Legacy

Prologue

Brightstone was a small town. It was so little it did not even appear on most maps of the area. In a small community of about fifty residents: there were a local butcher and other necessities but nothing besides that. One would have to travel many miles to hit a more prominent city this far up north. Still, everything in the town ran smoothly. It was the ideal place, a perfect retirement paradise. The landscape was filled with marks so yellow and forest so green. It was no wonder that a place so lustful hid a darker truth under its facade. Only a keen observer would notice the small abnormalities, and at first, those would easily be written off like the town's people just being a tad more helpful than the norm.

No old lady was ever left to struggle on her own with groceries, no crying kid would be left unattended for even a moment, and people never seemed to miscommunicate. The longer I stayed, the more unreal it felt. I had been staying here for weeks writing records to the ministry of scientific concerns. And despite being here for that long, I could still not pinpoint the source of the eerily smothering friendly behavior of the town. Perhaps it was just that people were kind, but that did not explain how everyone in this place seemed to be entirely in touch with each other's emotions. Something was wrong; that was for sure as the town's population had been dropping steeply as of late. That was the reason I was sent here to find the source of the weird ailment claiming the town's resident. The people had been no help and seemed oddly unconcerned. I had no proof if that was a connection between the sickness and the apathetic behavior, but it was driving me up the wall. I decided to go for a walk maybe the forest would help me calm down a bit. Nature is the best place for one to clear their thoughts. It was out in the wild I found the answer to this case, not that I knew at first after all it was such an innocent little thing. It reminded me of whipped cream dripped with strawberry jam; it looked so outplace in the undergrowth of the forest. Due to a lack of better equipment, I scooped it up in a napkin, hoping the sample would be alright in my pocket on the journey back. I worked tirelessly, trying to undercover the secrets of my finding. It was a type of fungus, but I was at a loss tying it to any fungus I knew about. Still, the more I worked with it, the sicker I felt. Reality became too harsh, and I found even the sound of my pen on paper too loud. I had to report this; it felt necessary. The day I went to the post to send that letter I swear the whole town was giving me dirty looks. The guilt hit me hard. This felt wrong. What was I even doing? But the letter was sent, and that was it. That should have been it.

It was serenity, the perfect wholeness of it all. Once you had all been divided living in your closed-off bubbles of being. But now you were all one together; you were the millions of droplets of water making up an entire sea. It was harmony how you all lived now. Nobody was ever brought the burden of loneliness or isolation. What one felt you all felt what one dreamt you all dreamt and like that you all became one community. But the outsider hated us. The man was always asking questions and critiquing. What happened to your husband, your child, your sister they never stopped prying. We all knew, and we all accepted our losses. There was no need to ask because we all knew what had happened, and we all knew nobody was to blame. When they found the truth in the forest, they finally felt us. Yet, they still betrayed us despite our hospitality. We had been kind too kind to the outsider, and now we were all paying for it. Where there had been one outsider, there now were many. These outsiders did not understand our happiness; they were angry and spiteful — a cover for their strange fear of us. Where we were one together as a whole, they were all divided, and they feared so deeply ever having to become one. We welcomed them with open arms willing to let the outsiders join our community, but they would not. Instead, they declared war on us. They brought nothing but pain to our happy home. At first, we were in disbelief and hoped we could reach some peace, but there was no truce to reach. Then we fought back, but it was too late. They hunted us down and burned our homes, food, and the forest. Nobody was allowed to leave. It all had to be destroyed. It was scary feeling the community's pain and pointless suffering. The flames were all over burning our sanctuary. And the men in strange masks with their weapons hunting us.

We did our best, but they were cunning, and in the end, we had nowhere to go. The outsiders' blind hatred was too vile to contend with, and our lives of kindness had not prepared us for this. We had our last stand in the church a holy site yet not blessed enough to be spared their wrath. Our legacy would die here; if not for the asking outsider, he wanted to repent for his sins. He promised to bring us whatever would be left with him as he fleed the town. He would take us far away from the outsiders' hatred and senseless violence. In the suffocating place, which we had once called home, that was the hope we carried at the end of it all. We hoped to be reborn in a new place of peace.