711492

Chapter 5 - A Gilded Cage

We are all born into an unforgiving world. Sometimes, I still believe, in the back of my mind, that I was born into the most unforgiving corner of it.

I suppose that's what everyone in the world thinks about themselves. Everyone believes at some point they are the lowest of the low birth. That there is nobody worse off than them. The world was designed to throw everything it's got at you, never letting up and never letting you surpass its treatment to find happiness. That is the way of the world we were born into.

And ultimately, it is nothing but a gilded cage masked as the freedom we think we have.

We are all still bound by the laws of this world, the laws we put into place. We are our own prison wardens. I've come to learn that nobody in this world is truly free, no matter how much money one person has, no matter if they are the king of the entire world, and no matter if they are a child with the grandest imagination; nobody is truly free. We will only be truly free from the things that bind us to this world once we are dead and gone.

The world itself is grim with beautiful surfaces but terrible depths; like the vast, boundless seas. Nature is the captivating surface but if you look beyond the surface, you will find that people are the terrible depths. People are selfish and cruel. Dear reader, you'd probably tell me "What about nature?" Nature is also selfish and cruel but the laws of nature are unintentionally selfish and cruel whereas people are petty and mean, deliberately ruining society as a whole. 

I'll move on, away from this topic before I get so twisted up that I forget the direction I was going in as I've already lost count of how many times I've said "selfish and cruel". 

A part of me wished I'd never seen the horrible side of things. Yet at the same time, I came to understand things better than I ever have, why things worked the way they did, and how to successfully integrate myself into the Outside's social hierarchy. 

I studied the Outside World so fearlessly due to being born in a closed-off place, oftentimes finding myself in lethal situations I've could've avoided if the Outside World wasn't so perplexing to my feeble mind and managed to escape alive due to sheer luck. I wanted to know what the Outside was like more than anything else. I wanted to explore all the dark, deadly parts of the world. I found myself overly curious about all the things we didn't have in The Golden City. And to this day, I'm still finding new things I have yet to discover in the Outside World.

I was brought up in an assassin's clan. Ettrail—or The Golden City—molded each and every child born into our town into a top grade assassin. Of course, we weren't told that for many years. All of our stealth and agility training, we all assumed that is what most children were schooled in. The children of the Outside were schooled in magic and could read. Compared to them, the children of Ettrail are barbarians, skilled in nothing but taking lives.

We came from a place where there was no such thing as keeping animals as pets or kings ruling over the masses. I only learned that the world cooks more than the same few things for dinner each night once I was running through the open air because in Ettrail, we were self-sufficient and kept to ourselves. In the place I came from, we didn't have famous people. I didn't even know what that word meant until I stumbled my way across the plains of the Outside. I didn't know that there was clothing made in all the colors of the rainbow; colors I had never seen before.

There were so many things the druids kept from us. So many things my parents couldn't even tell me about because they simply didn't know what it was or that it existed. And there are so many wonders I couldn't use all the words on earth to explain to them. There is food called candy that tastes like thunder. The Outside barters in something called money. Wealthy men—men who have a lot of this money—wear the colorful stones of the earth encrusted in melted, molded metal that shapes around different parts of their bodies. It's only for show. Cities on the Outside have paved their ground with the same brick used to make houses that wind between buildings and named it roads. There are buildings filled with tomes with words and sometimes pictures that are available to the masses unlike our archives. Many of them are used for storytelling. Sometimes they are informational. And on Outside, there is something called acting; it is entertainment. Entertainment is something that is interesting yet distracting from daily life. These actors put on plays, dress as people they aren't actually are and go on adventures while somehow managing to stay in the same place in front of an audience.

Most people on the Outside do not have tattoos of numbers, much less tattoos in general. Most of their children play with dolls instead of knives. They do not know of the arcane. They live their lives as free as leaves drifting in the wind.

Sometimes I think my parents wouldn't survive in the Outside World due to their ignorance. Then I remember that they were never told the truth about the Outside. Their ignorance isn't their fault. They didn't experience it in a way that made them realize the druids lied to them their entire lives. And they didn't pass their assassin's inauguration, which only tightened The Golden City's grip on them.

The druids tried their hardest to keep the Outside World out of Ettrail.

But sometimes the Outside still weasels its way in.