Season's Change Winter's Plight Book 1

Intro

I find it hard to conceive, hard to understand that there can be so much evil in the world, that people can and do evil things to others just because they can. I want to believe that ALL people are capable of good, that every thinking beast knows how to love and would choose love every single time. That is what I want to believe.

I have come to learn, that that simply isn't the case. People, ALL people, are capable of great atrocities as well as great good; and great atrocities are far easier to accomplish. They commit crime after crime against one another, at every turn in the road, constantly, often in the name of victory for one god or another. They claim superiority over others, chose to be cruel, evil hurtful, and mean. They are destructive and corrupt, dismissive and blatantly wrong. This is more the nature of the world I live in. A world where one man can keep a host of slaves and do with them as he pleases, to include murder and rape, as if he owned them, their minds, and their bodies, much like they were property, things to be owned, rather than living, breathing beings. Mine is a world ripe with the foulness of Faye and Man and the blackest of hearts, hardened in a world that does not care and shows no mercy for the meek and mild, a world in which love, honest and true love, is rare, the rarest gem of all and is crushed underfoot long before it is nurtured and cultivated. I live in a world that knows no tolerance, no acceptance, and no joy. It is empty, cold, vast and devoid of empathy, though it is teaming with life. Mine is a world divided by race and class, where humans are slaves to the greater races and classes and Denizens run in the wilds ruling them with poisoned blood and crooked empty hearts.

That is my world outside my home. My home is a land where love thrives abound, locked tight in the throes of an ever-present winter. Love is the base of my family life and the rule of our lands within the confines of our sphere of influence. Our strength comes from love, honest love and the purity of loyalty. My home, a land of peace and tranquillity were every man woman and child has a right to choose their freedom, and all labor is paid for rather than demanded. We hunt, we gather, we stand, side by side as one people united by loyalty and love under the banner of our ancestors and the crest of my family name. I am Avriel Kaplan, warrior Prince of the North, honor bound to the one who saved my life and the Goddess that now claims me.