Entry 1
Sander Ilchester
November 2018
My Grandfather Felix the First kept a diary from the age of thirteen. For the first years he describes a repetitive regimen of being beaten by his contract owner every day, and laying awake at night freezing and hungry with a stray cat who he called Charlotte. The cat was a Kadiki Blue, bearing the namesake of a matriarch he and countless other indentured children yearned after as the mother of a freer and prouder Engellexian Empire.
His own father was a miner by trade but perennially failed to keep a position due to alcoholism, drug use, or outright brawling. When charged in court for one such altercation, his father sold Felix to a bondsman who in turn sold the boy to a machinist in need of cheap small hands to fetch items or reach inside of monstrous machines he not dare poke around in himself. He writes that by fourteen he could pass as sixteen year old if he grew out a dirty blonde mustache, the minimum age needed to enter the Cantigian Land Army - infamous for recycling runaway servant children into earned freedom citizens.
The rest is common Cannie legend, he rises to a royal guard post and falls in love with my Grandmother, culminating in a nearly successful communist uprising over the Rydel Monarchy. They survived and married as everyone knows, and next the pages take a methodical form. Felix I chronicles a rocky marriage with my Grandmother Alice, a sullen woman who’s spirit likely died with her family in the red uprising. Felix and Alice had only one child together, Felix II my father.
His diary is drier than the later years of his own father, reading like a documentary screenplay that describes details of boiled eggs and uniform deficiencies in officers more than the raw emotion and anguish of my Grandfather as a child servant. He has given me the last year of his diaries, along with a year of civil war from my Grandfather, to take with me in what I can only call exile.
Like my Grandfather I am being sent away after a fight my father cannot win, but instead of selling me to a bondsman, he is sending me to a Himyari country called Azraq. Muhammad worshiping people with dark skin and dark oil reserves that mark the only similarity between Cantignia and this strange land. For now I am accompanied by Daryl Masters, the CEO of Monarch Petroleum and probably the richest man north of Charleroi. He’s told me I have several billion pounds to pay for quite a long stay here, but all I have in my hands is my cat Charlie - a Kadiki Blue.
Sander Ilchester
November 2018
My Grandfather Felix the First kept a diary from the age of thirteen. For the first years he describes a repetitive regimen of being beaten by his contract owner every day, and laying awake at night freezing and hungry with a stray cat who he called Charlotte. The cat was a Kadiki Blue, bearing the namesake of a matriarch he and countless other indentured children yearned after as the mother of a freer and prouder Engellexian Empire.
His own father was a miner by trade but perennially failed to keep a position due to alcoholism, drug use, or outright brawling. When charged in court for one such altercation, his father sold Felix to a bondsman who in turn sold the boy to a machinist in need of cheap small hands to fetch items or reach inside of monstrous machines he not dare poke around in himself. He writes that by fourteen he could pass as sixteen year old if he grew out a dirty blonde mustache, the minimum age needed to enter the Cantigian Land Army - infamous for recycling runaway servant children into earned freedom citizens.
The rest is common Cannie legend, he rises to a royal guard post and falls in love with my Grandmother, culminating in a nearly successful communist uprising over the Rydel Monarchy. They survived and married as everyone knows, and next the pages take a methodical form. Felix I chronicles a rocky marriage with my Grandmother Alice, a sullen woman who’s spirit likely died with her family in the red uprising. Felix and Alice had only one child together, Felix II my father.
His diary is drier than the later years of his own father, reading like a documentary screenplay that describes details of boiled eggs and uniform deficiencies in officers more than the raw emotion and anguish of my Grandfather as a child servant. He has given me the last year of his diaries, along with a year of civil war from my Grandfather, to take with me in what I can only call exile.
Like my Grandfather I am being sent away after a fight my father cannot win, but instead of selling me to a bondsman, he is sending me to a Himyari country called Azraq. Muhammad worshiping people with dark skin and dark oil reserves that mark the only similarity between Cantignia and this strange land. For now I am accompanied by Daryl Masters, the CEO of Monarch Petroleum and probably the richest man north of Charleroi. He’s told me I have several billion pounds to pay for quite a long stay here, but all I have in my hands is my cat Charlie - a Kadiki Blue.