~Succession~
Being exiled from your own home is probably the closest you can get to death short of actually dying; you are away from your family, your friends and even your home. Perhaps this is why God decided on such a punishment for us, even though our crimes perhaps warranted something far worse. I don't know why I'm writing this, now that the chances of anyone reading it are slim. Perhaps I'll feel better about my actions if I just lay it all down on this pad... though I doubt that I will ever, even if we survive this, find peace. Perhaps I should have started this earlier, not now when our food supply is dwindling and our arrival on Aldera looking less and less probable. Still, I find comfort in hoping that one day someone will find this text, read it and learn not to repeat our mistakes. But enough of my pointless rambling; the story of how I found myself travelling through space, heading to what may or may not be an inhabitable world, began in the small agricultural town of Penthe. It was located near where the Gulf of Eritrea once was. As you have probably assumed, it was an agricultural settlement. It’s economy was unremarkable; major exports included wheat, apples and boredom.
I was the son of a minor politician and his wife who, if I remember correctly, was a merchant. They were from the nearby city called Trenen, but they settled down in Penthe after the first riots of what would turn into a global war forced them to leave the city with their children to find a more secluded location to raise me and my sister. However, even this small town far from any major trade routes wouldn’t provide them with a hiding place from the violence that was erupting all over Pandora. Soon enough the town joined one of the newly formed illegitimate states, the “Grand Duchy of Oglamar” as its leader called it. Supporters of the Confederacy, including my parents, were sent to labour camps where they were worked and starved to death. One of my father’s friends managed to evade the policy by pretending to support the new regime and so he and his wife saved me and my sister from certain death in the camps. I was raised by them for the most part and only found out what happened to my parents twenty years later, when the Great War had ended and there was no longer any chance of changing the fate of Pandora. Perhaps if they had told me sooner, Pandora would now still be in one piece.
The nations formed at that time were in a perpetual state of cold war between each other and the Confederacy. Oglamar was in a particularly dangerous situation, bordering both the Dryhounds and the Confederacy. The Dryhounds would later become one of the most dangerous nomadic clans after the war, but at this time they were a fully organized and armed nation. Because of this Oglamar had a very rigorous conscription system; boys were taken at the age of 13 and were supposed to spend ten years in the army, mostly on guard duty against the border with the Dryhounds. I was no exception. At first I welcomed the change of scenery; the army was full of mechanical war machines and most of the bases I served in were much larger than my tiny hometown. It was all somewhat overwhelming and very exciting. It was only after I spent two years in training that we got the news; one of our allies was attacked by the Confederacy after they claimed one of the critical uranium mines in the area. At that very moment the two year cold war erupted into a burning global conflict, one that would devastate 60% of Pandora’s surface and claim six billion lives, including those of my sister and my parents...
and yes, this might be a hopeless attempt to get more people to write =P