[center][b]Sixty Eight Years[/b]
by [name]JustLurking[/name]
Chapter 1[/center]

[center][b]~ Rei ~[\b][\center]

On our home world there is an archipelago called the Shattered Tears.  It’s called that because thanks to the operation of various underwater volcanoes and currents the islands are shaped like a stream of tear drops.  Of course you have to turn your head and squint a bit to see the image, but it’s there.  The islands stretch in a arc from the temperate zones in the north down to the tropical zones in the south.  The islands are densely forested and the volcanic activity means that hot springs are dotted all over the place.  All in all, it’s a pretty nice place.

There’s a cub’s story which says that the islands are really the tears shed by the creator god when he saw his children embrace evil and turn on each other at the start of time.  Of course that’s just a story to put cubs to sleep at night - there’s not a word of truth to it.

Anyway, the important thing about these islands is that they are home to two species.  The islands on the west are inhabited by the foxes.  The east side of the Tears is home to the wolves.

It’s been that way as long as anyone can recall and our recorded history goes back three thousand years - so it’s been like that for quite a while.  For the most part, the foxes and the wolves ignored each other.  There was trade, political intrigue, constant one-up-man-ship, but the two sides mostly ignored each other in day-to-day life.

My people, the foxes, lived in small semi-autonomous city states called provinces.  Most of the provinces were democratic, some were even direct democracies.  The provinces were all united to form a coalition.  A citizen of any of the provinces was free to travel to, find employment in or live in any other province they wished to.  The leaders from each province would meet at regular intervals to discuss matters that were important to foxkind as a whole.  There was a lot of two-facedness at these meetings where each province would try to promote its own goals over those of the other provinces.

The wolves, probably as a result of their pack nature, had a single government, headed by a president, which was in over all charge of their territories.  Day to day affairs were delegated to local civil servants who followed mandates handed down by the central government.  The hierarchy was hideously complex, poorly defined and further convoluted by power struggles and partisan politics.  It was democratic after a fashion - the populace voted for the president and his parliament once every four years and, in theory at least, any citizen could stand for parliament.  The politicians were too busily engaged waging war on each other to be much of a treat to the general public.  It was the civil servants who kept the bureaucratic nightmare lumbering along year after year.

Interestingly enough there tended to be more vixen politicians than tod politicians in the fox governments, where as the wolves had the opposite situation with more dog politicians than bitch politicians.  There’s a slightly sexist fox joke about vixens being suited to politics because “they like to sit and natter”, where as tods “do the real work”.  I’m sure there’s a wolven equivalent, but no one’s ever told me it.

Anyway, of the two species, the foxes were slightly more advanced.  It’s not like we were miles ahead with personal rocket packs and ray guns while the wolves scratched out a living as serfs in the fields.  Both our cultures were at about the same level, but we we’re still slightly ahead of them.

Our cities were cleaner, our public transport was more reliable, we had the better communications network, our universities churned out brilliant scientist after brilliant scientist and our health care was better.  It was a good time to be a fox.

Most of this was because of our strongly individualistic nature.  Wolves thought in terms of the pack, always trying to fit in always trying to please their superiors.  It was a good philosophy, but real advances are made by people who go out on a limb and try something new.  Few wolves would tell their superiors when they were wrong and that they had a better way to do things - few foxes would be able to resist.

Our individualism was present in other ways too.

Foxes as a rule didn’t get involved with each others private lives.  Not that we were indifferent if some one needed help - it’s just we’d wait until we were asked before offering our help.  Wolves were much more proactive, sticking their muzzles in at the first sign of trouble, offering their help whether or not it was wanted.  Also wolves were strict abstintionists, having sex before marriage would cause the guilty parties to be ostracised by society.  The fox view, that it was nobody else’s damn business whom was sleeping with whom, lead many wolves to believe the unfortunate stereotype that foxes were sex crazed and immoral.

As we raced ahead of the wolves technologically, socially and economically the wolven government found us a convenient scapegoat for their own mismanagement.  After all, they argued, how could the disparity between our cultures be so great unless we were cheating?  And the more the wolves fell behind, the more their leaders shifted the blame onto us.  We were victims of our own success.

It didn’t help that we were condescending and aloof when we answered our critics.  Our righteous, self-satisfaction played right into the hands of their propaganda.  Still we remained oblivious to the danger or at least we ignored it.  Why did we care what the wolves said about us?  We also had the superior weapons tech.

Then the wolves conquered us.

Our superior weapons were in the hands of an army that just wasn’t as cohesive as the wolves was.  We never dreamed that the wolves would attack a better armed foe, we wouldn’t have.  We hadn’t fought a war in centuries and our arrogance had blinded us to the approaching crisis.  So when the wolves reached our shores they found only a poorly trained peace time army between them and victory.

The wolven victory was swift and total.

The only good thing that can be said is that our misplaced faith in our superior weapons made the war a lot less bloody than it might have been.

Not that that was much consolation to my people.  They were taken as slaves, their cities and homes were occupied and their possessions were confiscated.

This is where my family enters the story.  There were two teenage slaves taken from Light Province, Cælin and Mor.  Like many others they were sent to the wolven capital city Lyngvi to work.  They were instrumental in obtaining freedom for our kind.

When they arrived in Lyngvi they wasted no time in finding and joining the local resistance movement and they soon proved themselves extremely able leaders.

Under their guidance reliable lines of communication between foxes were established, giving the resistance the ability to coordinate and plan.  Through clever manoeuvring they usurped one job after another from their masters and made the foxes as indispensable to the wolves as they could.  They arranged acts of sabotage months, sometimes years in advance - always with an eye to causing disruption and inconvenience to the general public and to preventing the wolves from ever finding the guilty fox.

They made sure that the general populace felt discomfort at the same time as making sure they were too dependent on their slaves to simply get rid of them.

The efforts of the foxen resistance was set against a background of political upheaval.  The wolves were slowly realising that the problems in their society were not our fault.  After enslaving us their government had no bogeyman left to blame in their propaganda and their incompetence and deceit became plain to see.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of foxen society the wolves freed their slaves and returned their territories.

Of course there were problems, many foxes had no homes to return to, having been born into slavery or been completely dispossessed.  A similar problem was posed by wolves who had settled in the conquered fox territories and didn’t want to leave.  It was agreed in negotiations between the foxes and their former masters that all slaves would be granted full citizenship and reparations would be made for the hardship they had suffered and in return any wolf who wished to remain in the restored fox provinces would be allowed to remain as a full citizen.

Representatives for the foxes who chose to stay were picked.  Cælin and Mor were the obvious choice to represent Lyngvi and got 97 and 98 percent of the vote respectively.  They took their seats in the first parliament following our emancipation and were re-elected every four years since without fail.

As soon as they were able Cælin and Mor married.  Some six months later Mor gave birth to me.  My sire later confided in me that he had thought Mor was putting on a few pounds and it wasn’t until the fourth month that he’d begun to suspect.  I had been conceived in slavery and born in freedom.  I’m not the only one, there’s a few of us foxes who straddle the date, we formed a group and we meet once every few years for a drink.  Overall that year was very busy for my parents.

That just about takes wraps up the history of foxkind.  What follows next is my story about growing up as a fox in a world which is post-slavery but which is full of evil, powerful people who aren’t.  It begins in a primary school, six years after the emancipation.