The Garlean Empire had no cause to tear my family apart, and yet I became its casualty all the same. Merely because my mother had married a Garlean, and she was targeted by the empire—she was a gifted magitek scholar.
We once lived quietly in a small cottage in Ishgard, but were eventually forced to uproot our lives and move to Garlemald. More like, kidnapped. Even then, we were never treated as locals. We were regarded as fugitives, being watched, restrained, and judged.
My mother was confined to their so-called ‘black room’, compelled to produce results that would meet their expectations. As for my father… A farmer's life was never easy, but the Empire declared his passing as mere ‘fatigue’. I knew better. It was no simple death. If anything, it was murder. Just one that would never be acknowledged, nor solved.
All of my education came from my mother. It was she who taught me the principles of science and magick, and the ways the two intertwine in our world. Yet I was born with thin aether, forced to rely on magitek where others used their innate abilities for even the simplest tasks. Was it unfair? Perhaps. But those very disadvantages allowed me to grasp science more readily. I learned to work around my limitations, using knowledge and machinery to fill the place where aether should have been.
I found no comfort in the longevity promised by my race, only the cruel promise that I would remain imprisoned in Garlemald for countless years, waiting for the day I could no longer see the next sunrise. Yet it seemed Halone had been listening all along. My suffering ended the moment the Empire fell, I escaped Hell with my mother. And so, at last, I found my peace, returning to a land I had long missed, one that felt both distant and familiar. Yet the mark upon my forehead could never be erased. Garlean blood still ran through me, and I remained my mother’s only son, the living keeper of her memory where she and father both loved each other. I never blamed her for the hardships of my childhood. She loved me fiercely, endlessly, and she was the greatest mother I could ever have asked for.
After years spent in the Garleans’ grasp, my mother was at last able to retire from her work as a scientist. As for me, I chose to follow in her footsteps in Old Sharlayan, to continue what she left behind, and to embrace the possibilities of technology in place of the blessings I was never granted by Hydaelyn, or Halone… or perhaps both.
