Slavery

Both empires keep slaves, and both come to Garuun for more. What divides them is how a person becomes property, and whether that can ever end.

UNDER ARKEN

To the Faith of the One Light, enslaving the weak is the right and duty of the strong in faith: a soul too weak to serve the One Light freely may yet serve it as the chosen see fit. Arken slavery is chattel. A slave is livestock, property to be kept or discarded at the owner's sole discretion, and the bondage is hereditary: a slave's children are born slaves, passed down the generations like any other beast of the herd. Slaves stand at the very bottom of the Empire's order, beneath citizens, soldiers, nobles, clergy and the Emperor.

The Arken do not wait for slaves to come to them. Their ships sail on slaving expeditions into distant lands, Garuun among them, hunting men and women alongside gold and exotic beasts. Dawnhold, their fortress-port on the southern shore, is where the soldiers come ashore, and where the ships weigh anchor again laden with slaves for the home islands.

UNDER TESHARI

The Teshari keep slaves too, but by a colder ledger. One falls into bondage as a prisoner of war or, far more often, as a debtor or a convicted criminal. It is a sentence, not a birthright, and it does not pass to a slave's children. A Teshari slave's lot is hard, yet they keep a thin thread of rights that Arken denies its cattle. Violent crime is answered not with the labour-gang but with death: a corpse turns no profit, but neither does it unsettle the market.

Few are seized outright. The Federation's indentured labour, and the debts it lets whole regions run up for generations, make bondage a matter of bookkeeping: most who end in chains simply fell behind.

To the Gar the difference is small comfort. The Iron Man puts a chain on your neck; the Silk Man puts your name in a ledger. Either way, someone else owns your tomorrow.