I was nothing. I was a peasant on a relatively unremarkable earth like world. Other than having a breathable atmosphere Kachirigin 1 didn't have much to offer beyond endless fields of crops. The world had been terraformed to produce as much food as possible and the industrial scale farms were large enough to see from orbit. They didn't cover the entire world though.

I, like many, lived in a small village in the north, in a range of mountains too tough and cold to warrant the attention of the corporations. We grew food for ourselves, but couldn't afford the best seed stock, fertilizer or equipment. In this part of the world large rocks and steep slopes made farming hard, unsuitable for the massive machines of industry. It made growing food backbreaking work, but we made do, we survived in peace.

I remember looking out over the mountains. The wind was always blowing, and the mountains seemed to scrape the sky with white tipped fingers. I loved watching the trading ships come down from Nowak Orbital or from other settlements. I told my parents I wanted to fly, like all the children, but we were pore farmers and my parents always reminded me that we didn't have the money for flight school.

That never stopped me from looking at the sky though. Ha! Honestly, the only person that could make me look down to the ground was Akule. It was a bit ironic really. After all his name meant "looks up". We were told that he was always looking into the sky as a child. We had that in common and could recite all the constellations in the night sky.

We liked pestering the pilots to teach us how to fly. Chogan took pity on us whenever he visited and enjoyed taking us on flights in his old T7. It was slow and struggled in the winds at times but it got us out of our parent’s hair for a while so they didn't object unless it was harvest season.

My life was simple, safe, beautiful in its own way. In time Akule and I grew up, grew closer, grew content with the farm life, but before we came of age, Archon Delaine came to our world and nothing was ever the same.