The thickety spellbound chapter 10

“I was 7 when the fights happened. Your grandfather was obsessed with following the Clen. Back then those who followed with clen were called the Chosen. They were so few believers in the clen’s word, that they believed they were special. As more followed the clen’s word, the original followers realized they weren’t anything different from the other and changed the name to the children of the fold. But back to what I was saying: your grandfather was obsessed with the Clen. There were benefits to his brethren. Those who accepted his word as true were given more money from his stockpile. Times were bad then, with taxes and debt traps left behind by the previous Kuttian representative. And your grandfather wanted to move up in the world. This resulted in many fights with my mother, your grandmother. She did little acts of resistance, like giving spoiled eggs in his lunch or purposefully swapping timetables. Then he caught her in act doing these resistances.
She was too dangerous to be stayed with in my father’s mind.
It was a Tuesday, the days the boats were about to leave. He told us we were going to his work, and left to the boat with us. I was only 9. “
Paula could picture it all in her mind. Her father’s happiness climbing on board. His frown dawning as he realizes he’d never come back from his father’s work.
“When we arrived at De’Noran, we never expected there to be life. The creatures of the Thickety attacked everything which came into their vision. But eventually, they all became tamed.”
Paula heard about the taming of the animals. First, they infected the animals of De’Noran with a protein which made their young less dangerous. Then, they simply waited for the old breed of animals to die out. In this way, they began their conquest of De’Noran by removing the natives one by one.
“Later, I heard about the war with the Kinde Folk. They said they had slaughtered the clen’s men by slicing of their heads and then forcefully keeping them alive, using the “foulest of magicke” But fighting the witches who worked with the Folk simply because they wanted their land back? That crossed a line. The witches were killed more than the clen’s armies. That was unfair to me.”
This was the point of all the sermons of the clen. That only those with pure blood, with no blood from Sentium could go to Salvation. Every day, the world talked about traitors who had disobeyed the clen’s rule and showed their execution to the Overseer. Paula never saw them, but she secretly cared for them. They were risking their lives everyday to fight against the Clen.
…
The Overseer was sitting in a room. He had a red mask, with two eyeholes peering out of them. No one had ever seen his real face.
In front of the Overseer sat Timoth Clen. He wasn’t wearing a mask. The Clen worked for the Overseer and acted as his front. It had been like this ever since the Overseer had first met him in an alleyway in Lux.
Timoth was a beggar then. A poor child, asking for a bit of goodwill. His mother had left, and his father had thrown him out soon after that.
Everyone saw a penniless kid.
But the Overseer was not everyone.
He saw an easy pawn. The child was strong, but hungry. He adopted him.
When he was all grown, the first stage of his plan began. He used Timoth to lure people on to De’Noran. This was easy. People wanted a new system back then. A system where you didn’t have to work to live. De’Noran provided that. Starting from dawn, you could miss an hour, minute, and even a day of work. That was the easy part.
But then there was the issue of the Kinde Folk, or as their real name was, the Aftrune. They had lived here all their life. And De’Noran was built on their king’s tomb.
For a while, the Aftrune were calm. But the people were nervous. Nervous that their new neighbors could ruin their lives and infect the village with evil. And that was where the Clen came in.
He said the message told by his adoptive father, and spread rumors about the Aftrune. They first killed any traitor who didn’t follow them. Then, they put their bodies in the huts of the Aftrune. Within weeks, a war broke out.
The Aftrune had their magic, which they used to their advantage. But the people had something more. They had a catapult.
With his newly built catapult, he brought dead bodies. He had brought some samples of the Clinging Mist with him. After infecting the bodies with the plague, he hurled them over into the Thickety, to the settlement of the Aftrune.
The Kinde Folk were soon wiped out entirely. Then came the next stage of his plan: indoctrination.
The new generation of Island inhabitants were running out of partners, and there was of course, the possibility that the plague could leave through an animal.
So, using the Clen, he created the Burner Act. It would use the desperation of the common folk back in Sentium, and send them to the island to be partners and to cut through the overgrowth of the thicket. The depression in Sentium was over, but there now was anti Ilma propaganda, out of fear that they could raise the prices on glow orbs. Anyways, the Mist seemed to have mutated the plants of the Thickety into one mind. This worked well, for a while. The Kuttians cleared out the overgrowth of the mist, while the Ilmans, Luxians, and Aurenian married with the islanders. Then the Sentium immigrants, or Senties, as they were called, began spreading lies that undermined his rule. They needed to be stopped, but would he let his islanders go extinct ?
An alarm jolted the Overseer back to reality. He then remembered what the meeting was about. Timoth said that there might be a chance the Kinde Folk were back.
“ One of the guards claimed he saw something move through the forest when he taking down a rebel. And a kid in one of the schools have been having nightmares about whispers, the same things that happened when the Kinde Folk were at their highest power. I eavesdropped on this kid, and saw her go follow a man in a deer mask. A deer mask, Father! The same masks the Folk wore during the war.”

The Overseer was curt in his reply “How could there be any chance that the Folk are back? I personally made sure that they were all dead.” The Mist should’ve made them go red and blistered by now, just like the corpses he’d seen in Kutt when the plague first began.
Unless, there was a chance. The chance the Aftrune were back, and he actually had to execute Directive 537. If the Aftrune were back, then there might be possibilities that a witch could return. If a witch was back, his revisions of island history would not make sense. If his revisions to island history didn’t make sense, then the people would rebel. If the people rebelled, he would be done for.
These thoughts whirred in his mind, until he calmed himself down. Directive 41159 would take care of the Aftrune if they returned. He was sure of it.