Aurora’s World: Atecia: Opal: Talking to Margery (part 5)

[k_a_webb]

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

“When I think of my town six people means very little, it’s not unusual for that many to die in a month because something went wrong on their blooming day, but when they are only a hundred of you…” Opal looked around once more. “It must have been hard for your community to lose them.”

Haidar nodded. “You’re right, but there were also births during that time, so we looked on it as an investment for our future. Six of us died so the rest could survive and bring up those children, who would later become just as useful as the people we lost. Without them sacrificing themselves we wouldn’t have had the food we needed to be able to survive before those of us who’d chosen to work on the farm could harvest their produce for the first time. Even though whoever it was that brought us here told us it was to ensure our survival I started to disbelieve them when I realised exactly how little we had. They had thought of shelter and we were close enough to the river for us to have fresh water daily, but we needed food too. We hadn’t been left anything we could use to hunt with, or fishing poles, or even a guide as to what was safe for us to eat. What I believe they were doing was getting rid of us, due to whatever illness it was that we had, and dumping us here meant they didn’t have to worry that they may also become ill.”

“Did you have magic, the way we have now?” Opal asked, beginning to feel a little more comfortable with Haidar, although it was still strange to see someone else in her cousin’s body.

“No, we didn’t. That is something that evolved in time and Sauin was truly the first of us to bloom. It wasn’t something he could know at the time, there was always a chance someone else had gone through the same process without saying anything, but they hadn’t. Everyone else who bloomed followed Sauin. We don’t know why, we don’t know why we have magic, and they are things we may never know.”

“Margery said that the race who placed us here were experimenting.”

“That’s what she believes and it is possible. I don’t know what was going through the heads of the people who put us here, but I do know the way they were looking at us and they seemed scared of us, which I think might have been due to the illness that we’d had, that they were afraid they might catch, probably because they knew that when they returned they would be quarantined to make certain that they were free of whatever it was that ailed us.”

“So you truly believed that you were left here to die?”

“I do, but it’s not a belief shared by the others of us who were left here. They appear to want to see the race that left us here as our saviours rather than our jailers.”

Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.

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