnight, just before the new year could fully arrive. They got there first.
Word went out to each bunker and food was rushed in, in large amounts. Still warm, freshly cooked. August himself made the delivery. The meals had been put together by the village, cooked in people's own homes that same evening. Word of this camp had spread through the village by now, and people who had once been in a similar position before arriving at Maya years ago felt for these refugees in a way that needed no explanation.
There was also additional clothing, some sewn by the village's seamstresses, some donated by the Bonny and Su's Tailoring House. That had already gone out earlier with the secret supply run. What August brought tonight was only the freshly prepared food.
These small gifts, however little they amounted to, would hopefully give these people something to hold onto for tomorrow.
August only stayed long enough to look the camp's situation over before heading back home.
"Everyone, if you give us a moment, we'd like to let you know the village has sent freshly cooked meals for tonight. It's to welcome the new year ahead of us. It might not be much, but we hope it gives you something to hold onto. The future isn't written yet. Those of you who made it this far need to keep going, carry the memories of those who didn't make it, and build something with the time you have left. Join us if you'd like to celebrate, or just eat and fill your stomachs with something warm."
This was repeated in every section of the camp by whichever sergeant was in charge of it.
People moved toward the smell of food, even the ones who had arrived late that same day and barely had time to settle in. For a moment their exhaustion, their grief, all of it paused. Food does that. It brings people together. Not just people either. It works on every race and species the same way.
Some felt hope for the first time in a long while. Some felt like people again instead of just survivors. Others stayed quiet, still caught in their grief, but even they ate their fill. For tonight, that was enough.
When the hour of the new year arrived, a bell was rang out across the camp to mark it. They didn't have anything as precise as a real clock, but they had something close enough, a way to track the hours even through the long stretch of darkness. People had built tools for this over the years. Crude things, almost primitive by the standards of a proper city, but they worked. All forty-eight hours of the day, tracked well enough to know roughly where you stood in it.
One of the guards mentioned that the village had similar tools, just better made and more accurate, back when they first arrived years ago with little more than what they could carry. It wasn't said to brag. It was just something to talk about, a small piece of normal conversation in a place that didn't get much of it.
So the new year began. Some of the children laughed and ran around the bunkers in whatever excitement they had left in them. Others cried quietly where they sat. But there was hope in the camp that night, for tomorrow if nothing else.
The new year carried all the weight of the one before it. But they would face it going forward, not looking back.
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Questions About the Village
The days that followed felt a little lighter around the camp.
People started asking questions. What did the village actually look like? Were the stories about beasts living alongside people actually true, or just something merchants said to make a good story better? Those were the questions from the more imaginative ones, the dreamers, the ones who hadn't quite let go of wonder even after everything.
Some of the guards answered these questions with patience they probably didn't know they still had left. Yes, the beasts were real. Yes, some of them were enormous. No, they didn't attack people who lived there, because they were part of the community, not pests to be driven off. A few of the refugees laughed at that the first time they heard it, assuming it was a joke meant to keep their spirits up. The guards just shrugged and let them think what they wanted. They'd see for themselves eventually, if they chose to go.
Others, the ones already thinking about what came next, asked about opportunities. About the vetting process. What it involved, how long it took, what happened if someone didn't make it through.
A few asked the harder question too. What if they didn't fit in. What happened to people who couldn't adjust to a place where beastfolk and beasts lived as neighbors rather than threats.
The guards and support staff answered as honestly as they could. They didn't dress it up. They told them about people in the past who hadn't been a good fit for Maya specifically, and how those people had been pointed toward other towns and villages that Maya had good relationships with, places that could use willing hands and were happy to take them in. As long as someone was willing to work, they told them, there was a place for them somewhere. Maybe not here, but somewhere they could fit in and felt the safest.
By now the camp had grown to close to six hundred people. The weather hadn't let up. The guards had been told the cold was likely to last the entire month this year, with spring not arriving until sometime in the second month. That was later than usual, and nobody was thrilled about it, but the food supplies from the village were holding steady. There was enough to last a while yet, even with the new arrivals.
The bunkers had been expanded twice more since the camp was first set up, and a third expansion was already being discussed. None of it was glamorous work. Trenches were dug deeper into frozen ground, to fit in more underground rooms carved out with whatever tools could be spared and magic to excavate it a bit faster. But it kept getting done, a little at a time, the same way most things at Maya got done.
Some people in the camp were already starting to think about rebuilding a new life. Not everyone. But some. That counted for something.
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The Sovereignty of Arwen
While there was some joy in the camp, back in Arwen things had gotten worse.
The war had spread through the entire sovereignty by now. The snow in some places wasn't white anymore, it was dyed in crimson red, and stayed that way because nobody had the manpower or the will to clean it up. Bodies lay where they fell. There were simply too many of them and too few hands left to bury them.
Whole districts had gone quiet in a way that wasn't peaceful. Some towns that had been fighting hardest a month ago were now just empty graveyards, the fighting having moved on to somewhere else and left nothing behind but the aftermath. Anyone with the strength to walk had already started walking, north mostly, toward the same road the family of Rabia and thousands of others had already taken.
And somewhere in the middle of all that death, the Cabal's people were watching, and they were pleased with what they saw.
They had worked their way into both sides of the war. As agents inside the Arwenian army or agents inside the rebel command. Weapons flowed to both sides. Information flowed to both sides. Every time one side seemed close to gaining the upper hand, the Cabal made sure the other side got just enough help to keep things even. The wedge they had been driving for years was now buried deep, and the kingdom was tearing itself apart along the cracks they had carefully made.
Neither side knew the other was being helped (played) by the same hands. That was the part that made it work. Each side believed they were winning, slowly, and that belief was enough to keep them fighting long after either of them should have run out of reasons to.
Arwen had once been proud. Powerful, even, in its own way. Now it was a wasteland of its own making, though it didn't fully understand that the making hadn't been entirely its own.
To the Cabal, none of these deaths were wasted. Every life lost in Arwen's collapse fed into something larger. A ritual, vast in scale, an offering to the entity they called the Great Evil, the darkness that waited on the other side of the world. The Empire had sealed off the sea routes years ago, making it nearly impossible for the Great Evil to reach Arkanus the way it once had. But a ritual built on enough death, enough suffering, enough corrupted ground, could open something else. A gateway. Not unlike the kind the Empire itself used to move quickly across long distances, except this one would only open in one direction, and only the army of the Great Evil would be allowed to walk through it.
That would be the start of something the Empire wasn't prepared for. Not yet, anyway. Arwen wasn't part of the Empire, and Emperor Janus had no obligation to intervene in what looked, from the outside, like an internal collapse no different from a dozen others across history. The Cabal was counting on exactly that indifference. While the Emperor looked the other way at what seemed like just another kingdom destroying itself, the gateway would open quietly, and by the time anyone noticed, it would already be too late to close it.
They laughed about it, these people behind their masks. They imagined the look on the Emperor's face when he finally understood what had been happening right under his nose, behind the convenient excuse of a war he had no reason to care about.
Patience has served them well so far. A little more of it wouldn't hurt.
Maya Village sat in the middle of all of this, completely unaware. If the ritual succeeded, if the gateway opened where the Cabal intended it to open, the village would be standing closer to the center of it than anyone there could possibly imagine. Whether they would be ready for what came through it, when the time came, was a question nobody in Maya had even thought to ask yet.
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Meanwhile, at the Academy…
Far from any of this, the members of Talon One who were away at the academy were spending their short holiday break the way most students did. Out exploring the city, doing the kinds of things they rarely had time for during the school term.
It was strange for some of them, having actual free time. Back home there was always something to do. Training, patrols, projects, the constant low hum of a village that never really stopped needing things to ve done. Here, for a few days, nobody needed anything from them. It took some of them a day or two to figure out what to do with that feeling.
They wandered through markets, picked up souvenirs to bring back home for the next time they returned to Maya, and spent their afternoons in cafes that served a bitter drink most of them weren't used to. Some of them added sweeteners to cut the bitterness. There were a dozen variations to choose from, and they tried most of them over the course of the break, sitting around small tables and talking about nothing in particular, which was its own kind of luxury after a term of nothing but studying.
They also went to the theater a few times, the way their wealthier classmates often did. The plays ranged across genres. The women in the group tended to gravitate toward the romance plays, which left them in unreasonably good moods for the rest of the day. The men had wider tastes, but mostly ended up watching dramatized retellings of old imperial battles, the kind that leaned heavily into House Solmane's past victories. Propaganda, more or less, dressed up as theater. Still entertaining, even if everyone knew exactly what it was.
At some point during one of those afternoons, someone wondered out loud whether the village would ever reach a point like this. Cafes, theaters, the kind of leisure that came with a settled, established place.
Erik answered before anyone else could.
"Based on how fast the village has been growing, even with the controlled intake, I don't think it's that far off. We'll see something like this in our lifetime. I'm sure of it."
He said it plainly, almost matter-of-fact, his expression not changing much. But everyone at the table knew he meant it, and more than that, they knew he was probably right.
The others smiled at that thought. They were already thinking about all the stories they'd bring back with them, the souvenirs, the things they'd seen and tried here. August would probably enjoy hearing about all of it, whenever he had the time to sit and listen. He usually didn't, these days, but that didn't stop them from collecting stories anyway.
And so their days at the academy went on like that, full of small things, while back home winter pressed on and the world outside Maya's borders kept moving toward something none of them could see coming yet.