In the eastern part of the land once called the United Kingdom of Alleghany, a dry grassland stretches as far as the eye can see, and as everyone knows, anything you can see over but not the other side of may as well be infinite. These old rolling hills have seen the dawn of the Old Kingdoms, the wars of unification, with their knights and lords, as well as the recent modern conflicts with mechanized tanks and orderly regiments of an industrialized nation. Few people have ever called this land home, but for those who do, they know that their proximity to the borderlands lend to their generally precarious life.
It is here that lies the township of Munro Ford, upon the humble banks of an eponymous river, which permitted such a town existing in the first place. The folks here live a simple country life in their town and surrounding hills, where the sea of amber grass hits the mighty walls of ancient craggy brown stone that marks the edges of the old dominion of the Marcher Lords that ruled this land before the Green Revolution, which had reformed the UK of A into the Federal Republic of Alleghany, after the end of the Iohan War that ravaged much of the continent.
Munro Ford saw a boom in most of its corners during the war years; it's proximity to the Ocklundi and Syl theaters of conflict made it useful as a supply depot and staging area for operations in those areas. But with the war over, and trouble brewing in the heartlands, government forces withdrew from these sorts of places, and took most of their money with them, along with the support that many local businesses had come to rely on to keep trotting along. To put another way; when the soldiers left, so did the prosperity.
The main street of The Ford is now as much empty storefront as it is functionally a town; the number of taverns now down to one, and one or two stores, all of which cater mostly to locals at this point. The adjoining streets that run from the central strip dive into small neighborhoods that housed wartime workers like the camp followers of old, now wait for sale on the market in which few outside town even know exist.
And here now, we focus upon a single resident of The Ford; one Sheriff Buckle Roy Jr., or simply Sheriff Roy to the town residents. He's lived here his entire life, with the exception of his service as a captain in the Royal Army, which he spent most of in the distant theater of the Free-City of Anzverg, damned near on the other side of the world in a gods-forsaken tundra in which he was certain he'd die in. The War had done a number on his soul, in which he was hardly unique, but a great violence had been done upon him all the same. So much so, that when this hometown hero returned, the first thing he had done was break off the engagement to his fiancé, which incidentally was the daughter of the judge that he now called his boss, and owner of the only still-open bar in town.
With his workday now complete, and the orange sun casting long dark shadows across the town and surrounding land, Sheriff Roy loaded into his truck to drive home for what he hoped in vain would be an uninterrupted weekend, and set off into the orange-and-black monochrome of the evening. His truck which was nearly as old as he was labored like a tired beast as it crawled up the hill leading out. Sheriff Roy now lived in a old caravan trailer outside of town, preferring the sound of the ever-droning wind to the din of human life. It was always a long drive out, but he liked the time to think about his day and which frozen TV dinner he'd like to have that night.
During the long drive, the sun had set, and the deep-dark of the night came in, and on account of the new moon that night, it was like a jet-black sheet draped across the plains. Beyond the beams of his dirty yellow headlights, it may as well be the dark side of the moon. It was nights like that that the mites, a small species of folk that usually lived in small bands in caves, hollers, or small camps here in the east, loved to come out. They weren't usually violent, but would try to steal anything not nailed down. Sheriff Roy usually received three or four reports of theft of everything from laundry, and garbage cans, to a automobile stripped completely down to the frame. On nights of a new moon, they would come down in force.
It was upon his rumination of the mites, and whilst driving through the profound dark, that his truck began to make a dreaded sound; a shift of balance, a wobble of the cab, and a sputter. He cussed and swore in his strong eastern drawl, sounding like the descendant of hillbillies that he was, and put his foot on the brake as his corpse of a truck slowed to a stop on the dirt road.
He dug out an aging flashlight out of his glovebox, and headed outside to check the engine, all the while pretending he knew anything about vehicle repair; he did not. With a long and heavy sigh, he closed the hood of the car, and back to the bed of the truck, in which he kept a small bundle of things for just this sort of occasion-- some wood, lighter fluid, and a small folding stool.
In a few moments, he had a small campfire going there on the side of the road. he knew at this time of night, and at the end of the working week, that no one would likely be his way. And on account of being too damned old to stumble blindly home or back to town, he decided to simply wait here until the dawn. That, and he feared that if he left, he would no longer own a truck; while it is an utter piece of junk, that truck was still his. And, for the stated reasons, he made himself comfortable.
It was there in the sounds of the night, the wind over the grass, and the crackling of the burning wood, that Sheriff Roy stared into the flames. Despite his best efforts, his mind always drifted back to Anzverg; the shelled-out ancient stone streets, where modern boutique selling refined clothing, next to apothecaries selling traditional medicines of the Goethic Peoples, whose land claims have been long ignored. He remembers the sound of echoing machine gunfire a few streets over, and the sound of silence between bombs exploding and the survivors screaming. He remembered the victory greeting that welcomed him home, and how he hated the people there for glorifying the last several years; the war that had brought them prosperity was the one that had killed so much of the light that then-Captain Roy had in him. He rubbed his face at all the times he woke up his ex-fiancé when he shot up screaming in the night.
Shaking him from his thoughts, he heard the grass move in an odd way, and looked up; there, yards away on the threshold of the firelight and the dark, the eye-shine of a mite. In the scant illumination, he could make out it's ashen gray skin, and bulbous head and eyes. Mites weren't brave as a rule, but they could be mighty curious. The two locked eyes for a moment, before it melted back into the night. Where there was one, there was usually over a dozen more somewhere-- Sheriff Roy figured he was likely surrounded. While still bearing in mind that they weren't usually violent, his hand went over to his revolver, in case tonight turned out to be an exception to that.
But that moment never came that night. The moment came, and hung, but it would pass, and the dawn would come once more. It was moments like that, that Sheriff Roy thought the most about his life. While the danger and dark would surround him, he would survive, and that the next day would be a matter that would require his tending to.
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