Chapter Text
Most call it the ‘Mortal Betrayal’. The betrayal of humanity against the elves, when they organized an attack against Lumenaria, or the Lost Cities, and tried to use the elves’ own inventions against them to overthrow the kingdom. The Ancients were hailed as heroes when they bravely defeated them just before the humans managed to finish their experiments in their attempt to create an undying army that would never fall in battle. In their rage, the Ancients — the term used for the oldest generations of elves — combined forces with the other intelligent species and poisoned humanity, creating something that would connect to their DNA and blood, forcing them to face their own mortality day in and day out.
Humans, every single one, became frail and wrinkled, weak and unable to fight. They were much more susceptible because of the poison, their people falling like flies and fled to their own kingdom, barricading it from the rest of the world and refusing any attempts of contact for years to come, to busy stewing in their hurt prides and hateful grudges to try and rebuild their relations with the other species.
But that is the story every species except the humans are told. What if the humans had a different story to tell? What if humans, despite what many believed, didn’t think as one? They don’t have all the same opinions and spent thousands of years making sure none of their future generations ever had the mindset that the terrorist group that went up against the elves had. They made sure none of them saw fit to ever try such a thing, instead teaching them to build and improve, never to tear down and destroy the way the terrorist group that destroyed their reputation among the other species.
Despite it all, the humans never forgave, they never forgot. That was, perhaps, the only thing the other species had gotten right about humans today. For they think humans are still frail and weak, few came to the conclusion that humans were smarter than they looked and came up with their own cures to the poison to keep their people safe. Of course, not even they could fully rid themselves of the poison but they did what they could and improved with what they had.
Few came to the conclusion that maybe not all humans thought the same, maybe every human had their own opinion. None understood that humans were not evil, for ten bad people in a group of one thousand doesn’t make the entire group evil.
But as it appears, no one understood that. Not for a very long time.