Jason Lee - Staff Writer
The city springs up over the grassland like magic, its golden spires rising over the horizon as if they pierced through the earth. It is a young city, but a busy one.
Uniform streets score the land, each one choked with people. Wealth flows in endlessly, snaking in on caravans that cut through the grass. At night, the city lights up with a thousand taverns, disturbing the once tranquil steppe with raucous amusement. Ask any one of its people, and they will tell you a tale of glorious conquest over the earth, how they cut down the grass and forced the land to their will, of the many battles with the “savages,” and the utter dominion of man. However, beyond the golden city and its fledgling walls, the steppe-dwellers tell a different tale, one of flight and subjugation. Their foe was not one that fought with guns or steel or horse, though the city’s army did have those in spades. Nay, their strength was in the City’s wealth and tenacity. With scripture, plow, and fence, the city’s missionaries and soldiers subverted the old ways and broke them like a calf at the time of slaughter. It was a different sort of war.
The steppe-dwellers no longer quite live up to their name, living on the fringes of the City in a slum of mud and scrap much different from their tipis of days past. Their former paths have long since been stolen and divided into the domains of the plantations. What spears and bows they did have had been taken from them. The few who refused to abandon their nomadic ways and settle down were dealt with long ago.
This is not the end of their tale, however. Stay until the brazier runs dim, and you may hear of another war altogether. The works of man do not last forever, and the earth will not forever be his sandbox. When the city’s cobbles become choked with moss, its spires worn and decrepit, and its people old and jaded, there will be a reckoning. Nature will have her due someday, and when that day comes, it won't be much of a war.
The only thing that awaits is oblivion.