The Siblings
Traditional Children’s Prayer
Belate with the rainbow eyes. Goddess who made the seas from her tears, the mountains and valleys from her steps. Who left the desert barren after giving its trees and flowers to feed her children. Who created the people of this world in her image to fill it with laughter and love. Belate with the rainbow eyes, who created a people from each color tear that she shed in loneliness, protect us now…
Port City, Gold Coast
3rd Moon of Spring
“They say that beyond the seas and beyond the mountains there are people who aren’t like us. People with eyes that are not one pure color, with languages even stranger than those spoken here. But the ocean and the mountains keep us safe, and we call our land Erate. Over time, the seven clans that lived here became seven kingdoms – each ruled by the family with eyes the purest color of them all. Those with Gold eyes ruled the seas, those with Blue the lakes, those with Pink eyes claimed the plains that stretch to the desert, while those with Brown silently claimed the desert and nurtured the secrets it gave. Those with eyes like Silver settled in the mountains, while those with Green eyes made homes in the forest that slowly grew from the desert and surrounded the area claimed by the Lake-people. Those with Purple eyes scorned all the rest and lived in the swampy North that was at the base of the mountains. Oddly, those with Red eyes never settled in one place. They had settlements scattered throughout all of Erate. And they liked it that way. They had some major cities scattered along the cliffs to the South, but even that was partially Gold territory.
They say that beyond the seas and beyond the mountains the different People are always at war. That wasn’t the case in Erate. Each kingdom had a specialty, each had land that gave them a unique resource to trade and foster.
Until the Great War.
No one knows how it started, for it started more than two hundred years before anyone thought to write about it. Neighbor turned against neighbor. Cities expelled those with different eye colors in an effort to preserve the peace. The then-king of the Red Kingdom realized that he could profit by selling weapons and secrets to the different Royal Families, and fed the flames of the destruction to line his own pockets with gold.
The Gold King, our great-grandfather, was ultimately his demise. He realized that, after more than a hundred years of fighting, no one remembered why they were fighting the others. The only reason he had for going into battle was the word of a red-eyed messenger. Our great-grandfather decided to find his own truth, and sailed around Erate as a young man in the fastest ships of our ocean fleet. He learned the truth. Peace was finally reached. They created Central City at the border of the desert, plain, and forest from the ruins of an old Red City so that there could be a place for members of all the kingdoms to trade and live in harmony, and a place for treaties to be written and signed. And that is why…”
“What happened to the Reds?”
Juan blinked and looked down at his little sister.
“¿Qué?”
“What happened to the Reds?” she insisted in Basic; she didn’t want their younger siblings, who were playing nearby, to catch on to what they were discussing. At ten years old they were still too little for talk of battles and death. At fourteen, Ella felt much more equipped to handle the conversation.
Thrown off by the interruption to his pre-prepared speech for the diplomacy and history class he was currently being taught, sixteen-year-old Juan frowned. “They were punished for their role in prolonging the war.”
“Prolonging?” Ella’s basic wasn’t that good.
“La Guerra duro más que necesitaba.”
“What was the punishment?”
“They burned all their cities,” said Juan, matter of fact.
“¿QUÉ?”
Julian and Fiorella faltered in their happy chattering to look at Ella.
“No te preocupes,” she quickly waved their attention away. More quietly, Ella asked Juan. “Was that fair?”
Juan shrugged. “Our great-grandfather thought it was…but it wasn’t really up to just him, right? All the Kings and Queens had to come up with a solution.” Juan shrugged. “I know that someone wanted to just kill all the men and someone else wanted to make them all slaves. Can you imagine if Erate had slaves like the Island Nations?”
The Island Nations were several weeks away by boat and, luckily, thought that Erate was too cold a place to merit conquering. They were the primary source of the Gold Kingdom’s trade, as well as the home of pirates that often threatened their shores.
Ella and Juan both shuddered just thinking about the pirates. There had been a huge pirate attack on the Gold Coast several years back, when their mother was still alive and their baby sister hadn’t yet been born. Pirate attacks, however, were the biggest war experience either could really imagine, so the type of destruction that lasted much more than a hundred years and affected the whole of Erate was more than their teenage minds could handle.
“Well,” said Ella slowly. “I don’t think that destroying a bunch of cities is a good way to make peace.”
“The Reds weren’t interested in peace,” said Juan.
Ella looked at him with her big, golden eyes. “¿Estas seguro?”
Are you sure about that?
Juan had no answer.
