The Tent of High Healing

Chapter Two: Healers Eat Their Young

The people of Lumaris were wounded, haunted by the shadows of their history. They'd been exiled from their homeland for thousands of years. Scattered, they survived by cleaving together, enduring diaspora by clinging to tradition and to themselves. Ancestors passed down the written and oral ways of Ashrah, raising their daughters in the image of Selwyn——their birthright. They were chosen by the Gods to heal this world, a world that was so broken.

For four-hundred years, her people were enslaved in Dyvik, a labour camp in the northern region of Vahaelar. Worked to death for being healers, experimented on until they were shadows of their former selves and branded with a number, they became nameless ghosts, drifting through a haunted existence. Living while dying over and over again.

They were not the only ones in Dyvik, the Vahaelars had captured anyone touched by aether. Aetherians were born different, with the ability to harness magic and bend it to their will. The Vahaelars banned the use of aether, claiming the aetherians were trying to destroy society from the inside, for their own gain. Neighbours turned on one another, best friends handed over the other, families were divided, and lovers torn apart, as Vahaelar swept through its land sniffing out aether. Those who defied the rules went missing, or were found murdered. Fear took over the land for four centuries as Vahaelar conquered neighboring lands. Ignored by the rest of the world, until countries banded together, against the threat of Vahaelar reaching their borders.

In the year 3010, the Long War began as Novaria, Tzu, Arvyan, Koschi, Wessex, and Theandor allied with one another against the Vahaelar regime, ending the Long War in 3020. Dyvik and the other labour camps were liberated. The horrors of Dyvik were brought to light as soldiers laid witness to starving survivors and piles of bodies—— thousands of dead aetherians and aetherian sympathizers.

Those who survived met a world beyond their imagination. Many had been born into slavery and their freedom was foreign to them, violent.

Lumarians healers were some of the most affected, as the Vahaelar regime targeted them, wiping out two thirds of their people. They clung together, finding solace in each other, shutting out the world that abandoned them for four hundred years. Many pledged their lives to the Goddess Selwyn, the Ashrah Goddess of Healing. They taught their daughters how to harness aether to heal others, trying to atone for the evil of the world by healing it. The sons of Lumaris were raised to follow in the footsteps of Selwyn's consort, Aerovyn, who committed his life to guarding Selwyn. The sons of Lumaris were trained as the guardians of the healers and the daughters of Lumaris used their aether to heal.

Decades had passed since the liberation of the Lumarians before they reclaimed their aether. Some of the ancient ways of healers survived the camps alongside the scarred and branded hands of those that lived. While others were preserved by those living in diaspora far from Vahaelar.

In Dyvik, mothers passed down secrets of the ancients to their daughters, in hushed whispers, instructing them as their mothers and their mother's mother had for centuries. Many of their secrets dying with them, burned in the fire pits of Dyvik. Watering down the art of healing throughout centuries of slavery.

After the Long War, the healers opened schools and healing centres, doing their best to reclaim their lost art. As many of the ancient ways were forgotten, they began to fuse healing with new technologies and scientific discoveries. They were unable to reestablish the old ways but they birthed a new age of healing.

Countries banded together to support the healers of Lumaris and granted them retribution for their years of slavery by gifting them Lumaris——their homeland. They rebuilt the Tent of Healing, in the old city of Ashrah, above the birthplace of the Goddess Selwyn, and revived the city around it. They established the Selwyn School of Healing on the city's outskirts, where the daughters of Lumaris with aether in their blood were sent to learn.