One thing that most people don’t realize is that life is currently really, really easy.
Now obviously, it’s not easy for everyone. Poverty and illnesses and natural disasters and abusive families exist. But things like modern medicine, global trade routes, and all the post-Industrial Revolution inventions have made our lives easier than they have been at any other point in human history.
That’s a problem for me as a writer, because none of my characters have these blessings. I write about worlds where parents can reasonably expect to bury half of their children. Long winters meant death by starvation and exposure. An infected cut could lead to death. Women spent something like 60% of their time making clothes for their families. If you bathed once a week, you were considered a clean freak.
My fantasy WIP has its share of hardships. The main one, the driving force behind the plot, is the Fae Plague. It is similar to a regular plague, with the added horror of knowing that there is no cure or prevention. You could wake up one morning and find that your spouse or child has gotten their life-force stolen, leaving them comatose. The cobbler’s boy is trying to find magic to fix things, but can we count on him? He’s fourteen. More importantly, is magic real? Does the god Teos actively heal people? We know that passive magic works, or at least that’s what Elder Cedomir has said for years. He says that, if we live holy lives, then Teos will protect us from hardship. Have I been holy enough to earn Teos’ protection?
And that’s just the people Maywin left behind. He doesn’t know the extent of the Fae Plague. He just knows that his brother is sick, and that other people are likely to follow. So he fights. He fights through cold weather and little food, he fights his own discouragement, and most importantly he fights a literal demon. A fae has been pursuing him, taunting him, slowly draining his life-force. He fights. He fights until his body is too weak to walk another step and his soul is too weary to utter another prayer.
And that’s to say nothing of the tragedies that have happened in the backstory of the novel. The only reason Maywin lives in Bennerick is because of the famine in Laireann that forced his mother’s family to immigrate. The dwarves hate the elves because of a war that took place two hundred and fifty years ago.
And then, of course, there are the small things. Maywin’s father is chronically ill. He usually hides it, but occasionally he’ll wake up too sick to work. Maywin’s best (human) friend, Eilyth, is being abused by her father. The priest, Elder Cedomir, is a bit of a jerk.
The good news about hard times, though, is that they create strong people. Do strong people always create good times? Not always. A lot is outside of our control. However, being a strong person does come with its own benefits. Is life always bad? Of course not. Bennerick has a long list of festivals and holidays, opportunities for people to take their minds off the bad things and just rejoice for a bit.
What’s the most memorable hardship or conflict you’ve come across in a book, movie, or TV show? Let me know in the comments below! God bless you, dear readers, and don’t forget to review us on Amazon and Goodreads!