My Collection of Birthday Not-So-Short Stories

The Blood of Grace Part 1

The Blood of Grace

Prologue

            I live in a beautiful place. Here in Myna, people carry swords and handcuffs in the street, ready to pounce and arrest any magical creature that comes in sight. They spill blood in public to keep their message made known, and lurk in almost every corner in the towns to keep what they call the “peace.” (All a bunch of bull, if you ask me.)

            Here, the only protected place in modern villages is in the alleys where the owned slaves shiver, ready to jump off a cliff at their owners’ biddings, abusing their given powers to work for the same race that are hunting us down.

            It’s a war that’s been going on for ages, between humans and Magics. It started in 2009, when the paranoid humans thought us magical creatures were planning to overthrow their race, so they plotted a bloodbath against every forest creature they could find. Of course, we were planning no such revolt, but once they attacked, they pissed us all off. You want rebellion? No problem. We fought back and rebelled after what is now called, “The Great Bana Invasion”. “Great” isn’t exactly the term we would’ve chosen, but that’s beside the point.

            And whoever those bastards are that attacked my simple little cottage in the woods, where I lived with my parents and little sister, and slaughtered my poor sister Grace ruthlessly, made the biggest mistake they could make in this war. Why? Well, simply because I became the youngest and biggest kick-arse captain that sailed the seas, part of the system of Pirates that hunt humans, as the Buccaneers hunt us, looking to find that underground Capital where they plan, while rescuing our fellow Magics before they end up executed.

            So now, in the year 2050, it’s a battle of the fittest. If you get caught up in its quake, like me, there’s no turning back. So you might as well face it head-on. We’ll spill some of their blood, too. We won’t quake in fear as prey; we’ll hunt too. They thought we defied them, “the superior beings”, so we did.

            Yeah, sure. I live a “beautiful” place.

            Some would say how they, “could never get tired of the smell the sea” like Raine. I would beg to differ. After three years of breathing pure ocean-air, you get used to it. However, I will never forget the first time I heaved a big whiff of the marine atmosphere, before it became customary to have the first thing you smell in the morning be fish and man-sweat. It smelled like salt and seaweed, with a blast of sunshine warming it as the scent was carried on the most freeing wind you can ever feel, not having anything run against it but a brilliantly azure ocean. I recall my lungs feeling like they could expand two times bigger on the shore, compared to be surrounded by trees. Not that the air in the woods was bad. It’s just as good, just in a different way.

            Nonetheless, the thrill of ocean atmosphere wore off after about two months on a ship. How Raine still finds it so refreshing, I may never understand.

            “Ella, you lazy lump! Get off your butt and start being a proper Captain!”

            Well speak of the devil.

            I turned onto my other side, slowly blinking my eyes tiredly. Ugh. Morning already. I stayed up too late playing Devil’s Hand. (Reader, I’m not too much of an expert on your world, but I believe you refer something close to Devil’s Hand as “poker”) How can she be up so early in the morning?