The Healer

The War

Supper wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, the stew Anselme made was quite filling. The spices he brought with him from the South were amazing. They had it so much better than we did in the North.

King Ambroise was a green-eyed, greedy, ass. He was constantly raising taxes, and he never allowed anything from the South to be traded. Ever. 

It seemed as if the North was cursed after the war. When all the magic was banished, it was as if all the talent had left with it. The cows and sheep stopped mating, the trees shed their leaves and never grew them back, and it became a dry winter all year round. Slowly, society declined into poverty, and the King took whatever money we had left through his grubby tax collectors. 

Eventually, we did adapt to life without the Gifted, but it was hard. We learned that water from a river could be taken to nourish trees, with buckets instead of our minds and hands, and they would in turn give us fruit. And if we took the pits from these fruits, with some care, they would grow into more trees. The trees that would not give us fruit could be chopped as firewood. 

Before, we had the Féen to create fire, fire that would burn without a source. Nearly everybody that had magic in them was part Féen. The Féen usually added their own touch to the food for flavor, but now we had to stick to simple spices, if you could even call them that. Salt was washed out from sand and cleaned through a long and tedious process, and some of the edible weeds were dried out and rubbed to dust-small particles that were added to the food for some flavor. Although it was better than the bland flavorless food they used to cook before we discovered these little magics, it was nothing compared to before. Not that I'd ever had what was cooked before, but Mama used to tell us of the delicious meals her Mama would cook for her, meals fit for a King.

Meals King Ambroise was undoubtedly eating in his palace near the Rift. The Rift was a strange thing. It was created by the Gifted during the war to create the North and South. It was a literal split in the ground, as if the ground had been torn in half. 

Nobody really knew much about the war, and what was known was told in hushed voices around the hearth after supper. King Ambroise had a wicked idea of a Utopia he wanted to create.

 He started by creating equality between the Gifted and the Inept. By starting a civil war. A war nobody wanted to fight in. 

Hypocrite that he was, he had a group of Gifted Elites, who of course had magic in their blood. 

The Elites were sent to every home, where  they checked for all the Gifted. The houses they checked were painted in a paint mixture containing iron. The iron prevented any Gifted from entering the house. Any Gifted they caught were shackled in iron chains together like slaves. Bands of iron were strapped to their heads, around their wrists, and around their ankles, preventing any form of magic. Then they took them all to the Palace, and lined them all up. Nearly two million Gifted were at the Palace that day.

They were all massacred. 

Two million Gifted were killed that day by order of the King. Women, children, young men, old couples, everybody. To the King, Magic was a disease that had to be destroyed. So he got rid of every last drop of it.