Okay so I'm hopefully going to have these kinds of "inbetween" chapters which have no bearing on the story itself but give some insight into some aspect of the book such as the world it's set in, the characters involved etc. I think I'll have enough to put one between each chapter but if the last few chapters are gripping enough I may not need as many as that. Anyway, I'm rambling, enjoy!
The world of Bellepax is a land like any other. It's marked by wide open fields, rivers both long and wide, everything from small hills to mountains and the occasional dry desert. Its most notable feature is the manner in which it's populated. The variety of beings which inhabit the land are spread out, living near both similar and very different races. The inhabitants themselves might be seen as unusual, yet their characters wouldn't seem so foreign.
The creatures of Bellepax developed over time in a manner which left the canines and the felines at the top with respect to intelligence, although virtually on par with each other. As time waned on, the two races grew side by side to develop colonies, build structures and create an order amongst themselves which placed them above other species. However, although they grew together, they remained separate, kept apart by their long standing dislike of each other. The feud between cats and dogs has raged on for millennia and their newly developed intelligence did nothing to change that. In fact, as each race developed tools in place of their hands, they soon created weapons in place of claws and the fighting between races increased in size and ferocity. No-one really knew why they fought, whether it was rivalry, a need to have one species triumph over all or a grudge between one of each kind sometime in the infancy of the world.
Either way, war became forethought and it could be conjectured that the development of the felines and the canines soon halted at a stage when all their resources were being poured into warfare and a scramble for power. In any other world it might be considered a Dark Age, but for the members of Bellepax it was their way of life. Before long, some colonies rose above others and quickly absorbed the smaller towns in a bid to pool resources and build their armies. The land of Bellepax was soon split in a manner which prevented further change, as feline countries bordered canine nations and vice versa. The eight factions, while made up of many races of each species, were named after the leader that controlled them, and so the world was split into the empires of The Lions, The Wolves, The Cheetahs, The Jackals, The Lynxs, The Foxes, The Pumas and The Coyotes.
Soon, the stagnant nature of the world was becoming too much for the leaders to handle and the urge to fight at their borders with the other species – for which they felt a deep hatred with no apparent origin – grew. At the brink of their first world war, the leaders suddenly changed their plans and the factions were dissolved, with small towns breaking away from each other. These towns then moved around and intermingled, dispersing the large superpowers of felines and canines within each other’s borders.
It is unknown why the leaders averted the war, whether it was due to divine intervention of some kind or some even debate that the leaders had a collective epiphany, realising that the fighting would be pointless. Regardless, as a result of this action, the world has reached an uneasy peace where the urge for fighting is there but where few have the strength to handle all out war and none have the strength to come out of it any better than when they went in, meaning that any fighting would never be able to escalate beyond the immediate area and no single town could gain the resources to attempt a world war anytime in the future.
This is also left as a reminder in the maps of Bellepax. To remind people of the devastation that could have been, or perhaps just for simplicity, the maps which showed the boundaries of the eight great factions for many generations were kept and the positions of the towns as they are now were simply added. The boundaries of the old factions are now used as mere geographical markers – since any one of them may contain any assortment of both canines and felines – and each town or city is considered its own country although few refer to them in such a way.
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