Chapter 136: The Human Majority
Nessa Harwick had never met a Lizardman until she was fourteen.
This was not unusual. Nessa grew up in the Shimmerfields — the kingdom’s agricultural heartland, population 145,000, eighty-three percent Human. The Shimmerfields’ population was Human because the Shimmerfields’ climate was temperate, the Shimmerfields’ agriculture was grain-based, and grain farming was a skill that Human settlers had brought from their predecessor civilizations and refined over two centuries of continuous cultivation. Lizardmen didn’t farm grain. Lizardmen absorbed heat through their scales and preferred swampland and high humidity and the particular ecology of the Green Basin that Humans found uncomfortable and Lizardmen found optimal.
Nessa didn’t have opinions about Lizardmen. She had opinions about grain yields, weather patterns, the price of fertilizer, and whether the Bloomist blessing that was supposed to enhance soil nitrogen content actually worked or was just the smell of compost disguised as divine intervention.
But the Lizardman Question — the media term for the demographic tension between founding races and majority populations — had arrived in the Shimmerfields the way all capital-city debates arrived in agricultural provinces: late, simplified, and wrong.
"They want special treatment," said Derrik, Nessa’s neighbor — a grain farmer, forty-two, the kind of man who formed opinions from headlines and defended them with volume. They were at the Harwick farm’s common table — a weekly gathering of the local farming community where news was shared, complaints were aired, and the price of grain was discussed with the passionate intensity that other communities reserved for religion. "Demographic incentives. Subsidies for Lizardman families. That’s taking money from the general treasury — our taxes — and giving it to a specific race because of what their great-great-grandparents did."
"Their great-great-grandparents founded the kingdom," Nessa said.
"And we built it. Who cleared the Shimmerfields? Humans. Who plowed the soil, planted the grain, harvested the crops that feed 1.4 million people? Humans. Who settled the Northern Reach, the Outer Provinces, the frontier territories that expanded the kingdom from nine grids to thirty-two? Humans. The founding is history. The building is now."
The argument was familiar. Nessa had heard it in variations — at the table, in the market, in the chapel during the informal conversations that followed services. The argument was about fairness. The Lizardmen built the foundation. The Humans built the house. Who owned the house? The answer depended on whether you valued origin or contribution, and the answer you chose depended on which you were.
***
Nessa went to the Academy.
Not as a student — the Academy’s entrance requirements were beyond her education level and her family’s economic capacity. She went as a farm representative, attending a Ministry of Agriculture extension seminar designed to improve provincial farming techniques. The seminar covered crop rotation, soil analysis, Bloomist blessing coordination, and the particular bureaucratic science of filing quarterly production reports with the Ministry of Coin.
The seminar was held on the Academy’s secondary campus in the Shimmerfields — a smaller facility that served the agricultural provinces. The building was newer than the capital campus, well-maintained, stocked with academy-quality instructional materials. The students were mixed — Human majority, but with Kobold, Lizardman, and Gnoll faces scattered through the classrooms.
During a break, Nessa watched the students. They were young — seventeen, eighteen, the age when the kingdom selected its most capable minds and invested in their development. The Academy’s entrance exam was species-neutral — the same test for everyone, graded by the same criteria, selected by the same threshold. Kingdom On Merit. The fairest system possible.
Except.
"The entrance exam is species-neutral," said a woman beside her — a fellow seminar attendee, a Kobold farmer from the Northern Reach, small, dark-furred, with the particular expression of someone who had been thinking about this for a while. "The preparation is not. Academy preparation requires literacy, numeracy, and analytical skills at a level that academy-feeder schools provide. Academy-feeder schools exist in cities. Cities are disproportionately Human. Nine percent of the Academy’s intake comes from rural settlements. Sixty-one percent comes from Ashenveil."
"The exam is still fair."
"The exam is fair. The pathway to the exam is not. A Human child in Ashenveil attends a feeder school funded by the city’s tax base, staffed by Academy graduates, resourced with current materials. My child in the Northern Reach attends a chapel school funded by the Crucible’s pastoral budget, staffed by a priest who teaches six subjects because there’s only one teacher, resourced with books that are twelve years old." She paused. "The exam doesn’t discriminate. Everything before the exam discriminates. The exam just formalizes the result."
Nessa absorbed this. She was a farmer. She processed information the way she processed soil — slowly, thoroughly, turning it over until she understood what would grow in it.
"I’m not against Lizardman families receiving incentives," she said. "I’m against the *framing*. The debate in the capital is about demographics — about which race has more members, which race holds more positions, which race’s culture is dominant. But the actual problem isn’t demographic. The actual problem is structural. Rural children can’t compete with urban children. Poor families can’t compete with wealthy families. This isn’t a Lizardman problem. It’s a class problem that affects Lizardmen because Lizardmen are concentrated in rural, lower-wealth areas."
"So the solution isn’t demographic incentives."
"The solution is rural investment. Better schools. More teachers. Updated materials. Infrastructure that gives every child — Lizardman, Human, Kobold, any species — the same preparation for the same exam." She looked at the Academy students through the window. "The Kingdom On Merit works. It just doesn’t start at the exam. It starts at the school. And the schools aren’t equal."
***
The grain harvest came. Nessa worked. The kingdom ate.
That was the Human majority’s argument, when you stripped away the emotional rhetoric and the demographic anxiety and the particular human tendency to frame structural debates as racial ones. The argument was work. We work. We produce. We farm the land and build the towns and staff the garrisons and fill the schools and pay the taxes that fund the system that governs all of us. We didn’t found the kingdom. We built it. Both contributions matter. Neither cancels the other.
Nessa thought about the Kobold woman’s observation. The exam was fair. The pathway wasn’t. This wasn’t about Lizardmen vs. Humans. This was about cities vs. villages. About wealth vs. poverty. About a system that proclaimed merit while structuring access to merit’s prerequisites along lines of geography and class.
The Kingdom On Merit. Where merit is measured at the finish line and the starting line is determined by where you’re born.
She filed her quarterly production report. 14,000 bushels. Her family’s contribution to the kingdom’s grain supply — a fraction of the Shimmerfields’ output, a rounding error in the national statistics, but enough to feed sixty people for a year. Sixty lives sustained by one family’s labor in one season on one piece of land.
That was the Human majority. Not a political position. Not a demographic category. Not an argument about who deserved what.
Just work. The quiet, seasonal, unglamorous work of feeding a kingdom that debated everything except the food on the table.