Establishment of the Long Line

Life, Organisation Association

A precursor to the Abolitionist movement, when citizens of the empire began to make a concentrated effort to help the Unbelonging

Darcus Pefija traveled to Jhonto as a simple industrial worker looking for opportunity. While traveling through the Grain Province (soon to be collectively called Ashland), he was startled by the living and working conditions of the Unbelonging. The food, clothing, and fuel he had taken for granted for so long were being harvested or mined by the most absolutely wretched of the human race. The longer Darcus stayed in Ashland, the angrier he became. Five months after he moved to Jhonto, he was asked to leave his job in a cotton mill; he had been caught receiving smuggled shipments to distribute among the Unbelonging. Darcus left Jhonto in a fury, but he took three friends, all Unbelonging, with him to the border of Ashland. He'd sent a message ahead, and a friend from the Empire was there to receive the fugitives and take them farther north. Darcus returned to the heart of Ashland, where he settled in a small town and wrote a small pamphlet about what he had witnessed there. During this undertaking, he met and courted a farmer's daughter named Leila. She caught his fire, and after marrying, the two of them distributed his writing together. Leila helped raise money for medicine and shoes for the Unbelonging while Darcus publicly protested the forced labor. It wasn't long before he was smuggling Unbelonging to freedom again, his wife riding ahead so as to receive them at the border. The coast of Ashland was heavily guarded, and they had no means to cross the sea anyway, so the Pefijas' fugitives had to sneak over the length of the empire to the shore on the other side of the Glass Mountains. As Darcus' efforts grew more and more daring, with more of his friends involved, the northern shore became known among the Unbelonging as the Freedom Docks. Darcus' friends lent horses, money, provisions, and even their own homes as stopping points on the way to the Freedom Docks. Over time, this system of safehouses became known as the Long Line, and the Pefijas were the first active Abolitionists on the continent.