"Those who live in splendor will never understand the value of the soil. Only stained hands know: it is mud and blood that forge the world."
The sages often said that the world had died four times.
The first era, under the reign of the Titans, was the Golden Age. Back then, Aether—the primordial breath of Mother Earth Gaia—was still pure and potent. The earth bore fruit of its own accord, humans knew neither hardship nor disease, and death came to them as gently as a dream. But the Titans' dominion ended with the Titanomachy, when Zeus and the younger gods triumphed, imprisoning their fathers in the abyss of Tartarus.
A new order was born, and with it, the Silver Age. The Olympian gods created a new race of men, but they were arrogant and disrespectful. Zeus grew angry, and the first divine genocide wiped them from the face of the earth, ushering in a rule written in fear. Then came the Bronze Age, a nightmare of war, where men born from ash trees destroyed one another.
And then, a final glimmer of light—the Age of Heroes. The Demigods, bearing the blood of both gods and men, accomplished immortal feats. But they too faded. Troy fell, and Achilles was slain. The kings and the churches, in the name of the gods, erased the memory of the old city-states, dividing the world into 12 Divine Kingdoms to make it easier to rule and to harvest Faith.
Now, it is the fifth era, the Iron Age, the age of Slavery. Gaia's Aether has grown thin and weak. Humans, the final, wretched descendants, live in a world from which the gods have almost completely turned their faces.
They were the forgotten.
And in a forgotten corner of the Kingdom of Argonia, under the "protection" of the goddess of Marriage, Hera, there was a village named Axios.
But for fifteen-year-old Lycaon, the world was no epic ballad. The world was the smell of damp earth after a night of rain, the biting cold of the morning seeping through the cracks in the walls, and the coarse feeling of the straw bed under his back.
He was awakened not by the distant church bells, but by the rustling stir of the hens they raised inside their home. Their house had only a single room. The frame was made of rough logs, the walls plastered with mud and straw, and the thatched roof had faded to a grim gray. The floor was just packed earth, always damp and cold. A corner of the house, fenced off with a few rotten planks, was a sty for their small pig.
In that cramped and dim space, his whole family slept together, huddled around the dead embers of the central hearth. They warmed each other with their own breath.
His mother, Theona, was the first to wake. She was thin, her tunic of coarse linen worn and old. She moved quietly, rekindling the fire. There was no chimney; the smoke simply rose to the roof, leaving the air inside perpetually acrid and stinging. The flame flared up, illuminating her face, etched with hardship but gentle. Breakfast, like every other breakfast, was a pot of thick oatmeal porridge, seasoned with nothing but a little salt.
"Lycaon, Lyra, wake up and eat." His mother's voice was low and warm, carrying the weariness of years, yet still full of tenderness.
Lycaon sat up. He was fifteen, with the lanky body of an underfed child, but his shoulders were beginning to broaden, and the muscles hidden beneath his rough-spun tunic already had a hint of resilience. His father, Orpheus, was already by the hearth, using a stone to sharpen the worn-out blade of a hoe. His hair was a tangled mess, his beard scraggly, and his coarse wool tunic was patched in countless places.
"Father, let me do that," Lycaon said.
Orpheus shook his head without looking up. "The land tax has gone up again this year. The lord demands payment in the finest barley. Our plot of land is worse this year; I don't know if we'll have enough to pay."
Theona sighed, placing a bowl of porridge in front of her husband. "And there's the church's tithe. The priest said we must offer an extra basket of eggs this season to ask for the goddess Hera's blessing."
"Where will we get eggs? The hens have only laid three in the past week," Orpheus grumbled, his voice hoarse.
Lycaon listened in silence. He was used to conversations like this. The lord's tax, the church's tax, and the days spent as unpaid labor in the lord's fields. They were invisible threads, binding his family to this land, to this cycle of hardship and want.
Lyra, his six-year-old sister, was also awake. She wore an old tunic of their mother's, cut down to fit, and ran barefoot to Lycaon's side. "Big brother," she whispered, her large, round eyes sparkling, "will you make me a straw doll later?"
Lycaon smiled, a rare smile that brightened his somewhat somber face. He ruffled his sister's hair. "Of course, but you have to finish your porridge first."
He looked at his father, hunched over the hoe, at his mother, silently portioning out the meager porridge, and at his sister, happily taking her bowl. His grey eyes, unconsciously, saw everything. He saw the deep wrinkles on his father's brow, saw the early silver strands in his mother's hair, and saw the fragility of the smile on his sister's lips.
This was his world. A small, warm garden, built from love, amidst a world of poverty and oppression. And he knew he had to protect it.