Chapter 1: Trembling Night
1988, Gottia
The war had been raging for months, Hundreds of thousands sacrificed on the altar of war to fuel the ambitions of a ranting psychopath.
The war had begun as most things in Gottia did, Himdach's endless rantings filled the airwaves, parades of black-uniformed* fascists marched past subservient crowds as propagandistic tunes blared from loudspeakers.
Months later there was only silence, there was no electricity to power the radios, the only people stupid enough to still be wearing Gottian uniforms were either fascists or corpses and the engines of war that Himdach had unleashed on Gotmark were nothing more than rusting piles of scrap metal.
I didn't know it at the time, but it was the last month of the war, my ten-year-old self had no real concept of war or politics, I was too busy trying to ignore the groaning from my empty stomach.
It's funny, you can often tell how a war is going just by looking at the contents of your dinner table. When the war started we had plenty of beef in our stews, then it was just potatoes, then the potatoes got rationed so we used turnips, by the end, we were lucky to get more than a few anaemic looking carrots.
The streets of Franktorf utterly silent, were once loud vibrant urbanity had dwelled was now desolate silence. The city was a husk of cold, gutted buildings, withered faces and emptied shelves.
The facade of normalcy had begun to fade quickly when the war had turned against Gottia. At first, we had carried on as normal, my sister and I piling into the family car for the daily commute to school, the lessons had quickly changed from the usual braindead glorification of the state to air raid drills.
Public order began to collapse as the fascists cowered in their bunkers and left the common citizens to fend for themselves. Schools emptied, supermarkets ran out of stock and emergency services ceased to operate in any meaningful way.
The car soon sat idle in the garage, there was no fuel to run it with, at night we shivered in blankets and huddled together for warmth, by day we queued for handouts from the Arvinists* and stepped over bodies in the streets.
Andrenne advanced from the east and Goyanes from the west, our armies collapsed as men began to throw down arms and desert en masse, better to risk a firing squad then to stay and venture certain death on the front.
To this day I do not know how my father got back to Franktorf so quickly, he had been deployed somewhere in the centre of the country. There had been little time to ask when he had stumbled through the apartment door.
Paul Lindhoff Snr. was a short, stocky man with a prominent beer gut and a boxers frame. What he lacked in size he more then made up for in raw strength and the ability to think on his feet.
He had a shock of scruffy blonde hair, he was balding even then, and two blue eyes with a look of quiet intelligence were set in a weatherbeaten face that had seen a lifetime of hardship.
My father's nose had been broken and reset years back, it hung crookedly above a mouth missing more than a few teeth. And while he might have resembled a man who had spent too many nights in a boxing ring, to a scared ten-year-old he was the most comforting sight in the world.
'Paul!' my mother had exclaimed as she all but tackled him in her excitement
'Where are the children?' he had said gently in reply
I nervously stepped from the doorway to my room my sister olive holding my hand as we walked towards him with trepidation.
We had not seen him in months, the army had all but snatched up the majority of the male population and shipped them off to the war. Many had never returned home, the army had stopped reporting casualties months ago.
My father was a fireman in those days, a trade considered ideal for military service, he had been drafted far earlier than most as a result. perhaps that was why he had deserted when he had, he had seen the way the wind was blowing early.
He had walked forward and lifted us both into a firm bear hug, for a few moments we felt safe. He had put us down and turned to our mother.
'Emma, grab what you can, we need to leave' he had sounded like he was trying to stay calm but there was an urgency to his tone that he couldn't quite hide
'The government has a curfew, the blackshirts have blocked all exits from the city' my mother had replied in a fearful voice
Himdach, that insane fool, it hadn't been enough for him to start a war that had killed thousands, now he wanted to take us all with him. Before the power had gone out the radios had blared out the same message over and over
'No surrender to Goyanes, No Surrender to Andrenne, fight to the last man!' Himdach's bellicose voice had yelled
'That mad fool!' my father had yelled slamming his fist on the table angrily
His hand had brushed something, a pamphlet written in perfect Hessiche, it had a logo on the side...it was an airdropped message from the Goyanean military.
'Citizens of Franktorf
We come to liberate you from the fascist dictator Gaucheis Himdach, the bombing of major urban centres is a necessary part of this action. Vacate your homes and seek safety beyond the city.'
He had crushed the pamphlet between his hands with a look of pure rage. we were trapped between the checkpoints of fascist thugs and the bombs of our so-called liberators.
'How are we supposed to flee!? the roads are clogged with abandoned vehicles and bands of deserters!' My father had whispered in an exasperated tone
The air raid sirens had sounded as he spoke, the bombings were starting.
'We need to get to the shelter!' my mother had said grabbing me by the arm
'Its two blocks away Emma!' Father had replied
'Where then!? we can't wait here!' My mother cried in a panicked voice
'The parking garage! It's reinforced!' Father replied in a moment of quick thinking
They had scooped us both up and we had rushed down the stairs of our housing block, down into the concrete basement of the carpark.
We had huddled there in the darkness, explosions above shook our hiding spot and caused us to grip one another fearfully. We waited out the bombings for what seemed like an eternity, then just before dawn the shaking had stopped.
We had emerged to find most of the street in rubble, we would later discover that the shelter we had been so far from had taken a direct hit killing everyone inside, our father's arrival had saved us from a similar fate.
Days later Himdach would be dragged screaming from his bunker by angry citizens and beaten to a bloodied pulp. He would swing by his legs from a lampost like an eery pendulum calling time on the failed state of Gottia.
The war would end not long after Himdach's exit, but there was no applause from those left in the rubble of Franktorf. We wandered like lost souls through the ruins of a city flattened by allied bombs and unlike Gotmark the victors had little interest in providing aid to the survivors of Gottia.
The victors talked of freedom and humanity as they divided up the carcass of Gottia, but evidently that high minded ideology did not extend to those caught up in Himdach's lunacy.
Himdach may have started the war, but it was we the common people he left to suffer its end. without aid people began to starve in massive numbers and as the winter of 89 arrived the flu finished the work the famine had started.
We were comparatively lucky, my father had family in relatively untouched Kufen*, but little Olive began coughing shortly before we left. The doctors in Kufen could do little to relieve her fever, all the medicines were in short supply.
The bitter irony of my sister's death was that if she had been across the border in occupied territory, she would probably have lived. My mother never fully recovered, my father never forgave the allies.
We returned to Franktorf a few years later, drawn by work and the socialist governments promise of a new era. For decades after we struggling to build a new home. The allies gave our new state a name from old history, they called us Hessunland.
*This refers to the Fatherland Defence brigades, fanatical paramilitaries that were utterly devoted to the fascist ideology espoused by Himdach. The FDB were the last forces to surrender and the first to commit atrocities.
*The Messianist Sect of Preacher Janus Arvin, the largest faith in Hessunland.
*Kufen is the southernmost town in Hessunland, a largely agrarian region compared with the urbanised north
1988, Gottia
The war had been raging for months, Hundreds of thousands sacrificed on the altar of war to fuel the ambitions of a ranting psychopath.
The war had begun as most things in Gottia did, Himdach's endless rantings filled the airwaves, parades of black-uniformed* fascists marched past subservient crowds as propagandistic tunes blared from loudspeakers.
Months later there was only silence, there was no electricity to power the radios, the only people stupid enough to still be wearing Gottian uniforms were either fascists or corpses and the engines of war that Himdach had unleashed on Gotmark were nothing more than rusting piles of scrap metal.
I didn't know it at the time, but it was the last month of the war, my ten-year-old self had no real concept of war or politics, I was too busy trying to ignore the groaning from my empty stomach.
It's funny, you can often tell how a war is going just by looking at the contents of your dinner table. When the war started we had plenty of beef in our stews, then it was just potatoes, then the potatoes got rationed so we used turnips, by the end, we were lucky to get more than a few anaemic looking carrots.
The streets of Franktorf utterly silent, were once loud vibrant urbanity had dwelled was now desolate silence. The city was a husk of cold, gutted buildings, withered faces and emptied shelves.
The facade of normalcy had begun to fade quickly when the war had turned against Gottia. At first, we had carried on as normal, my sister and I piling into the family car for the daily commute to school, the lessons had quickly changed from the usual braindead glorification of the state to air raid drills.
Public order began to collapse as the fascists cowered in their bunkers and left the common citizens to fend for themselves. Schools emptied, supermarkets ran out of stock and emergency services ceased to operate in any meaningful way.
The car soon sat idle in the garage, there was no fuel to run it with, at night we shivered in blankets and huddled together for warmth, by day we queued for handouts from the Arvinists* and stepped over bodies in the streets.
Andrenne advanced from the east and Goyanes from the west, our armies collapsed as men began to throw down arms and desert en masse, better to risk a firing squad then to stay and venture certain death on the front.
To this day I do not know how my father got back to Franktorf so quickly, he had been deployed somewhere in the centre of the country. There had been little time to ask when he had stumbled through the apartment door.
Paul Lindhoff Snr. was a short, stocky man with a prominent beer gut and a boxers frame. What he lacked in size he more then made up for in raw strength and the ability to think on his feet.
He had a shock of scruffy blonde hair, he was balding even then, and two blue eyes with a look of quiet intelligence were set in a weatherbeaten face that had seen a lifetime of hardship.
My father's nose had been broken and reset years back, it hung crookedly above a mouth missing more than a few teeth. And while he might have resembled a man who had spent too many nights in a boxing ring, to a scared ten-year-old he was the most comforting sight in the world.
'Paul!' my mother had exclaimed as she all but tackled him in her excitement
'Where are the children?' he had said gently in reply
I nervously stepped from the doorway to my room my sister olive holding my hand as we walked towards him with trepidation.
We had not seen him in months, the army had all but snatched up the majority of the male population and shipped them off to the war. Many had never returned home, the army had stopped reporting casualties months ago.
My father was a fireman in those days, a trade considered ideal for military service, he had been drafted far earlier than most as a result. perhaps that was why he had deserted when he had, he had seen the way the wind was blowing early.
He had walked forward and lifted us both into a firm bear hug, for a few moments we felt safe. He had put us down and turned to our mother.
'Emma, grab what you can, we need to leave' he had sounded like he was trying to stay calm but there was an urgency to his tone that he couldn't quite hide
'The government has a curfew, the blackshirts have blocked all exits from the city' my mother had replied in a fearful voice
Himdach, that insane fool, it hadn't been enough for him to start a war that had killed thousands, now he wanted to take us all with him. Before the power had gone out the radios had blared out the same message over and over
'No surrender to Goyanes, No Surrender to Andrenne, fight to the last man!' Himdach's bellicose voice had yelled
'That mad fool!' my father had yelled slamming his fist on the table angrily
His hand had brushed something, a pamphlet written in perfect Hessiche, it had a logo on the side...it was an airdropped message from the Goyanean military.
'Citizens of Franktorf
We come to liberate you from the fascist dictator Gaucheis Himdach, the bombing of major urban centres is a necessary part of this action. Vacate your homes and seek safety beyond the city.'
He had crushed the pamphlet between his hands with a look of pure rage. we were trapped between the checkpoints of fascist thugs and the bombs of our so-called liberators.
'How are we supposed to flee!? the roads are clogged with abandoned vehicles and bands of deserters!' My father had whispered in an exasperated tone
The air raid sirens had sounded as he spoke, the bombings were starting.
'We need to get to the shelter!' my mother had said grabbing me by the arm
'Its two blocks away Emma!' Father had replied
'Where then!? we can't wait here!' My mother cried in a panicked voice
'The parking garage! It's reinforced!' Father replied in a moment of quick thinking
They had scooped us both up and we had rushed down the stairs of our housing block, down into the concrete basement of the carpark.
We had huddled there in the darkness, explosions above shook our hiding spot and caused us to grip one another fearfully. We waited out the bombings for what seemed like an eternity, then just before dawn the shaking had stopped.
We had emerged to find most of the street in rubble, we would later discover that the shelter we had been so far from had taken a direct hit killing everyone inside, our father's arrival had saved us from a similar fate.
Days later Himdach would be dragged screaming from his bunker by angry citizens and beaten to a bloodied pulp. He would swing by his legs from a lampost like an eery pendulum calling time on the failed state of Gottia.
The war would end not long after Himdach's exit, but there was no applause from those left in the rubble of Franktorf. We wandered like lost souls through the ruins of a city flattened by allied bombs and unlike Gotmark the victors had little interest in providing aid to the survivors of Gottia.
The victors talked of freedom and humanity as they divided up the carcass of Gottia, but evidently that high minded ideology did not extend to those caught up in Himdach's lunacy.
Himdach may have started the war, but it was we the common people he left to suffer its end. without aid people began to starve in massive numbers and as the winter of 89 arrived the flu finished the work the famine had started.
We were comparatively lucky, my father had family in relatively untouched Kufen*, but little Olive began coughing shortly before we left. The doctors in Kufen could do little to relieve her fever, all the medicines were in short supply.
The bitter irony of my sister's death was that if she had been across the border in occupied territory, she would probably have lived. My mother never fully recovered, my father never forgave the allies.
We returned to Franktorf a few years later, drawn by work and the socialist governments promise of a new era. For decades after we struggling to build a new home. The allies gave our new state a name from old history, they called us Hessunland.
*This refers to the Fatherland Defence brigades, fanatical paramilitaries that were utterly devoted to the fascist ideology espoused by Himdach. The FDB were the last forces to surrender and the first to commit atrocities.
*The Messianist Sect of Preacher Janus Arvin, the largest faith in Hessunland.
*Kufen is the southernmost town in Hessunland, a largely agrarian region compared with the urbanised north
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