II. FOUR DISTRICTS AND ONE KINGDOM

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        Every sunrise gave you hope that you were sound, healthy, and had at least one more day to work wonders, and every sunset found you exhausted by the repeated attempts to keep the heat and the light of the sun in your life. A new age had begun, one that could not be imagined a few hundred years before... Battles? None for a long time since nature took hold of everyone's fate and proved the pettiness of people's thoughts and behavior. Times were indeed troubled, the earth was shaking, and the bloodstained conflict was now waged against nature, between land and water, but even so, people were the ones to suffer.

        Now that their territories were significantly diminished by the losing battles against the waters of the seas, the four kingdoms of yesteryear had become small floating islands cast in the waters by the fury of nature. Set in the four cardinal points, the islands contrasted not only in terms of climate, but also in terms of the activities practiced by their inhabitants. They were the only stable land spots ever known, unchanged for decades, because everyone still alive had never known them otherwise. They were the one and last hope of mankind, of those who had become their own prisoners.

        A piece of cliff surrounded by waters, which they called the Royal Island, was left from the old plateau of the Central Mountains; it was called like that because they had built a castle from the former fortress; there, under an agreement, the kings of each kingdom would rule one after the other. But in time the lack of descendants weakened the royal blood, and the other survivors were the royal family of Narzomand, who led all the kingdoms skillfully and truthfully generation after generation. The more the kings would change, the smaller the land and the population, until the peak of civilization was reached: the last king and the last pieces of land.

        In the absence of other military aspects, the king's power meant strictly the commercial and administrative decisions, some of the most important ones being the change of the name of the four kingdoms to "districts" ruled each by a governor and their union in a single kingdom under the ward of the Narzomand king. After the reorganization, they also engaged actively in the fast-tracked development of the navigable waterway; in this period, the seas were packed with ships steered by skilled captains.

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