TALMAN TALES - NEW WORLD ORDER

  Chapter 1 – The Hatred of This World

  Exactly seventeen years ago today, I lived through the day that would change my life forever. I want to tell you the story of my suffering and help you understand why I became the person I am today. But let’s start at the beginning. My life began around the year 1337, after the great war of Schattenreich. I was born in the main district, Schattental. My parents were loving and, despite their stressful jobs, they always found time for me. We didn’t have much, but I was more than content with my situation.

  As a child, I always wanted to become a police officer. That was my first dream. But the carefree life I lived with my parents was soon to come to an end. It was my sixth birthday, and the day started like any other – at least for everyone else. Filled with excitement for the good schnitzel from Herr Rosenberg, a tradition my parents and I kept, I woke them up. Their faces lit up as soon as they saw my wide smile. For my birthday, my parents had actually taken the day off, much to their boss’s dismay. My anticipation was overwhelming.

  After we had gotten ready for our visit to Herr Rosenberg, we set off. The walk took about forty-five minutes. For some people that might sound like quite a long trek, but the unbelievably good schnitzel and the stories from the old days that my father told me along the way were more than worth it.

  That day, he told me about a legend his grandfather had once told him, a man I unfortunately never got to meet. At the time I didn’t know that this story was based on real events. I think my father kept that part from me so I wouldn’t be frightened. Sadly, the story was terrifying enough without that knowledge, but with my father beside me I felt safe. My father was strong; in his free time he helped our neighbor fell trees to earn a bit of extra money.

  Anyway, I want to tell you that story now, so listen carefully:

  “Not all that long ago, an unknown man came to Schattenreich. At first, he was respected by everyone in the village, because he used every opportunity he could to help people. He would climb trees to rescue residents’ cats, or help elderly people. He also had a heart for children. His pockets were almost always filled with sweets, which he happily handed out to any child he saw, or he would play football with them.

  But all of that was about to change in an instant. One day, when he was on his way to work, the police mistook him for someone else and arrested him. The man they confused him with had murdered two children and looked almost exactly like him. He was taken into custody and brought to the king’s castle, where he was to await his sentence.”

  Insisting on his innocence didn’t help him much, and so in the year 1263 n. KVS he was sentenced to eighty years of the most brutal torture. Before his punishment began, he was forced to drink a potion that made his body more resilient, so that he would fully feel every bit of pain inflicted on him without dying from his wounds.

  The potion also inevitably extended his life by two hundred years. Over those long years, the torture drained every last trace of kindness and joy from his body. The cheerful man turned into a numb monster.

  When my father told me this story, a chill ran down my spine. But I was sure the story couldn’t be real, and that my great-grandfather had simply made it up to teach my father not to judge anyone without knowing their background.

  Soon after, I spotted Herr Rosenberg, who was, as always, already waiting for us because he knew we would be coming. I was so hungry that I could hardly wait to eat that delicious schnitzel. But this time something was different. Herr Rosenberg invited me into his little kitchen, and I was allowed to watch him prepare the schnitzel.

  I was overjoyed, and nothing could ruin this precious day for me. Herr Rosenberg really was a good man, and after we had eaten our fill, we said a warm goodbye and headed home. But my father still had a surprise for me. Because he had spent almost all his free time in the last month cutting down trees for our neighbor, he had a bit of extra money left, and we went to the bakery where he bought me a small cake. For me, that was a rare treat, and it tasted so incredibly good that I threw myself into my father’s arms and started crying tears of joy.

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  So we set off on our way home. Nothing particularly exciting happened, until a cat approached me that looked severely malnourished. It had no fear of humans at all, and I immediately asked my father if we could take it with us. But he had to deny my wish and reminded me that we simply couldn’t afford a pet.

  However, my mother talked him around, and from that moment on I had a cat named Mutza. Her fur was black, but her nose was as white as snow.

  The whole way home I carried her in my arms and stroked her. Honestly, nothing could ruin that unbelievably wonderful day. When we finally arrived home after the long walk, there was nothing I was looking forward to more than playing football with my father in the garden. I had no idea it would never come to that.

  My father opened the front door, and two men were standing there, both of them, I’d guess, in their mid-thirties. They grabbed my parents and marched them to the dining table. My father sent me to my room, but I could hear everything they were discussing.

  The two men demanded that my parents hand over the house to them in exchange for their lives.

  My father refused and attacked the intruders. I had never seen him like that before – he hit them with all his strength, as many times as he could. But when he ran out of stamina, all I heard was a truly evil laugh, and one of the men said, “I survived eighty years of the most brutal torture. Do you really think your pathetic punches can hurt me? You weak creatures make me angry.”

  In the next moment, I saw my father’s head lying on the floor. Slowly, the rest of his body collapsed. In the background, every other sound was drowned out by my mother’s desperate screams, and all I could do was watch as my father was murdered. My mother cried, and I decided to storm out of my room and protect her. But one of the men slapped me so hard that I fell straight into a coma. From that moment on, I don’t know what happened.

  The next moment, I woke up in a trash bin, surrounded by the completely dismembered and already rotting bodies of my parents. I had no idea what had happened. I started crying uncontrollably on the spot. I still couldn’t comprehend how my life could turn around so quickly. In the blink of an eye, my beloved parents had become nothing more than a set of building blocks, like the ones I always saw in the newspaper but never owned, because my parents couldn’t afford them.

  When I finally pulled myself together again, I decided to bring the people who had committed this horrible act to justice – no matter how long it would take. And so my incredibly long path of suffering began, as I tried to defy my fate. I knew I had a long road ahead of me, but deep in my heart I felt it was my destiny to make those criminals pay, and so I set out on my adventure.

  My first task was to give my parents a proper burial. I gathered the pieces from the trash bin. Sadly, some parts were missing. My father was missing an arm and a few toes; my mother was missing a foot, her ears, and her teeth. I brought what I could to a hill where a large tree stood, the tree where my parents had once hung a swing for me.

  It was exhausting, and I threw up several times from the stench. But this was the only thing I could still do for them after they had raised me and taken care of me as best they could. At last, I managed to bring the remains of my parents to the hill and bury them there. But that was only half the battle. I still had to gather stones to build a proper memorial. I also picked every flower I could find so I could arrange them into a beautiful picture.

  After I had overcome this hurdle, a few very hard years began for me – alone on the streets of Schattental, without family, without money, without friends, without food, and without anything to drink.

  I had hit absolute rock bottom, but my determination to make the perpetrators feel my revenge kept me going. From there, the only way left was up. Every day I had to fight for something to eat. Leftover food from a restaurant’s garbage bin was like striking gold for me.

  Sometimes days passed without me getting anything to eat. But that was the lesser evil. Older kids and adults called me “scum”, “parasite”, or worse. Sometimes they even beat me or kicked me for no reason at all.

  Despite all these setbacks I had to endure as a little boy, I never stopped believing in my own strength. With every setback, I drew even more motivation to find the ones who had caused me all this pain and slaughter them the way they had slaughtered my parents. Every single day, I imagined what I would do to those bastards if I ever saw them again. With every punch to the face I received, the revenge fantasies I created in my head became darker and darker.

  My life’s goal was no longer to become a police officer, but with every day I spent in this world – a world that had become so cruel since Grandlord Braunstein’s rise to power – I felt my sense of justice growing stronger than the day before. More and more, I felt the urge to help others, to give other children a better future and prevent them from going through the same suffering I had endured, even though all I had ever known was hatred.

  My ambitions were high, but I knew I had to become stronger. And so I set out on a journey to the neighboring village of K?nigsgraben to gain new experiences. Before long, I met companions who had gone through similar things to what I had suffered. That completely changed my view of the world, because until then I had always assumed that I was the only one who had it this bad, the only one forced to endure such torment.

  But enough about that – let’s continue with the journey.