Sighing I look through the window of my families castle at the wilderness beyond. Another community has been destroyed, or so the clans bringing in refugees have informed us.

The history of our people has always been full of ups and downs.

At one point we were technologically supreme and dominated the planet. We had great machines, vast cities, weapons no animal or natural force could contend with, and we could communicate to those on the other side of the planet instantaneously. We were looking towards other planets, believing that there was nothing left to conquer on this one. We had been to the highest mountain tops, the deepest oceanic trenches. We had left the atmosphere and were at the cusp of starting to colonize other planets.

But the higher you fly, the harder you fall. Nature, or the earth, or whatever it was, found a way to respond to us. It might even have been one of our own many, many experiments into our ever-expanding technological capabilities. We were able to chemically change matter and transform energy types and adding a new type of energy seems like something someone might have thought to be a good idea. Whoever or whatever did this; there was now a new energy type to contend with.

Adding a new type of energy to the world has had many, many consequences. Gravity, electromagnetism, light, thermal, and all the other types of energy used to be in balance. However, add a new kind of power, and the previous balance is lost. Expanding the issue is that mana is not uniformly distributed everywhere. It was already known that increasing gravity slows down time and bends light, so we knew that energy types have a significant effect on each other. It should not have been a surprise that mana pockets change all the different energy types in its surrounding. It can increase or decrease gravity, and it can make a location warmer or colder, or even improve the flow of time in that pocket to the point where when you leave it you will have experienced time in a different way than people who haven’t entered that pocket.

Mana is a type of energy which seems to be able to adapt to and become any type of matter. This energy permeates the bodies of both humans and animals, making us better, or at least more than we were before. As our bodies absorb mana, it enhances us, making us faster, stronger, and our senses got better. Now we could run much faster, jump higher, lift heavier things, see further away and hear better. However, this is true for any living being. Powerful beasts roam the wilderness moving from mana dense areas to mana dense areas absorbing the mana at the location and leaving when the mana there is used up. Plants have become a force in their own right, making nature a dangerous foe as it had been in olden times.

Now, with mana acting like a monkey wrench in the world of our own creation, our technology became unusable. Centuries of research on how to use the energies of the world suddenly became obsolete, the moment a new one was added. We can still create electricity but can’t transport it. When the moving current reaches a change in mana density, it can slow down or speed up or stop being all together, and this effect changes constantly making it unusable at the final location. A combustion engine works differently in one location than it would work in another so your car could suddenly come to a halt, or your plane might drop from the sky.

Traveling became impossible as sudden increases or decreases in gravity make any fast travel besides just running impossible. All forms of communication went down, even if we had been able to use electricity, as sound waves are affected as well as moving differently than they used to.

Societally we went back centuries, to where your immediate neighbors were all you had around you. People lost sight of their friends and family that were outside of walking distance range, and governments had to go local too.

It took years for humanity to figure out that the mana available to grow your capabilities was directly related to the mana in your environment. And humans mostly did the wrong thing. By staying in the same location, we used up the mana in our lands quickly, which we hoped would allow us to at least use some of our technology. We also kept living in as large of communities as we possibly could. It felt like it would be suitable for protection, and of course humans were and always will be social creatures, but in the end, we were splitting what little mana we had available to us among the many. This resulted in animals slowly but surely edging out humans in power. Entire countries were being wiped out by hordes of animals so strong that there was no way for humans to damage them with the weapons that were available.

This is how we got to our current situation. Refugees from the destroyed communities started banding around the few pockets where humans had stayed and grown in mana rich environments whom we now call the powerful. These are people who have taken in enough mana to be able to contend with the powerful beasts roaming the wild and threating the weaker people. With initially few others to share the mana with, the survivors from these groups of powerful became strong enough to protect a portion of land leading to the option of starting their communities.

But there are so few powerful people left. Without the means of expanding our lands, we can’t create more powerful than there originally were. The ones we have can’t become more powerful without risking their lives in battles against equally powerful beasts. And after all this, there are merely nine stationary communities and seventyish roaming clans remaining in the entire northern Americas. To our knowledge at least. And if such a massive piece of the world has so few left, we can only fear what the rest of the world would be like.

My community, Aprait, is a large one and was founded by seven surviving families that were living in a remote, mana dense, mountain village. Originally there were over 200 households in our town, but the constant battles against the beasts in the area had cut that number down to the mere seven that remain today. However, these seven became very strong.

The other villages are far, far away from our current location. We are on the border between what used to be Canada and Alaska, and the furthest other community is on one of the islands in South Carolina or about 5200 kilometers away. Even with our enhanced bodies, we can’t travel much more than 150 kilometers a day, leaving a little over a month of travel time.

Being a mountainous village food is always an issue, so we started taking in refugees to help with this issue. The seven families each have a sizeable castle-like compound surrounding the village, so that we can maximize mana intake for our new members, but can still quickly enter the town. Within the tow, the refugees that were taken in, grow food, both through farming and livestock. As there are so many living beings in that small area, the villagers, as well as the cattle, don’t have enough access to mana to grow strong enough to fight, so they are entirely reliant upon the families to defend them.

Aprait is led by a council of seven; each family has one representative present in the council and follow a majority rules system. The other villages have become one of four types besides the one that we are following. There are the following types:

First were religious communes that have stayed religious. Usually, these are led by a church leader who controls everything that happens. Directly beneath this religious leader would be a type of paladin. These take the role that in our village are accepted by the families. Like our families, they live on the edge or just outside of the community. These would be the most powerful around, and both keep the people safe as well as in line.

The second type would be a monarchy type of community. Here usually one person or family rules through power. They would be the only one or ones with power keeping the rest in line as well as safe. Naturally, if one person or one small group of people monopolize most of the space they would become very strong themselves, but having so few protectors is a risk in and of itself, so these communities tend to be very small.

The last types are the roaming communities we call clans. These can either be tiny groups or singular people who are strong enough to survive on their own. Or they are traders protected by someone powerful who travel between the known communities. These groups are small, far in-between, and we have no way of knowing how many are still out there.

However, in the struggle for land and resources, humanity is losing. Badly. Until last year there were ten communities, but one of the monarchies has been destroyed when the head of the family died of old age, and there was no one powerful enough left to protect everyone. On their journey to other communities, over 80% of the refugees died, and so we lost another piece of land from which to derive power.