Cliff woke up and rolled over not yet wanting to open his eyes. He did not know what had woken him up and he did not care in the slightest. It was Christmas today and he should be getting out of bed all excited like when he was younger but he was too tired. The small amount of whiskey he had had at the family gathering last night might have had something to do with it. Being newly 11 by a month he was almost a man, well a teenager at least, and his father had allowed him to have a small shot. It tasted awful and burned going down his throat.

Jason Frost was your normal college student, except he grew up looking like a girl. He never got over five foot five inches, and weighed 110 pounds wet. His mother always made excuses saying that he would someday grow out of it, but face it, he was 19 now, and things would never change.

And no matter what Jason tried, he was always mistaken for female. Cutting his hair short just made him look silly - and other boys hit on him using the short hair as their ice-breaker! When they weren’t just trying to hit him, anyway. It wasn’t as though he dressed, or acted, feminine. It was just his lot in life - his curse, as he came to see it. There was something “off”, and he could never figure out what it was.

The Carson family has a yearly Christmas tradition of asking Santa for what they really want. This year, Santa decides to give it to them... but makes a slight mistake. This story was originally written and posted in 1998.

The last thing I remember was walking into my cheap apartment after a rowdy night with the guys. This is pretty much the same as every other night when one goes to a university in which your parents are paving the way for you. I was to graduate from university in another month or two. My grades were all top scores, which is kinda hard to not get when your two apartment mates have been various tutors in the subjects you were taking. My only escape from the horrid life dictated by my parents before I was even out of the crib was partying.

Tribe of the Mountains Chapter 10 — Love and War.

What leads someone to treason, rape, murder.
How deep can a man or woman fall into the trappings of self servitude and greed?
Why?

Of course these questions are important, essential even to an organized society.
But there are times when you must send it all to the depths and judge a person only by the consequences of his/her actions.
These times are always the darkest ones.

Anora the first.
Philosophical musings.

Its been 5 years since I left my family. It seems so much longer to me though. But that was the only way I could survive. It all started before I was born, actually even further than that if I understand the family history. It started with a feud over a stupid pig. A pig have made its way over the fence of some family yard into a neighbors yard and ate their turnip patch.

Tribe of the Mountains Chapter 9 — Expanding and Converting.

Kids, you have a choice.
Not much of a choice some of you say, but you have it.
Forget the pressure from our society.
You know that your mothers will keep contact one way or the other.
Go to your rooms today.
Think.
Do I want to be a man, a woman or one of the tribe?
You had all your life up to this moment to decide, but think a little more.
You have one week.
Use it.

Linda Basteter
Discourse to the children of the Tribe at their thirteenth birthday.

Tribe of the Mountains Chapter 8 How to be a Man

 
 
For centuries the Free People were the only ones able to survive in the space between the northern and southern mountain ranges. The poor yellowish grassland was full of weirdly shaped small hills, deformed beasts and poisonous plants. Not that the land was completely devoid of it's blessings though, it had a huge diversity of animals living both above and below ground and a kind twisted ironwood tree so strong that nowadays a few of the wagons made using it remain, as if untouched by time.In this land they not only survived but thrived. They killed the worst of the monsters, learned to shape the hard wood and learned the hard way what to eat and what to avoid.

For a while things seemed to be getting better, the land was less poisonous, the monsters were defeated and feared man. The numbers of the people started to increase. Their neighbors, the soft people of the cities, were considered weak and easy to plunder.

Pride really comes before the fall.

Merinda Anorier
Notes from Classes at the Mountains Academy