CH. 1
The young man in torn rags ran down the crudely paved street, shadows crossing his mud-obscured face from the roofs of houses hanging out over the road. Behind him general Jeremiah galloped on horse, brandishing his sword wildly. The man slipped right into an alleyway, past the makeshift stand of a poor merchant. Jeremiah gave sign with his right hand and an archer on the man's flank let go. A loud THWAP echoed down the alley, ricocheting off walls of homes. Jeremiah hopped off his horse and slid the sword down a leather holster.
"Finally. You've evaded my grasp long enough, puny fiend. You barely have the food to live, yet you run faster than the greatest cavalry I have to offer our lord. What is your secret?"
"Hope." He replied with a last breath.
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The sun peered over the cacti-pierced horizon. A boy with blonde hair sat on the porch of a giant spruce mansion, gazing at the expanse of his territory.
"Is it good to be in power?" Another boy walked out and sat on the porch as well.
"What matter of a question is that, Jonathan?"
"Look Matt, I don't even have a mansion, yet my own brother? An empire and the presidency of the world." Replied the one called Jonathan.
"Kate recognized that there cannot be presidents while a dictator rules through tyranny." Matt said.
"But he created the world!"
"Does that make him a god? There is only one god, Jonathan, and that short, pale geek isn't it."
Jonathan gasped at his older brother's insult and ran back inside. Matt looked thoughtfully at the door slamming to his house. There were preparations to be made, so he followed.
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The killer snatched the sharpest broadsword from the crafty wooden table in the corner with a clatter. his prisoner tried to escape the handcrafted iron bars holding him to the rack that would surely be his deathbed. He was deprived of bathing, food, care, and remotely sanitary living conditions. At the though of this, the executioner grinned, visible even through the black metal visor he wore. He pressed the point of his ornate blade closer the sweating, filthy man's face, wetting the sword's tip. The blade indented the fragile skin before precisely slitting along his pulsing blue vein. The blood dripped like beads of rain rolling down a window, pooling in the man's collar. He clenched his teeth and began to shriek in a bloodcurdling scream that would normally break even the toughest men, but the executioner continued. The blade slowly pivoted horizontally, gauging a circle of flesh the size of a baseball in the captive's pulsing red neck. The loose veins dangling from the top of the hole draped over the blood rushing down into his rags, and the torn flesh looked as though someone ripped a seat cushion in half. And in that instant, with a last strained prayer, the man's buggy black eyes lost their focus on the shining, maroon tip of the sword that killed him, and rolled back into his head. The executioner slid his bare meaty hand along his broadsword, sending the blood splashing onto the red concrete floor and pooling at his boots. It left a faint rosy tint on his blade as he carelessly flung the cold, bloody-ragged cadaver into the pool of blood on the floor. His gargantuan hands immediately grasped the next struggling prisoner, who was trying to escape as a seal would from a shark. And with that the man-killer brandished his shining friend for the next grotesque killing.
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The inside of cowmansion2 was ornate. Expensive shrubbery lined the windows, chests filled with resources scattered the giant room, and light poured in through walls of windows. Matt was pondering the fact that windows were considered rare in Huntsgrove, when a girl came running down the stairs.
