Four years ago, the village where I live was burnt to the ground by bandits.  They raped and pillaged the survivors.  
	The best arch sorcerer in the area, Parthus, was summoned by the village elders and begged to begin his journey to avenge the people of the town.  
	He gladly accepted, attended a going away party, pulled on his robe, and set off out of town.
	I spotted the bandits using his dismembered body as tent posts and his skull as a football a week later.  
	His nose made the ball spiral oddly, and the bandits abandoned it in favor of his inflated bladder.  
	The village rebuilt itself and settled into the idyllic lifestyle that city folk pretend we have.  
	Three years ago, the village was burnt to the ground by zombies.  They pillaged the survivors and attempted to eat their brains.  
	The best barbarian in the area, Groax, was summoned by the village elders and begged to begin his journey to avenge the people of the town.  
	He gladly accepted, attended a going away party, pulled on his loincloth, and set off out of town.
	I found him zombified with both legs hacked off.  He was making a spirited effort to haul himself along the ground with his eyebrow, as both arms were crushed and his jaw was ripped off.
	The townspeople started using him to power the windmill on calm days, after his arms had been splinted.  
The village rebuilt itself and settled back into waking up at the crack of dawn every morning.  
Two years ago, the village was burnt to the ground by centaurs.  They pillaged the town and ravished both men and women.
The best huntress in the area, Acadia of the Forest, was summoned by the village elders and begged to begin her journey to avenge the people of the town.  
	She gladly accepted, attended a going away party, pulled on her leather leggings, and set off out of town.
She showed up a week later, battered, bruised, and mentally destroyed.  The village immediately decided to indenture her with the Nobel and Ancient Order of the Degree of the Dancer, a job that she excelled at after tightening up a bit.  
The village rebuilt itself and dealt with the plague of centaur foals that showed up after a few months.  
One year ago, the village was burnt to the ground by rebels.  They pillaged the town and distributed propaganda literature, stopping momentarily for some light sodomy.
The best paladin in the area, Sir Generia, was summoned by the village elders and begged to begin his journey to avenge the people of the town.  
	He gladly accepted, attended a going away party, pulled on his chain mail underwear, and set off out of town.
I later saw the rebels using steel pots with arrow holes in them.  They were stained reddish-black and were all pretty crude, except for one which looked like it could be a helmet.  I also spotted Sir Generia’s decapitated head on a pole at the edge of their camp.
The village rebuilt itself and stagnated.
Last night the village was burnt to a crisp by a dragon, mercifully giving us a break on the standard ravishing.  
The best quaestor had been crushed by a runaway hippo, so they were forced to use the best ranger, e.g. the guy who failed so hard they could not even apprentice as a thief.  They didn’t bother to throw me a party, just told me to get my ass out there and kill the dragon.   
I packed my bag carefully, drew rations from the village granary, and waved goodbye to the chicken that had bothered to see me off.  
In front of me was Deathshead Mountain, vanquisher of a thousand armies, home to a million demons, and filled with enough to-be-rescued princesses that they had formed a rather good finishing school that regularly competed on the local equestrian circuits.  Smoke arose from the gaping eye sockets, and I swore I could see the flash of an adventurer being burnt to a crisp.  At the top was the dragon, capable of breathing flame hot enough to boil steel and steam water elementals.  Behind me was a shitty farming community with an excess of adventurers.  I was equally averse to going to either.  
So I did what any teen does in a difficult decision, I decided to get wasted and deal with it in the morning.  I walked a mile out of town, pulled out the medicinal whiskey and spent a pleasant night getting plastered.  In the morning, after using a hangover potion, I hailed a passing caravan, was hired as a guard for minimal pay, and soon was sitting in the back playing cards with a motley assortment of rogues and desperadoes.  Finally, those bastards were going to pay.
It was the best day I had had in five years.  [Replace with prior sentence?]

Chapter 1
My earliest memory is of my grandfather.  He was a demented old man who fondly reminisced about his days as a bandit pillaging and raping entire villages.   
One day, after killing kittens for breakfast, he looked over to me and said “Remember, Drake, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, as long as you make other people miserable.”  This was then punctuated by a series of vigorous hip thrusts and a leer towards my sister.  
That quote pretty much describes my first decade.
I lived with my extended family in the capital city of Nox Antiqua, the New City.  It was a simple existence, all twelve of us living in a hovel in the middle of the slums.  We weren’t well off, but we were doing better than others.  We generally had something on the table; if it were a good week, it would be recognizable as food.  All of us had a job, being variably employed as beggars, seamstresses, thieves, and, if all else failed, guards. And we all were fairly healthy, you don’t generally last if you aren’t.  It was a hard but doable existence.  
This lasted until I was 10, then it all fell apart.  The rulers of Nox Antiqua decided that the production of dephiline, long an act punishable by several months with the local torturer, had been going on long enough to be traditional, and allowed its sale and distribution.  Dephiline is an interesting mixture, it contains a powerful cocktail of addictive stimulants, powerful muscle enhancers, and enough alcohol to shut down whatever empathy the wastrels of the New City may have had.  Within days of its release, it was popular as a novelty.  Within weeks, it was necessary to keep up with employers looking to take advantage of a stronger, longer lasting labor force.  After three month, the majority of the city was addicted, and the fragile peace that had existed was shattered as people fought to control the dephiline trade and use it to enhance their followers.  The norm of anarchy was replaced by a state of warfare.  
Even towards the end, I didn’t really care about the negatives.  I had entered the market at the beginning, offering to help an alchemist with menial work in exchange for lessons on alchemy, and learned enough to produce my own dephiline fairly early on.  I teamed up with a local gang leader for protection and distribution help, and money started flowing in.  After the first day, I could get enough to eat.  After the first week, I could afford clothing that wasn’t in the process of putrefaction.   After the second month, I had enough money to get the hell out of the New City and buy a small farm in the beautiful and safe countryside.  I planned to stay for another three months to accumulate enough wealth to buy a crop of slaves to work the land for me and to set up a convoy system to move dephiline from a production plant on the farm to the city.  Young though I might have been, but moral and moderate I was not.  
I hid my newfound wealth from my family to stop them from wasting it on beer and spent increasing amounts of time in the gang’s hideout, making dephiline in ever-increasing quantities.  The combination proved to be rather disastrous.  
The production of dephiline is a very dangerous job, a wrong weight or an alembic that boils too quickly can ruin an entire batch or react, as the ancient alchemist likes to say, violently.  The sounds of exploding alchemists had been increasing as of late, but that was expected as demand ramped up and people didn’t have a handle on the amounts that they were attempting to produce.  I would say that I was near the edge of my skills, but I still had some margin of error.  The process was becoming a strain, though.  
I was in the basement of the gang hideout making the largest batch I had ever attempted when I heard frantic hammering on the door.  
“Kind of busy!”  I shouted, carefully mixing two flasks, taking care not to breathe in the fumes they were producing.  
The door opened anyway and “Red” Galgamesh, the chapter’s lieutenant burst in.  He was gibbering and I took my eyes off the flasks for a second, an unforgivable crime against the gods of volatile and explosive chemicals. He looked terrified and was pointing at the door.  
“Your fa- fa- fa-” he stuttered, desperately attempting to get something like an intelligible sentence across.  
I returned to my work, relived that the flasks weren’t changing colors or bubbling, when Red grabbed my arm, jolting the mixture and causing the slightest bubble to form.  I held my breath and watched as it dissipated before reaching the surface.  Thank the gods.  
“WHAT THE DAMNATION WAS THAT FOR!” I shouted, placing the flasks carefully on a table.  
“Your family is -is -is here.”  He stammered out, obviously terrified.
“So?! You nearly blew us up!”  
“They want dephiline and know that you make it.”
“That’s bull, nobody in my family takes deph…” I trailed off, thinking.  One of my flaws, is a tendency to, when preoccupied, not pay attention to people around me.  It worked with the gang, as they protected me coming and going from the hideout and I had only one job there, but I honestly couldn’t remember if anyone at home had been acting oddly or what they had been doing for the past month.  Shit…
“I can’t leave the mixture, this much will blow up most of the block, and if they’re addicted, they probably won’t let me have enough time to finish it.”  I stated, looking at Red, who nodded.  
“Yeah!  We’re going to be cheesed.”  He ended with a note of hysteria in his voice.  
“How much time do we have before they come down?”  Thankfully, the gang’s hideout was filled by gang members and the basement’s only entrance was as far from the main door as possible.  
“Umm… none,” Red said, slowly turning around.  I followed suit.  
At the top of the stairs, I could see my six-year-old sister, holding someone’s head in one head and the shattered remains of the lock in the other.  Behind her was the rest of my families, all of whom were covered in blood and were pushing to relieve their addiction or rip my throat out, according to whatever stage of withdraw they were experiencing.  
I nervously cleared my throat, and said “Hello everyone…”  They quickly came down the stairs, lining up in a semi-circle facing me and Red.
“We didn’t know you could get us as much dephiline as we wanted.”  My grandma said, out of bed for the first time in years.  Which were spent lifting weights if her muscle tone was any judge.  In fact, the entire family looked like they were professional weightlifters.  By my judge, they were at one of the last stages of dephiline addiction, at a point where they were willing to put alleviating the withdraw symptoms before anything else and had the strength to do exactly that.  They must have been one of the first groups of users to be this far along this quickly.  
“Yes, I can!  You will just need to wait a little bit until this batch is finished, so why don’t you all go home until I’m done and you can have so much as you want!”  I desperately reply, nudging Red to back me up.  
Dephiline addicts have a tendency to attempt to kill anyone they view as interfering with feeding their addiction.  In their eyes, I committed the ultimate crime, and I would be supremely lucky to make it out with my life.  
“What? No, this dephiline is mine!  The gang controls the trade here and you’re not getting any for free…”  Red burst out, before slowly trailing off, realizing exactly what he had just done.  
My sister, still holding the severed head, strode forward and crushed it against a glass-fronted holding tank, yelling about how she was going to get as much dephiline as she wanted or something.  I wasn’t really pay attention as I had stopped breathing when the tank wobbled back and forth.  Several dozen liters of proto-dephiline sloshed around, jeering at Fate to smite us for our stupidity. My heart stopped as a bubble formed at the bottom and lazily drifted up.  It seemed to gather speed and strength as it rose, growing larger and larger as it approached the surface.  It popped.
My heart resumed beating and instantly went into overdrive.  
“Everyone get out of here, it’s going to explode!”  I screamed, sprinting towards a cut in the wall.  My family didn’t wasn’t paying attention as the tank had broken a hole in the wall, revealing a room full of mine carts filled with crystalline powder.  Red was frozen in horror.  The last thing I saw before jumping down the hole was my family ripping the wall apart, Red’s stock-still frame, and the tankard violently shifting colors and bubbling.  Gravity remembered me, and my view was replaced by rapidly moving rock and a small patch of reflective darkness.  
I didn’t anticipate the shock of the frigid water, it was cold enough to freeze my arms and slow my reflexes.  Damn it. Damn it.  Only a few more seconds.  I grabbed for the door I knew should be there, passed through the hydrophobic field, and fell out onto dry land.  I sprinted forward, one hand against the wall, the other pumping desperately.  I rounded a corner and fell into a reinforced alcove, my panic room, and lay there gasping against the straw.  A few seconds passed, I panted and lit a torch.  
A massive boom, and the ceiling compacted a few inches.  This was more worrisome than it sounds as the room was designed so it could take the equivalent of whale dropping at terminal velocity.  I lunged forward as masonry started falling out of the walls and ceilings.  Shit, shit, shit.  
I grabbed the torch and started running.  Scant seconds later, a second, much larger explosion ripped through the tunnels, flinging me to the ground, howling.  Dazed, I slowly stood up, swaying from the aftershock.  I patted myself to make sure all my bits were there and tried to move on.  Blood leaking from my ears and dripping down my nose, I picked up the torch again and stumbled down the hallway, the tunnel groaning all around.  I felt an earth clot fall against my shoulders, and I heard a crack as a keystone disintegrated under the pressure.  The tunnel continued to destabilize and I started to dodge falling arch stones.  
After about twenty meters of rapid stumbling, my goal comes into view, the city catacombs, with blessed escape routes leading to the surface.  Between safety and me were 10 meters of falling stones, dirt piles, and broken ground.  I lunged forward, hoping desperately to make it before the tunnel completely collapsed.  I failed.  
A shaft opened underneath my feet and I fell down a sinkhole.  Tumbling in the darkness, all that could be heard was a faint “Those idiots!”