Title: Sixty Eight Years: The History of Foxkind
Part: 1 of 10
Keywords: furry, nosex
Universe: Shattered Tears
Author: just_lurking
Summary: The History of Foxkind as told by Rei.

=== Rei ===

On our home world there is an archipelago called the Shattered Tears.
It’s called that because thanks to the operation of various underwater
volcanoes and currents the islands are shaped like a stream of tear drops.
Of course you have to turn your head and squint a bit to see the image,
but it’s there.  The islands stretch in a arc from the temperate zones
in the north down to the tropical zones in the south.  The islands are
densely forested and the volcanic activity means that hot springs are
dotted all over the place. All in all, it’s a pretty nice place.

There’s a cub’s story which says that the islands are really the
tears shed by the creator god when he saw his children embrace evil
and turn on each other at the start of time.  Of course that’s just a
story to put cubs to sleep at night - there’s not a word of truth to it.

Anyway, the important thing about these islands is that they are home
to two species. The islands on the west are inhabited by the foxes. The
east side of the Tears is home to the wolves.

It’s been that way as long as anyone can recall and our recorded
history goes back three thousand years - so it’s been like that for
quite a while. For the most part, the foxes and the wolves ignored each
other. There was trade, political intrigue, constant one-up-man-ship,
but the two sides mostly ignored each other in day-to-day life.

My people, the foxes, lived in small semi-autonomous city states
called provinces.  Most of the provinces were democratic, some were even
direct democracies.  The provinces were all united to form a coalition.
A citizen of any of the provinces was free to travel to, find employment
in or live in any other province they wished to.  The leaders from each
province would meet at regular intervals to discuss matters that were
important to foxkind as a whole.  There was a lot of two-facedness at
these meetings where each province would try to promote its own goals
over those of the other provinces.

The wolves, probably as a result of their pack nature, had a single
government, headed by a president, which was in over all charge of
their territories.  Day to day affairs were delegated to local civil
servants who followed mandates handed down by the central government.  The
hierarchy was hideously complex, poorly defined and further convoluted by
power struggles and partisan politics.  It was democratic after a fashion
- the populace voted for the president and his parliament once every four
years and, in theory at least, any citizen could stand for parliament.
The politicians were too busily engaged waging war on each other to be
much of a treat to the general public.  It was the civil servants who
kept the bureaucratic nightmare lumbering along year after year.

Interestingly enough there tended to be more vixen politicians than tod
politicians in the fox governments, where as the wolves had the opposite
situation with more dog politicians than bitch politicians.  There’s a
slightly sexist fox joke about vixens being suited to politics because
“they like to sit and natter”, where as tods “do the real work”.
I’m sure there’s a wolven equivalent, but no one’s ever told me it.

Anyway, of the two species, the foxes were slightly more advanced.
It’s not like we were miles ahead with personal rocket packs and ray
guns while the wolves scratched out a living as serfs in the fields.
Both our cultures were at about the same level, but we we’re still
slightly ahead of them.

Our cities were cleaner, our public transport was more reliable, we had
the better communications network, our universities churned out brilliant
scientist after brilliant scientist and our health care was better.
It was a good time to be a fox.

Most of this was because of our strongly individualistic nature.
Wolves thought in terms of the pack, always trying to fit in always
trying to please their superiors.  It was a good philosophy, but real
advances are made by people who go out on a limb and try something new.
Few wolves would tell their superiors when they were wrong and that they
had a better way to do things - few foxes would be able to resist.

Our individualism was present in other ways too.

Foxes as a rule didn’t get involved with each others private lives.
Not that we were indifferent if some one needed help - it’s just we’d
wait until we were asked before offering our help.  Wolves were much
more proactive, sticking their muzzles in at the first sign of trouble,
offering their help whether or not it was wanted.  Also wolves were
strict abstintionists, having sex before marriage would cause the guilty
parties to be ostracised by society.  The fox view, that it was nobody
else’s damn business whom was sleeping with whom, lead many wolves to
believe the unfortunate stereotype that foxes were sex crazed and immoral.

As we raced ahead of the wolves technologically, socially and economically
the wolven government found us a convenient scapegoat for their own
mismanagement.  After all, they argued, how could the disparity between
our cultures be so great unless we were cheating?  And the more the
wolves fell behind, the more their leaders shifted the blame onto us.
We were victims of our own success.

It didn’t help that we were condescending and aloof when we answered
our critics.  Our righteous, self-satisfaction played right into the
hands of their propaganda.  Still we remained oblivious to the danger or
at least we ignored it.  Why did we care what the wolves said about us?
We also had the superior weapons tech.

Then the wolves conquered us.

Our superior weapons were in the hands of an army that just wasn’t
as cohesive as the wolves was.  We never dreamed that the wolves would
attack a better armed foe, we wouldn’t have.  We hadn’t fought a war
in centuries and our arrogance had blinded us to the approaching crisis.
So when the wolves reached our shores they found only a poorly trained
peace time army between them and victory.

The wolven victory was swift and total.

The only good thing that can be said is that our misplaced faith in our
superior weapons made the war a lot less bloody than it might have been.

Not that that was much consolation to my people.  They were taken as
slaves, their cities and homes were occupied and their possessions
were confiscated.

This is where my family enters the story.  There were two teenage slaves
taken from Light Province, Cælin and Mor.  Like many others they were
sent to the wolven capital city Lyngvi to work.  They were instrumental
in obtaining freedom for our kind.

When they arrived in Lyngvi they wasted no time in finding and joining
the local resistance movement and they soon proved themselves extremely
able leaders.

Under their guidance reliable lines of communication between foxes were
established, giving the resistance the ability to coordinate and plan.
Through clever manoeuvring they usurped one job after another from their
masters and made the foxes as indispensable to the wolves as they could.
They arranged acts of sabotage months, sometimes years in advance -
always with an eye to causing disruption and inconvenience to the general
public and to preventing the wolves from ever finding the guilty fox.

They made sure that the general populace felt discomfort at the same
time as making sure they were too dependent on their slaves to simply
get rid of them.

The efforts of the foxen resistance was set against a background of
political upheaval.  The wolves were slowly realising that the problems
in their society were not our fault.  After enslaving us their government
had no bogeyman left to blame in their propaganda and their incompetence
and deceit became plain to see.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of foxen society the wolves
freed their slaves and returned their territories.

Of course there were problems, many foxes had no homes to return
to, having been born into slavery or been completely dispossessed.
A similar problem was posed by wolves who had settled in the conquered fox
territories and didn’t want to leave.  It was agreed in negotiations
between the foxes and their former masters that all slaves would be
granted full citizenship and reparations would be made for the hardship
they had suffered and in return any wolf who wished to remain in the
restored fox provinces would be allowed to remain as a full citizen.

Representatives for the foxes who chose to stay were picked.  Cælin and
Mor were the obvious choice to represent Lyngvi and got 97 and 98 percent
of the vote respectively.  They took their seats in the first parliament
following our emancipation and were re-elected every four years since
without fail.

As soon as they were able Cælin and Mor married.  Some six months later
Mor gave birth to me.  My sire later confided in me that he had thought
Mor was putting on a few pounds and it wasn’t until the fourth month
that he’d begun to suspect.  I had been conceived in slavery and born
in freedom.  I’m not the only one, there’s a few of us foxes who
straddle the date, we formed a group and we meet once every few years
for a drink.  Overall that year was very busy for my parents.

That just about takes wraps up the history of foxkind.  What follows next
is my story about growing up as a fox in a world which is post-slavery
but which is full of evil, powerful people who aren’t.  It begins in
a primary school, six years after the emancipation.


