The two suns beat down on the small boy as he hoed the weeds from between the rows of straggly, stunted turnips.

     He worked for hour after hour, paying special attention to those weeds with reddish purple leaves, some varieties of which were so poisonous that the merest touch could bring the skin out in an angry red rash. If a purple weed grew close alongside a turnip, some of the poison could be transferred to the root and then the unfortunate person eating it would die in agony, coughing up blood and screaming in delirium. Fortunately, affected roots tended to have a reddish tinge to them, which made them easy to spot, but accidents still happened. Tak's father frequently called purple plants the greatest danger they lived under. Worse than the tornadoes that swept the land in high summer. Worse than the shologs who could come raiding out from the mountains at any time of the year.

     Tak paused in his work to look up at the mountains, just visible on the horizon like a menacing line of dark thunderclouds. Sweat beaded his forehead and glued his sandy blonde hair to his forehead. Rivulets ran down his darkly tanned face, washing clean tracks through the dust, and his white cotton shirt clung damply to his back, revealing the angular curves of his spine and shoulder blades. He'd been working since dawn with only a brief pause for lunch at midday and it was now nearly sunset, but he was only a little fatigued. He had all the energy of youth and he'd been doing much the same work since he was old enough to walk.

     Consequently he was as tough and wiry as an old leather bootlace. Skinny to look at but with muscles that bunched as hard as walnuts under his sunburned skin. His hands were as hard and calloused as his father's and the nails were cut as short as they possibly could be without drawing blood in case they snagged on a splinter and tore. He was only six years old, but he already had his fair share of scars, one of which had almost cost him his life when a large tree stump he'd been helping his father dig up had suddenly given way and the splintered end of a root had impaled him through the stomach. He fingered the scar under his shirt, feeling the rough, ridged texture of it. As it shrank it had pulled the skin with it, leaving his side puckered and folded in on itself, but he hardly noticed it any more. It had happened six months before, after all. An eternity for a young child.

     Around him, in every direction but the north where the mountains stood, the Plains of Wessom stretched, flat and featureless, all the way to the horizon. Behind him were the few acres of beet, potatoes and barley, in the centre of which stood the crude cabin in which he lived, along with the animal pens and the barn in which their stock was stored, what little there was of it.

     A few miles away, beyond the horizon and out of sight, were a few other small homesteads. They visited them every few weeks to keep on good terms with their neighbours and to remind themselves that they weren't all alone in the world. Two days journey to the south was the market town of Jalla, which Tak had visited only once. That was the extent of Tak's world. The only clues he had that anything else existed came from the strangers who would occasionally call by, on their way somewhere. Tak's father would invite them to share a meal and spend the night under their roof, as was the unwritten law in the wild and desolate borderlands, and from them Tak would hear tales of fabulous far off places, some of which existed only in the storyteller’s imagination.

     His eyes would open wide and shine with fascination at the stories of bright and beautiful cities. Of dark and terrible forests. Of heroes and Kings and black hearted villains. Of salty sea ports where ships set sail for exotic and unknown lands and of never ending wars being fought between the principal city states. Wars in which whole populations were often put to the sword. Sometimes such stories scared Tak, and his father would wrap him up in his great bearlike arms and hug him close, his bushy beard tickling the boy's neck.

     "It's just made up stories, isn't it?" Tak would ask, anxious for reassurance, and usually his father would laugh and squeeze him tighter. Sometimes, though, he would say something else, something that only increased the boy's fear. Sometimes he would hold his son close and murmur that they were lucky to live so far from such troubles.

     Sometimes the visitors would talk about shologs. Everyone in the borderlands feared the fierce, shaggy humanoids who still occasionally ventured south into human lands a thousand years after the Great War of Survival. The war that had finally secured humanity's future on this hostile world. The heartland of the once mighty sholog civilisation still survived, though, high in the inhospitable reaches of the mountains, and it would be many centuries more before the last surviving stronghold of sholog territory was finally overrun by the massed armies of humanity, leaving the surviving humanoids doomed to a purely nomadic existence. Forced to find whatever temporary homes they could and forever forced to move on whenever the local human communities became aware of them.

     Eventually it would be forgotten by even the wisest sages that the ancestors of the most reviled and feared of the humanoid races had once built cities and tended crops, and who knows to what heights their civilisation might have risen if they, rather than humanity, had won the war. As it was, though, the shologs, divided into small tribes that only rarely met to interbreed, continued to degenerate into even more monstrous and bestial forms until even they themselves forgot what they had once been. They knew only that they hated humanity. They no longer knew why.

     This whole track of land was known as the Borderlands because it lay between the rich and secure heartland of human territory to the south and the wild and lawless wilderlands to the north, the first major feature of which were the mountains. Everyone who lived here was at risk, but the actual border between human and humanoid territory was generally held to be the river Rute that snaked its lazy way across the wide, flat plain about fifty miles north of Tak's home. Amazingly, some homesteaders eked out a living on the far side of that river, a fact that was a constant source of amazement to Tak's father. "Fools!" he would say, shaking his great bearded head sadly whenever the subject came up. "They're too far from the border forts. Who do they think's going to defend them if there's another incursion? It's the children I feel sorry for, the poor little mites. They've got no choice, but the parents should have more sense. The Gods damn them for their foolishness if anything happens to them."

     Tak's father took no chances of anything happening to his own children. Both Tak and Laira, his sister, four years older than him and the object of Tak's undying adoration, already knew how to ride horses and knew the way to Jalla, the nearest defensible place of safety where they would hopefully be able to hold out until help came from the border forts. Tak had also had his first few lessons in the use of a spear, although this was an area in which the otherwise bright lad showed no aptitude whatsoever.

     "You must learn to fight!" his father insisted every time he thrust the short practice spear back into his reluctant hands. "One day you'll have a family of your own. What'll you do to defend them if you can't use a spear? How will you save them from a ravaging pack of snouts?"

     Tak had no answer to that and so would make a new effort to parry his father's thrusts, but with no more success than before. His hands, already long fingered and dextrous even at that young age, were simply not meant to hold a weapon. They were not meant to hold a hoe either, or any other farming implement. His hands had been designed by the Gods to be the shapers and wielders of patterns of magical force, and even then he could sometimes feel the strange tingling behind his eyes and under his narrow fingernails as his young body absorbed raw, ambient magic from the air around him, storing it up ready for use. It would be many years before he knew any of this, though. At that time, as he carefully hoed the weeds out of the dusty ground around the pale yellow turnip roots, he hardly even knew what a wizard was, except as the wicked villains of his father's bedside stories, and no-one he knew had ever met one.

     That was to change that very day, though. The yellow sun was lying, fat and bloated, above the western horizon, its face crossed by a thin finger of grey cloud, and Tak paused in his work to look up at it. This close to the ground, Tharsol was tinged a rosy orange and could be looked at directly without hurting the eyes and Tak stared at it in fascination. He was a brilliantly intelligent boy, filled with curiosity about everything in the world, and had avidly soaked up what little his father had been able to tell him in answer to his endless questions. Although they appeared to be flat discs, the two suns were, in fact, round balls of fire. The stars were also round balls of fire. They looked smaller because they were further away. The world was also a ball, although a smaller one, and it went around Tharsol once a year, which in turn went around Derro, the red sun, taking many thousands of years to go around once. Derro itself circled something even larger and even further away, taking even longer to complete one orbit, and this object in turn...

     It went in the other direction as well. Tharia, the world, was circled by the three moons, which were circled by moonmoons; very special objects that only the astrologers could see and which they used to predict the future. Tharia thus stood in the centre of an infinite progression. Small things orbiting larger things from the infinitely small to the infinitely large. That was the way the Gods had created the universe, and their handiwork was evident in the beautiful symmetry of it all. Tak felt a warm glow of pleasure as he contemplated all this. He liked knowing the way things were.

     He was brought out of his reverie by the sight of a plume of dust rising across the face of the yellow sun. He'd seen such clouds before, thrown up by the hooves of a galloping horse, but this one was bigger, as if made by several, and as he squinted his eyes he found that he could just about make out the riders. Tiny specks almost lost in the shimmering heat haze. He dropped his hoe and ran back to his cabin, worried by what the arrival of so many riders might mean but also glad of the excuse to stop work a little early. Normally, he would have been hoeing the weeds until it was too dark to see.

     His father was down the well, digging it deeper in an attempt to find the retreating water, and he climbed wearily up the rope upon hearing his son's cries. He wore nothing but smears of black mud, not wanting to ruin his hard to replace clothes, and when he heard about the approaching riders it was his spear he ran off to fetch, not his trousers. Life in the Borderlands taught the importance of getting your priorities right, and of the danger of wasting time on irrelevancies.

     His spear, whose sharp point of real steel, their most valuable possession, had been sharpened and resharpened so many times by the three generations of men that it was now getting dangerously thin, stood beside the door where it could be snatched up in an instant. He ushered Tak into the cabin, where Laira and his mother were cleaning the recently harvested arkars for the market, their fingers red and crinkled from hours immersed in dirty water. Tak and his sister knew the routine, having done this many times before, and they crouched down under the window while their mother loaded the crossbow. She stood in the doorway to cover her husband as he went back out to confront their visitors.

     Tak knew it was dangerous to rise to his knees so he could peep through the window, and Laira tried to pull him back down as he did so, but her own curiosity was also stronger than her common sense and in the end they were both kneeling there, the girl's hand firmly gripping the boy's shoulder ready to throw him to the floor the moment danger threatened. They saw the muscles in their father's body tensing up as the horsemen drew near, saw him shifting to fighting stance as they paused to survey the situation ahead of them.

     Then he relaxed a little, though, as he recognised their uniforms under their thick layers of dust. All but one of them were wearing the brass and leather uniforms of Domandropolis, the city state that claimed ownership of this stretch of the Borderlands. That didn't necessarily mean that his family was safe, of course. They might pillage his home and rape his wife and daughter. Maybe even his son as well. Such things happened, and they had to be accepted.

     There was no use complaining to the fort's commander. Defending the Borderlands was highly dangerous some of the time and grindingly boring the rest of the time. The fort's commander, like all his breed, therefore allowed his men to amuse themselves with the people whose lives they were risking their own to defend. It was, the soldiers believed, the least the locals could do to repay their debt; the relative security they enjoyed from the sholog threat. The locals didn't dare object, because they knew that, bad as life was with them, it would be infinitely worse without them. At least the soldiers didn't torture them to death for sport.

     Tak's father was well known to the soldiers of several forts, though, and that gave his family some measure of protection. He had once been a soldier himself, with a long and successful record, and was still well liked and respected by his former cohorts, even after he'd met Tak's mother and left the service to marry her. He never missed an opportunity to remind the soldiers that he was one of them, bragging of his exploits in a way that was quite alien to him, knowing that that was the way to protect his family from their attentions.

     These soldiers were bearing the insignia of Barran Keep, though, and that was bad. Barran Keep was a long way away. So far away that they probably had no idea who he was. They would treat him as they would any other homesteader, unless they saw from his stance and bearing that he had received military training. He stood his spear upright on its end, therefore, and assumed a more relaxed stance, trying to look confident and unafraid as he waited for the soldiers to approach.