Meet Marko!

Marko built through rainy and sunny days. He experienced pain, agony, sweat, and tears. I bore witness to each stage of the build.

He was a nobody, long before he laid a single brick. People wrote him off for years. Whatever he built above ground, it was not about the building, it was about a boy proving something to himself.

When Marko started building, he shared his plan with me.

Marko did not want to build a normal establishment. He wanted to build one of a kind. He wanted to build what would become the best establishment in Melany. His goal was to bring academia, commerce, and protection under one roof.

Not for prestige. Not for power. What Marko wanted was peace. A place where a mind could grow without waiting for the next threat. Everything else was just plumbing.

“Picture this”, he said, “A community where children are protected, women are cherished and men are obeyed. A haven.”

It had never been done before. Why would I believe him? He was delusional from a young age. I did not see him change.

I laughed at him. “It is not going to work”, I said.

Marko struggled to get jobs. He worked as a gig worker for a Chinese company, and in every spare hour he read and learned. He learned masonry, architecture, the shifting politics of who was aligned with which government. Optimism that looked delusional from the outside. Doubt he never let anyone see. Trial, error, and the kind of lesson you only get by failing quietly and trying again the next morning. None of it made sense yet. Later, it would all feed into something he himself didn’t understand.

He sat down. He learned.

He needed strong men. Melany had been at war with Otterval for as long as most people could remember, except it hadn’t always been war. Otterval used to be an ally.

Something broke that alliance before Marko was old enough to understand it, and by the time he was, the two nations were trading raids at the border: guerrilla strikes, not open battles, neither side willing to call it a real war, both sides fighting one anyway. Strong men had been deployed to fight, and more kept disappearing into a conflict nobody had officially declared.

Marko worked with young men and women.

He leveraged women for knowledge and young men for labor.

Building Ankarra was a task not for the faint of heart. In his young years, Marko was sickly. It started early; his mother left to pursue studies in Otterval right after birth, and Marko was breastfed by his grandmother till he was of age. He started school later than most kids. He got lost often on his way to school because his parents could neither afford a good school nor a caretaker.