AU Thear: Brooke: First Day on Thear (part 4)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Sophia sighed. “That is the documented reason you’re here and why, in the other cities, you would have been put into an arranged handfasting from the beginning, but that isn’t what we want to do here. We want any relationship you have to be your choice, otherwise you are going to end up hating us. If this is going to work the way we hope it will we don’t want that.”
“In the way you hope it will?” Brooke looked at Sophia. “You want us to feel at home here?”
“Of course we do, Brooke. Coming here wasn’t your choice and we did our best to fight against it - we just didn’t have enough of a voice out there. Aisling, in the end, gave in, because she felt it was our only option to help you, which does now seem to be the most important thing.”
Brooke bit her lip. “It’s bad out there?”
“From what we’ve heard it does seem to be that way. Unfortunately there’s not a lot we can do right now, although we do have plans to help the girls out there in the future, if they’ll let us after all they’ve been through.” Sophia shook her head. “I hate this, so much. Aisling knew it was coming, but the problem was that we couldn’t do anything to stop this, and she knew that from the beginning. That knowledge didn’t stop her from trying, even though she knew how hard it was going to be to convince them that this was a mistake, because there were so certain they were right - which I do understand. After all they’ve done they’re terrified of their own extinction.”
“What have they done?”
“You’ll learn that in your classes in more detail than I can give you, as Aisling knows much more about it all than I do, but basically the problem was caused by each of the races of Thear deciding that they were better than the others. Due to this there was an increased interest in blood purity, so Dormas would only marry Dormas and Tein-Igni would only marry Tein-Igni, which has caused all sorts of issues with the number of babies being safely born… and the number being conceived in the first place. The longer it went on the more pronounced these problems became. Now they’re actually beginning to really worry about what they’ve done, but they all still believe that they are better than the other two races.”
“So they brought us here because we aren’t a part of that?”
“All three of the races believe they’re better than you, which makes it one of the few things they’ve actually agreed on in the last three hundred years. Out there you would be treated like a second class citizen no matter where you ended up, but here we don’t have the same dislike of mixing bloods. My husband is Dorma, and it’s thanks to the Tein-Igni in both of our bloodlines that our son was born purple, although mixed colours, like Cassian’s, are very rare.”
Mirrored from K. A. Webb Writing.