Mari, Age 5:

  Mari’s first memories were of a dark, sterile place made from pale blue stone. Her body was covered in a slightly sticky liquid after being released from the confined world she hadn’t even realized she was sealed within.

  The person that had freed her was a tall, slender woman with vivid pinkish purple hair and striking green eyes. She had been wearing a complex glove on her right hand and carrying a small metal ball in her left while her eyes darted around rapidly. Mari found it all new and wondrous.

  Sadly, her throat couldn’t form any sounds after having had the tube removed. Everything felt wrong, and she only had the information that had been forced into her mind, which was the sole reason she was likely to be feeling anything at all. Or thinking, for that matter.

  “Here. Let me get you warm.” The woman spoke in a gentle tone, but had a harsh, rigid voice that had been worn raw from shouting. With the towel the woman draped around her shoulders, Mari began to associate the woman with the sense of warmth that the thick fabric gave her. Her clothes, like a second skin, were soaked in the sticky liquid, and she’d begun shivering without even noticing.

  “Leader, these kids are all strange. You’d think they’d start crying or something, but instead, there’s nothing. No emotion at all.” The stocky man alongside the warm woman had a faint, soothing voice that was the opposite of the warm woman’s. She dubbed him the ‘calm man’ for that fact alone.

  Calm man was even stranger than the warm woman. He had skin like solid rocks and firm features, despite his placid nature. His eyes were sunken and their brown irises held a sense of ageless wisdom, if she could really grasp the idea of what wisdom meant without the experience to expand on the core concept.

  Everything was like that, once she noticed it. She realized she was identifying things, but lacking in comprehension due to missing context.

  A woman with eyes like those of a snake approached the group while guiding a young boy around her age. The boy had dark skin and brown eyes. She somehow felt that she could trust the boy with her safety, though it made no sense to her. Her mind felt like it was full of holes.

  “Wovren, please restrain yourself. Despite the seeming emotionlessness of the children, I can hear their heart beats changing as we speak. They are not without feeling. Alynne, how many more do you believe we can free?” The warm woman spoke first to the stocky man, then to the snake lady. The calm man just grunted, while the woman with the snake-like eyes replied.

  “I wouldn’t release more than a dozen for now. Food supplies are still going to be limited after we ruined the infrastructure during our siege.” That report sounded rather bad. She didn’t like it.

  Still, she had the boy to work with, so she would survive. At least, that’s what she thought, still unable to figure out where the idea came from. Wilke, the only name the adults used for the boy, was a steady shield. The name seemed wrong to her, but she had no context for why that would be, either.

  Mari, Age 7:

  She grew up in dire circumstances.

  The city she was being raised in was renamed Elitheen, a word that meant freedom in one of the old tongues, and it was poorly organized, to say the least. Her knowledge of raw concepts was amazing for her age, but the actual application of that knowledge was impossible. While she had some advanced skills crammed into her head, she found that she lost some of them as abuse set in.

  Humans weren’t looked upon favorably. They were often indistinguishable from the Sylphariens, and everyone was mad at those people. Mari had stones thrown at her, and hateful glares were the least of her worries. When she was in the Citadel, she was treated well enough, but it ended at the doors. She had no idea why people hated her, but she and the other children had been a considerable drain on resources, so that explained a bit of it.

  She hadn’t been growing the way her mind seemed to believe she should be. A lack of proper food was preventing her from being healthy. The rations were there for everyone to do alright, but she found she was often the target of theft before she could eat a full meal. It didn’t help that she had been giving some of her food to Wilke. Somehow, she knew that she didn’t really need to eat as much as the others, though she also had to admit the amount she did need was more than she was getting.

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  Still, the animosity of the other people in Elitheen was unpleasant. She’d learnt to cry at some point, and she often did. Thankfully, water resources were the only thing they had plenty of, so crying didn’t result in dehydration.

  There would be a school opening within the year, though. She was hopeful.

  Kris, Age 7:

  Kirssanine, daughter of the leader of the revolution, knew nothing but kindness.

  Everyone in the city looked upon the first of her mothers with fawning adoration. Karin was a war hero and the leader of their new government within the Citadel. Everyone brought their spare produce to the home of their local war hero with words of admiration.

  If only that favor meant much.

  Even with the people throwing their praise upon her as a genius of the new generation, Kris found that it repulsed her. She had seen how the very same people would throw stones at the children in the city that looked like Sylphariens. How they would steal their food and reject their existence within the community. It truly disgusted her, and despite begging her mothers to do something, the actual attempts took a lot of careful consideration that she wasn’t ready to think through.

  Kris was a bright girl. She had grown up sitting on Uncle Wovren’s lap and listening to stories of the places they’d been as friends. She read every history text she could find, because she could read about important people, sometimes even ones she knew personally.

  There was a single lesson that history had taught her, even from a young age. That everything moved in cycles. One person mistreats another for some reason, leading to a reprisal that begins an unending cycle of grudges and hatred.

  The races of the world had overthrown the Sylpharien Empire, and along the way, they’d killed many fathers and mothers, or potentially children, even if that wasn’t intentional. One day, some mistreated person who had lost a family member would take revenge and begin a whole new cycle of hatred.

  The other problem was the way her own people had been acting.

  The children they’d been throwing stones at had done nothing to deserve the hatred they received, but they also served as the most immediate outlet for the grief over the revolution’s own lost loved ones. If the Ravien down the street hadn’t lost her mate in the war, then it was possible that they’d see children for how powerless they’d been.

  She had no idea how the new school would actually turn out, but it had been a complete disaster for the orphans of the Citadel within days.

  Mari, Age 11:

  She finally understood.

  It wasn’t just that the people hated her and the other kids from the labs for being a drain on resources. Food supplies in Elitheen had been self-sufficient for years. The issues had run deeper than she’d ever thought.

  “You filthy replacements should’ve been locked away with the other Imperials. Collared and forced to work for all of us, instead.” Krystal’s voice rang out as Mari was kicked in the stomach by one of the older girls that enjoyed the same collaborative abuse that Krystal did. Lynthia, if Mari remembered the name right. While Krystal was the sort to abuse with words, Lynthia was the type to enjoy beating on people physically.

  The third person in the room was Lynthia’s younger sister, Cynthia. The pair had been orphaned by the empire, and their lives had been harsh. Even if Cynthia didn’t recall their parents, Lynthia was four years older and remembered their mother and father well. She loved the opportunity to get ‘revenge’ for the loss by beating on Sylphariens.

  Cynthia didn’t like to get her hands dirty or tell people off. She just enjoyed being present. She clearly knew she wasn’t very eloquent, so she liked to ride Krystal’s highs by tittering whenever the other girl threw around her verbal abuse.

  Lynthia grabbed Mari’s uniform at the collar and lifted her off the ground. She was too malnourished, too weak, and too helpless to resist.

  “You and that lot of lab rats from the Citadel were all just clones of important people. Body backups for the same people who took all our families away. You don’t deserve to breathe the same air as us. Your only use is to have your memories restored when you’re older so you can work for us. Must feel nice to have such a secure future making amends for your shitty genetic source. If you didn’t have the right genetics to do the jobs we can’t, then you’d never have been kept around in the first place.” Krystal’s comments were aimed at a topic Mari had never actually heard before.

  She didn’t have much context for how she had been born or why she was in the lab where Karin had found them all, but being the backup bodies for the higher ranking Imperial citizens was a bone chilling realization. She really was one of the people responsible for all the pain and suffering her classmates had experienced.

  And so, she felt a new feeling blossom in her chest. She deserved the pain.

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