The Kingdom - Page 9/201

All that was lost on me right now though. What was I going to do?

I'd never been farther from the home place than the nearby settlements and once to the capital of Smirnaz. I knew that a far larger world lay out there than this small neglected backwater of a place, but where to go?

To the west and south lay the other six Kingdomer Nations. All around them were the nations of the Nicationers.

I was half Nicationer. Was that such a bad thing? Was I somehow cursed through no fault of my own because of who my father had been?

I refused to believe such a thing. But what I believed would matter nothing to the greater world of the other Kingdomer Nations if they all looked upon me as nothing more than a lowly halfbreed. Did they all, like my mother, believe that their Kingdomer blood was of higher value than mine?

I didn't really feel that I fit in with such people. If the soul of my existence was to consist of being looked down upon as something of lesser value then I wanted no part of a life spent with the people of my mother's lineage.

What options did that leave me? Did I go and settle in the surrounding lands of the Nicationers and become as they were, not bound by any Kingdomer principles of faith in the one true God, El Elyon, in whom I had firmly believed since early childhood?

There were other issues with the Nicationer nations that I wanted no part of. My love for my mother may have grown cold within the last few hours of time, but I could not condone the way the Nicationers subjugated their women into the status of being a slave, with no respect given to them.

My mother was not a good woman, but that did not free me to join the ranks of my father's people in their abuse of their women. It was not so in the Kingdomer Nations, but as I'd already realized there were other problems to be had with that route.

On the other hand, if the oppression of women wasn't enough to consider not settling in the lands of the Nicationers, their heathen practices of sacrificing their own children to their false gods was. I had no respect for people who would do such things.

Something occurred to me then, which brightened my mood considerably. Here I was, contemplating the merits and fallacies of the two divergent people groups of my world, and I was finding myself to have quite a moral framework of thought for one of such mixed birth as I. Perhaps I wasn't so cursed after all.