Prologue for Airla's Story

The war that had raged through the ten dimensions had ended at last. At the end of the war Will and Eustacia Rolleira, the King and Queen, were victorious, every other dimension having surrendered to them eventually.

With all ten dimensions dragged under their one rule the King and Queen proceed to rule in their own way, ignoring the poverty that was rife in many areas.

As a result the inequality between the dimensions was vast by the time that seventeen years had passed since the end of the war. Whilst Savannahtair, the King and Queen's own land, enjoyed wealth and a perfect society with no obvious problems, the people of dimension nine starved in their overcrowded cities.

Even before the war had started dimension nine had been in crisis. Once a wealthy, prosperous nation, they had expanded too fast. Overcrowding took over as giant apartment blocks and skyscrapers sprung up everywhere. The countryside was wiped out, buildings merged, even oceans were drained and built over for more space. All the water in dimension nine was made part of the regulated system, and excess water was sold to other dimensions.

All one thousand worlds of dimension nine were slowly turned into giant buildings. The ground itself was tunneled out, many floor being built below what was previously ground level.

Eventually this had to stop, and other means had to be found, since the overcrowding was only getting worse. A major overhaul took over dimension nine, floors were squashed together, leaving only one metre between floor and ceiling in the richer areas, less in the poorer regions.

With no plant-life anywhere in the dimension they had to payout large sums of money to export their polluted air and import oxygen.

Able to produce very little for themselves, dimension nine had sunk into an extreme poverty before the war had ever started. It had surrendered quickly, having no resources to resist the Savannahtairian armies with, and ever since, things had only gotten worse.

In dimension nine the distant King and Queen were nothing but vague public figure to hate. Little was known of them, and news traveled slowly in dimension nine. The people were too poor for things like television's and radio's and the dimension itself too poor to buy the paper for newspapers.

In a particularly impoverished area of dimension nine lived Airla, the King and Queen's niece. She had never met them, even her parents hadn't seen them in nearly thirty years, despite the fact that they were related on both sides- Airla's mother was the Queen's sister, and her father was the King's brother.

They were not poor by dimension nine standards, they lived in the area because both of Airla's parents were doctors who wanted to help the people who needed them most. Everyone knew that they were related to the King and Queen, but no one held it against them.

People did wonder why Airla's parents never wrote to their more powerful relations for money, after all, there was not just Airla to provide for but her three older siblings too.

They never did write though, so the family lived like everyone else- crammed into a tiny one bedroom apartment where the ceiling was so low you couldn't stand up straight. There was no heating, and they could only afford cheap, thin clothes like everybody else, so they were cold night and day. Like everyone else they were too poor to buy much food, so they were constantly hungry too. But Airla's mother had lived off of her sister's charity before, she didn't want to again.