Side Story 4.1: The Three Families
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The Departure
Nine years ago, before the night of fire and blood that would destroy the original Maya Village and claim nearly every life within its borders, three families made a decision that would haunt them for the rest of their days. They chose to leave, to abandon the peaceful settlement that their ancestors had built generations ago, seeking connection with distant relatives in lands they knew only from stories passed down through the years.
The threat of invasion had made these Houses to be pushed off on the edge of their already seceding minds.
The House of Arbe had been the first to announce their intention to depart in the last village council. Twenty members strong, led by Patriarch Aldrin Arbe, as they had grown restless with village life. The old man spoke of legacy, of reconnecting with the greater Arbe clan that supposedly still held influence in the southern regions of the central continent. His children and grandchildren, swept up in his vision of returning to a heritage they had never personally known, agreed to follow him into the unknown.
The House of Nebe followed soon after. Seventeen members, including Patriarch Gerold Nebe, had their own reasons for leaving. Gerold's wife had died the previous winter, and the widower could no longer bear to remain in a place filled with memories of her. His sons and daughters, seeing their father's grief, had agreed that a fresh start elsewhere might ease his pain. If they could find the ancient Nebe clan that their grandfather had spoken of in his final years, perhaps they could build new lives unburdened by sorrow.
The House of Bern was the last to depart, and their leaving had been the most reluctant. Fifteen members led by Matriarch Elena Bern had no grand visions of legacy or desperate need to escape painful memories. But they were practical people, and when two of the village's most prominent families announced their departure, Elena had quietly calculated the village's chances of long-term survival with a depleted population. The mathematics were not encouraging. Better to leave while they still had the strength and resources for the journey than to wait until the village's decline made departure impossible.
The rest of Maya Village had bid them farewell with mixed emotions, but no judgement was made in their decisions; the village respected it. Although it was painful to see those who had been with them for three generations. Those who had built this very village would now leave them, and it was understandable enough. The threat of the Empire's allies raids to villages that the Empire and her allies had passed by and still were not aligned to theirs or their allies were considered as part or supporters of then but now extinct Fresco League of Kingdoms, and it made it a viable excuse to leave the village before they would be killed. They are also an illegal settlement that had settled into the Empire's own backyard, (the Great Forests) so there was that. Some had pleaded with them to reconsider, warning that the world beyond their isolated valley was far more dangerous than they understood. Others had respected their choices, even if they disagreed with them. A few had quietly admitted they understood the impulse to leave, even if they themselves chose to stay.
August Finn, just nine or ten years old at the time, had watched the three families depart with a child's incomprehension of why anyone would leave the only home they had ever known. His parents had explained that people sometimes needed to seek their own paths, but the young boy had simply been sad to see his friends from the Arbe and Nebe families go.
The departing families had left with provisions for the journey, basic weapons for protection, and the stories their elders had passed down about the locations of their ancestral clans. They had maps that were generations out of date, directions that relied on landmarks that might no longer exist, and confidence born of ignorance about the true dangers they would face.
They had thought themselves prepared. They were wrong.
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The Journey Through Hell
The first month of travel had been almost pleasant. The three families had banded together for mutual protection, forming a caravan of fifty-two individuals ranging from elderly patriarchs to children barely old enough to walk. They followed the hidden forest paths that the village had made that eventually connected to wider Imperial Highways or trade roads, moving through wilderness that was dangerous but manageable for people who had spent their lives hunting and surviving in relative isolation.
But as they moved further from the protective obscurity of Lonelywood's Forest and into more populated regions, the true nature of the wider world began to reveal itself.
The first attack came from bandits who had been watching the road for easy prey. The raiders had correctly identified the caravan as rural villagers, people who might carry valuable goods but who lacked the professional competence of merchant guards or military escorts. Twenty men with weapons and experience descended on the caravan at a river crossing, demanding they surrender their valuables.
The Maya villagers had fought back. They were not warriors in the formal sense, but they were hunters, accustomed to facing forest beasts that could kill them with single mistakes. They had weapons. They had courage. And they had the desperate determination of people protecting their families.
The battle had been chaotic and brutal. Three bandits had died, cut down by arrows and spears wielded with surprising skill. But the villagers had paid a terrible price for their resistance. Four members of the House of Nebe had fallen, including one of Gerold's sons. Two from the House of Arbe, including Aldrin's youngest grandson, just seven years old. One from the House of Bern, Elena's nephew who had been hit by a stray arrow.
The surviving bandits had eventually retreated, shocked by the unexpected resistance and unwilling to take further casualties for what had become a costly raid. But the damage was done. Seven families members dead, their bodies buried hastily beside the road because they had neither the time nor the resources for proper funeral rites.
That first attack broke something fundamental in the three families' understanding of the world. In Maya Village, death from beast attacks was a known risk, but it was relatively rare, and it came from creatures that operated on predatory instinct rather than calculated malice. These bandits had attacked them not out of hunger or territorial defense but simply because they saw an opportunity for profit. It was a cruelty that the villagers had never truly understood before that moment.
The second major incident came two weeks later, in a town where they had stopped to resupply. A merchant had seemed friendly, offering to sell them provisions at reasonable prices and asking conversational questions about where they were traveling and what they carried. The villagers, still operating on the social trust that had governed their isolated community, had answered honestly.
That night, the same merchant led a group of hired thugs to ambush them in the cheap inn where they were staying. The attackers had better intelligence this time, knew which rooms the families occupied, struck with coordinated efficiency designed to overwhelm before resistance could organize.
But the Maya villagers had learned from the first attack. They had posted watches. They had prepared ambush positions of their own, learning to think tactically about urban combat even though it went against every instinct developed in their peaceful village life. When the thugs burst through the doors, they found themselves facing ready defenders rather than sleeping victims.
The fight had been vicious. Two more villagers died, including Elena Bern's eldest son, the one she had been grooming to take over leadership of the family. Five attackers died as well, and several others fled with serious wounds. The merchant who had betrayed them was found the next morning in an alley, his throat cut by Gerold Nebe personally, the grieving father channeling his rage into lethal action.
The local authorities had been remarkably unconcerned about the violence. Dead bodies in the lower districts were common enough that no one investigated too thoroughly, especially when the victims were foreigners without local connections.
The three families left that town as quickly as possible, another hard lesson learned about the casual violence that pervaded civilization beyond their isolated valley.
More attacks followed over the months of travel. Raiders who saw them as easy targets. Corrupt officials who demanded excessive bribes at checkpoints. Con artists who tried to swindle them of their remaining resources with elaborate schemes that the villagers were too unsophisticated to recognize until it was nearly too late.
Each incident cost them something. Lives lost in combat. Resources stolen or extorted. The psychological toll of constant vigilance in a world that seemed designed to exploit anyone who showed weakness or naivety.
By the time they finally reached the southern regions where their ancestral clans supposedly resided, only thirty-one of the original fifty-two remained. A survival rate of barely sixty percent, with twenty-one souls lost to violence, disease, and the grinding attrition of traveling through a hostile world.
The House of Arbe had lost eight members, including two of Aldrin's grandchildren and one of his sons. The old patriarch had aged a decade in those months, his grand vision of reconnecting with heritage now tainted by the blood price it had cost.
The House of Nebe had lost seven, including Gerold's son and his eldest daughter who had succumbed to a fever contracted in a filthy town where they had been forced to shelter during a storm. The widower who had left to escape painful memories now carried fresh grief layered atop the old.
The House of Bern had lost six, including Elena's heir and two of her grandchildren. The practical matriarch who had led her family away from Maya's uncertain future now wondered if she had led them into something far worse.
They were broken, traumatized, and haunted by questions of whether their departure had been the worst mistake of their lives. But they had survived, and that was more than many rural villagers managed when venturing into the wider world.
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Reunion and Revelation
Finding their ancestral clans proved easier than the journey to reach them. The House of Arbe, the House of Nebe, and the House of Bern were not unknown names in certain circles of the southern central continent. They were old families, bloodlines that stretched back centuries, with histories written in both glory and tragedy.
The Arbe clan maintained a compound in a prosperous city called Swolenburg, where they operated as respected merchants and craftsmen. When Patriarch Aldrin and his decimated family appeared at their gates claiming kinship, the current clan head had been skeptical at first. But blood recognition rituals confirmed the connection, genetic markers that could not be faked, and the lost branch of the family was welcomed home with cautious warmth.
The Nebe clan had scattered more widely, but the main branch resided in the Duchy of Heran, where they served as minor nobles with holdings in agricultural lands. Gerold and his remaining family were received with formal courtesy, their noble blood acknowledged even if their circumstances were pitiful compared to their established relatives.
The Bern clan proved the most welcoming, perhaps because they remained closest to their roots. They operated as a warrior family in service to the Kingdom of Talvasia, providing officers and skilled combatants to the royal army for generations. Elena and her family were greeted not as lost relatives but as reinforcements, valuable additions to a clan that always needed more capable fighters.
But in each case, the reunions came with revelations that cast their ancestors' original departure from these clans in harsh new light.
The original members of the three families had not left to seek adventure or to establish a new settlement out of pioneering spirit. They had fled, refugees escaping a grinding meat grinder of warfare that had been consuming their bloodlines for generations.
The southern central continent had been wracked by near-constant conflict for over a century. Kingdoms rose and fell. Alliances shifted like sand in wind. And noble families like the Arbe, Nebe, and Bern were expected to contribute their sons and daughters to every war, every border skirmish, every pointless territorial dispute that their liege lords decided required military resolution.
For generations, the three families had bled themselves dry in service to kingdoms that viewed them as little more than expendable resources. Young men sent to battlefields to die for causes they barely understood. Young women conscripted as combat mages or military healers, their magical talents exploited until they burned out or fell in combat. Children trained from youth to be soldiers rather than farmers or craftsmen or scholars.
The attrition had been unsustainable. Each generation of the three families grew smaller, their bloodlines thinning as war consumed the young before they could produce the next generation. Extinction had been a mathematical certainty unless something changed.
So approximately 200 years ago, the then-leaders of the three families had made a desperate decision. They had selected their youngest members, those with the least magical talent and therefore the least likely to be forcibly conscripted, and sent them away. Told them to find somewhere far from the kingdoms and their endless wars, somewhere they could live in peace and raise children who might survive to adulthood.
Those refugees had wandered for years along with other like minded individuals before finding the hidden valley where they established Maya Village. A place so remote, dangerous and unimportant that the kingdoms' grasping hands could never reach them. They had built a life there, raised families, and for three generations lived in the peace that their ancestors had sacrificed everything to give them.
And now their descendants had returned, walking willingly back into the world their ancestors had fled.
The established branches of the three families tried to be welcoming, but there was an undercurrent of bewilderment in their hospitality. Why would anyone who had escaped this life choose to return to it? Did these country relatives not understand what they had given up?
But of course, the Maya families had not returned out of desire to rejoin the political and military obligations of their bloodlines. They had come because they believed Maya Village had been destroyed, because they thought their peaceful home had been obliterated and that returning to their ancestral clans was their only option for survival.
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Nine Years Later
Nine years had passed since the three families departed from Maya Village, and nine years had passed since that terrible night when raiders had descended on the settlement and slaughtered everyone they could find. At least, that was what the three families believed although they had never witnessed it they could tell it in their hearts that no one would have survived to bring them news otherwise. No travelers had passed through their ancestral clan territories with tales of Maya Village still standing. As far as Aldrin Arbe, Gerold Nebe, and Elena Bern knew, they were the only survivors of their community's destruction.
The guilt was crushing at times.
In quiet moments, when the demands of their new lives allowed for reflection, each of the surviving family members wrestled with the question of whether they could have made a difference. If they had stayed, would their twenty additional fighters have been enough to repel the raid? Or would they simply have died alongside everyone else, or was their departure the only reason any part of Maya Village's legacy survived?
The House of Arbe had integrated into their clan's merchant operations, learning the complex world of trade networks and commercial politics. They had wealth now, far more than they had ever possessed in the village, but several family members privately admitted they would trade it all to go back to their simpler lives. The teenage children who had been born in Maya and remembered the village spoke wistfully of the freedom they had known there, the ability to walk the forest paths without guards, the community where everyone knew everyone and trust was the default rather than the exception.
The House of Nebe had adjusted to noble life with varying degrees of success. Gerold himself had never fully recovered from his losses, both his wife before leaving and his children during the journey. He went through the motions of noble duties but remained emotionally distant, a hollow man occupying a position of status. His remaining children tried to embrace their noble heritage, but they too carried scars from the journey and from the guilt of survival.
The House of Bern had perhaps fared best, finding purpose in the warrior traditions of their clan. Elena's surviving children and grandchildren threw themselves into military training, channeling their trauma into martial excellence. Several had achieved recognition as skilled fighters, their unusual background and forest survival skills translating surprisingly well to military service. But even they wondered sometimes if the peace they had known in Maya might have been worth more than the honor they had gained as soldiers.
The world beyond the village of Maya had proven to be exactly as cruel as the village elders had warned. Humans, humanoids, and demi-humans alike operated on principles of self-interest and exploitation that the Maya families had been tragically unprepared for. The strength they had gained from hunting forest beasts and living self-sufficiently meant nothing against opponents who fought with deception, manipulation, and coordinated malice.
They had learned to survive in this harsher world, but at terrible cost.
And through it all, none of them knew the truth that would have changed everything. Maya Village had not been destroyed. One survivor remained, a boy who had become a man and rebuilt the settlement from ashes into something greater than it had been before. The peaceful valley they mourned still existed, now populated by refugees and beast folk and protected by warriors who could stand against threats that would have obliterated the original village.
August Finn lived, and the legacy of Maya endured through him and not them.
But the three families remained ignorant of this truth, separated by thousands of kilometers and the chaos of a continent where information traveled slowly and unreliably. They mourned a death that had not occurred, carried guilt for a tragedy they could not have prevented, and tried to build lives in a world that their ancestors had wisely fled.
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The Question of Fate
Would their paths cross again? Would the three families somehow learn that Maya Village survived, that the home they had abandoned and then mourned still stood? Would fate or fortune or simple coincidence bring them back into contact with August and the thriving community he had built?
The southern central continent was vast, spanning thousands of kilometers of diverse terrain and countless political boundaries. The likelihood of random encounter was vanishishingly small. But the world had a way of connecting threads in unexpected patterns, especially when powerful forces began to take interest in previously insignificant matters.
The Empire's intelligence services were investigating Maya Village, slowly building a picture of the hidden settlement and its unusual capabilities. Those investigations might eventually reach ears connected to the three families, especially if the Nebe clan's noble status or the Bern clan's military service brought them into contact with Imperial officials pursuing the Maya question.
Or perhaps trade networks would provide the connection. The House of Arbe had become enmeshed in commercial operations that spanned much of the southern continent. If Maya's Traveling Mercantile continued to expand their reach, eventually their distinctive high-quality goods might reach markets where Arbe merchants operated. A conversation about sourcing, a chance recognition of techniques or styles that echoed the old village's traditions, and suddenly the truth might begin to emerge.
Or perhaps nothing would connect them. Perhaps the three families would live out their lives in their ancestral clans, never learning that the home they had abandoned continued to thrive without them. Perhaps August would rebuild Maya Village into a true power in the region without ever knowing that survivors from the original settlement existed elsewhere in the world.
The future remained unwritten, obscured by the chaos of probability and the unknowable complexity of a world where millions of people pursued their own goals and dreams. The three families had made their choice nine years ago, and that choice had led them down a path of blood and trauma and hard-won survival. Whether that path would ever curve back toward Maya Village was a question only time could answer.
But in a world where Imperial Intelligence pursued hidden settlements, where trade networks connected distant regions, and where the powerful took interest in the unusual, the possibility remained that the scattered pieces of Maya's original population might someday be reunited.
Whether that reunion would come before the world crumbled under the weight of its own conflicts, or whether it would come too late to matter, was a question that even the wisest could not answer.
For now, the three families lived their separate lives, carrying memories of a peaceful village that most of them believed was gone forever, unaware that those memories might not be as final as they thought.
The world turned. Seasons changed. And the threads of fate continued to weave patterns that no individual could fully perceive or understand.
Perhaps, someday, those threads would bring them home.