Beautiful and Broken

7.

We were riding through a pine forest. I have never seen one before, our climate was too mild for these trees to thrive, so they were a sort of a curiosity only found in the gardens of the rich. I savoured the rays of sunlight filtering through the branches, the softness of the carpet of fallen pine needles below our horses' hooves.

"I never knew pine forests smelled this nice", I said.

"There is an old tale told in our country, about a monster that lives in pine forests, it moves without sound, enveloped in shadows. At each full moon, it hunts innocent travellers, it catches them and turns them into trees. People say this is why pine trees are evergreen: because there is a trapped human soul in each of them."

"I suppose no such monster exists."

"But it does. I was that monster, long ago."

There was a smug smile on his face, but it didn't entirely convince me. When people show the most attitude, usually that is when they are the most vulnerable.

"Then we are a whole society of monsters down there in the south. All mages of Atlantis live for hundreds of years. Some of them develop powers that can literally move mountains and make the rivers change their directions."

"And still they don't look at you with terror, they don't hunt you and kill you for a sport!" He halted his steed so abruptly that my poor mare could not follow suit, she stopped a few steps in front of him, so that I had to turn and ride back to be next to him. His dark eyes were burning, his hands gripping the reins of his steed so hard that his knuckles turned white.

"In our history lessons, they teach us about a dark period of Atlantis, so long ago that only drawings and folk songs keep its memory. Our land was very alike the Ravka you have told me about: there were much less mages than today, they were hated, persecuted, subjected to mock trials that were so unjust, one would laugh about it if it wasn't all true. They threw the witches and wizards into deep water, and killed all of them who didn't sunk to the bottom, because they said that the devil made them light enough to float. And the rest of them couldn't make much use of their innocence either, because by the time they fished them out, they were all dead by drowning.

Then one of the more powerful wizards had enough. He gathered a few of his like-minded friends and they hid in the mountains, more and more mages flocking to them. He spoke to them everyday about how unjust their treatment was, and he trained them to use their magic in a fight. In a few years, he had an army, small in numbers, but deadly as a force of nature. They surged through Atlantis, leaving only ashes in their wake, they took the capital by force, and thus the new era of our land begun. Atlantis was ruled by mages, and humans became their slaves, death being the penalty for even the smallest offence."

"And how did that work out for your people?", he asked, obviously not as repulsed by the idea of slavery as I was.

"Not all mages enjoyed being despots. Many of them were touched by the pain and suffering surrounding them. Rebellions were frequent, Atlantis was an eternal war zone between mages and regular humans. So the humans' rights were gradually reinstated, the last step being having a human king of Atlantis ruling together with the council of mages."

"Are you telling me that we have to go through all this in Ravka before we achieve a state of normality?"

"Maybe I'm hoping there's someone out there ready to learn from our mistakes." I gently nudged my mare into movement. "Or maybe I was only telling you a story."