I remember that my mother, Reiveinte Crimsonwolf, stood next to me as we went to greet my father, Tanus. We waited for an abnormally long time next to the magic-powered carriage. When the door finally opened, my father, who had always been icy cold to everyone, exited happily. He held out his hand, lovingly helping a woman down. Her thin black and red robes fluttered in the wind like some kind of dark fairy.

My mother wrapped her arm around my shoulders and pulled me to her side. She appeared so calm as if she knew this would happen.

Tanus and this new woman walked up to us and he introduced her as Lyre. Then he went on and on, saying that she was his bonded. His only partner in this lifetime. He was sorry but, as per our laws, my mother was automatically divorced. She would have to pack up her belongings and move back to her clan. And oh, could she please take me so I could learn more about my maternal family and not get in the way of him building his love nest?

Immediately, my fellow clan members helped me pack and sent us off to my mother’s clan. I spent two years with the Crimsonwolfs. While everyone there treated me politely and was very welcoming, they still treated me as an outsider. Even my mother, who seemed livelier since returning, treated me with politeness but not closeness. Because they assumed that I would eventually go back. And about two years before I would enter the sim, my father did eventually call me back. His bonded didn’t want children, and since my father was the leader of our clan, he decided to raise me as the next leader, unless one of the other clan members showed more aptitude.

After moving back for a few months, I’d discovered an oddity about the two bonded. They never left each other’s sides. Their personalities matched so well that what one person thought the other person would also. They had no conflicting views, and they often had the same flaws. For instance, they adored the same flowers and hated being lied to.

They also both loved money and power to an extreme. While they didn’t cut corners where it mattered, they did cut them where it would only inconvenience people. Instead of doing laundry every day, they cut it back to every other day, which let them pay the launderer’s less for the same amount. But this meant that the quality of our clothes dropped as the workers no longer had the time to ensure good quality care. They also cut back on the quality of ingredients purchased for our food causing several clan members to straight-up leave.

Then there were the mines themselves. Most of our income came from the labyrinthine tunnels underneath our land. Some of which even crossed underneath our stronghold.

Tanus fought tooth and nail to sell our mined ore for the highest amount possible. Which was fine until the Ravenborn clan started competing with us more fiercely. It seemed that every time he tried to sell silver, nickel, and other metals, the Ravenborns, those ‘upstarts’ who’d only moved near us a couple hundred years before, undermined his efforts by selling their ore for slightly less. This back and forth went on for several months. It started to affect our clan’s finances.

Lyre was not happy. Tanus was not happy. If things kept going like this then the clan would start to go bankrupt. The two also refused to sell the silver at competitive rates because we had a higher quality ore or something. Then, without telling anyone, the two had a wild thought. Why not sabotage their competitor?

But they would have to keep it secret, just between them and a few trusted individuals. Even I wouldn’t know about it until much later.

***

At first, it started as little things. Making it so the Ravenborns received the wrong information about where people were meeting. But that didn’t work, so then they had a trusted clan member sabotage their carriage at an inopportune time so they couldn’t reach the location where a deal was happening. That one surprisingly worked.

But the Ravenborns discovered the sabotage. And, because, in the time before the Passivity Precept, they had once been a proud clan of warriors, they decided to fiercely retaliate. After much effort on their part, they discovered where we stored our raw ore. Some of their members spread a type of herb at the entrance and in several locations throughout our land. This attracted large biting insects that infested the whole area and cost our clan a significant sum of money to hire specialized exterminators to come and rid our land of them. During the extermination, Tanus discovered the herb and he quickly deduced that it was retaliation from the Ravenborn clan.

This infestation also caused us to be late with our shipment. Tanus was furious and Lyre convinced him to escalate since their rivals had done the same.

They quickly found the location of the Ravenborn’s ore storage building near a nest of flame spiders. Since they couldn’t outright light the building on fire, they decided to coerce the spiders to do the deed in their stead.

Normally flame spiders were docile, but when scared they would combust and burn everything within a foot of them. So they lured these creatures into the storage building by scattering their favored prey inside the building. Once a portion of the spiders had moved into the building, they frightened them. From there, the building caught fire. The Ravenborns had used tar to patch the building in places and hadn’t purchased any anti-fire spells during the original construction.

After the tar caught fire, what would have been a small spiteful inconveniencing fire, became a large structure fire. Fortunately, no one died, but several of their clan members needed expensive specialized treatment for smoke inhalation.

The fire had burned down everything, so the Ravenborns had no proof that my clan had sabotaged them… but they knew who it was.

***

Because Tanus discovered the loophole of using animals to cause destruction, he became obsessed with raising dangerous monsters, especially the kind known for bypassing magical defenses and killing elves. Like the Giant Beargeit, a massive furry creature about the size of four cottages. Also known to attack anything if it became too hungry.

Meanwhile, the Ravenborns continued their trade war against us. It even reached the point where they were undermining the other investments our clan made, bringing down our income severely.

Several more clan members left and my cousins started to become upset with how Tanus had been managing the clan in recent years. Of course, if they’d known that Tanus and Lyre had started a war with the Ravenborns, they might have been able to stop it. But those two still kept it secret. My cousins only knew that our income was lacking. To save money they cleared some land and planted fields to subsidize our meals.

One of my uncles tried to convince Tanus that we couldn’t afford to keep the monsters but he refused to release them and used our lack of funds as an excuse to slowly starve them.

Of course, after seeing how low we’d become, Tanus wanted to stop and somehow make peace. But Lyre convinced him that we couldn’t. After everything the Ravenborns had done to us, the clan had to double down.

They would use the fierce animals they’d raised to attack their next shipment and prevent it from reaching the client on time. This might also injure a few people, but that was a sacrifice they were willing to let the Ravenborn’s make.

But the thing about wild animals was that you couldn’t control their actions. So when they released the poor partially starved animals on the caravan shipping the ore, instead of doing damage and running, the animals attacked and killed several of their clan members, including Jethia’s parents, Briavin, and Dorsall. It was purposeful destruction, but it was also an accident.

***

When my father returned that day he confessed everything to me. He said that he would leave the clan in my hands if anything happened to him. It was like he forgot that I was a fucking underage kid focused on studying and technically I was unable to do anything. In the event, something did happen to him the clan’s leadership should have gone to my adult cousin, Reidal. But he didn’t seem to give a shit and figured that he’d throw everything to me, his chosen heir.

***

Because this incident was so large, the Ravenborns scoured the area, leaving nothing unturned. Eventually, they discovered traces that my clan maliciously set the wild animals free. They brought it up with Fiarar’s, our world’s, authorities and asked them for a ruling. They judged that the Silvercat Clan’s mine would go to the Ravenborn Clan as compensation, and called for Tanus and Lyre to turn themselves in and face punishment for their actions. This would allow the clan to go free and not be responsible for the deaths. With this, It seemed like it would end here.

***

Soon after that ruling, as I returned from class, I overheard a conversation.

Instead of doing the responsible thing, Lyre tried to convince Tanus that the two of them didn’t deserve punishment. Those deaths were a complete accident. They were only doing what they had to do to keep the clan from going under. But for once her words failed to convince him.

Finally, finally, Tanus decided to turn himself in.

But then Ravenborns suddenly gathered on our doorstep.

They wanted the clan stronghold as well and said that since the mine was under our land, our clan’s buildings were included in the settlement even though they technically weren’t.

By this point, the Ravenborn’s hatred was so strong that they wanted to entirely force us out of my clan’s territory, the territory we’d occupied for millennia. Furious, and wanting to retaliate against them, my father released the Giant Beargiest so it could attack them...

Or he thought he had. The Beargiest, was a starved wild creature filled with rage and resentment. Instead of confronting the Ravenborns who had nothing to do with it, it decided to attack the creatures it smelled every day while it starved. So my clan’s own well-raised monster charged at our people. Everyone escaped into the stronghold, but the Beargiest’s body slams and scratches damaged our building’s infrastructure and broke several important spells that had been embedded into the building.

Then the ground shook. I didn’t know this at the time but, knowing that our clan would have to surrender the mine to Ravenborns, Lyre had hooked up a large amount of the small magical explosives used in mining and detonated them to collapse the tunnels. The mining area was empty at the time since we'd cleared out to give it to Ravenborns. But collapsing the mine caused the ground to quake, and the structurally unsound building collapsed on everyone. Fortunately, everyone escaped into the PPVS.

Technically, our clan had refused to receive punishment without a fight, so the PPVS issued the Ravenborn clan free-roaming prisoner collars and allowed them to capture the members of my clan within the sim. Because, Tanus and Lyre vanished into the PPVS, instead of turning themselves in, my clan members sentences became even harsher than they would have been.

Apparently, Tanus and Lyre had been players of the sim for years. They had fairly high-level characters so wherever they’d escaped to, it was very far away from where the rest of my clan members spawned.

***

Of course, I entered the PPVS, as well. The administrator asked what I wanted. But what the hell was I supposed to say? I’d just literally escaped death. And I was too young to understand everything that had happened. I guess they took pity on me because instead of forcing the issue they let me continue character creation.

I remember asking what the best healer was and being told that it was a bard so on a whim I chose that. When I had free time I loved playing music and writing poems so why not do it in a simulation as well?

Then I chose my stats with the Administrator’s help and they sent me down.

In the beginning, my race had made a deal with the PPVS, that clan members would spawn at specific locations when they first enter the PPVS so they could stay together. But, in this instance, since most of my clan members were first time players, it worked against us.

I spawned right in the middle of a raid. To my left, Ravenborns captured a maid who’d worked for us for a hundred years. To my left, one of my cousins had already been collard and was being forced to kneel.

Reidal, saw me appear, grabbed me, and helped me escape the area. We planned that if at least one of us made it out then we could gain levels and return to free everyone.

We initially left the area without issue. But we went in the wrong direction. They found us and while I managed to cross into an area I shouldn’t have been in, he was easily caught.

But I had to keep going so I ran and ran, and finally, I fell into a weird cave. Even now I don’t remember exactly what happened in there except that I died with a harsh level death penalty and respawned only to be immediately caught.

They forced me to kneel in front of Jethia, who was full of rage and spite. She explained all the little things I didn’t know. How my father was a coward who would rather abandon us than receive the punishment he deserved. And, due to the laws of my race, how my clan and I would have to receive punishment in his stead.