Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Microstory 1448: Ecrin’s Return

When the final battles of the war against the time monsters began, the source mages retreated into their special hidden dimension. They took with them nearly a hundred and fifty people, who could theoretically restart the population, assuming the rest of the humans on Durus were killed in the attacks. It would be a long time before anyone knew what happened to these people, because only one of them returned to the main dimension. Her name was Ecrin Cabral, and she was one of the first town mages ever. She protected Orabela Vinci when the latter chose not to be proverted to an older age. In reward for this, Orabela gifted Ecrin with the power of agelessness. So she was eighty-nine years old when she returned to the main dimension in the year 2101, but she still looked as she did when she was seventeen. She was horrified to find the world she once loved had been destroyed, and not by the war, but by the survivors. As a woman, as a mage, and as a human being with a conscience, she did not feel like she could stand by, and let things go any further. So she fought. She used the skills she learned over the course of six decades to fight against the establishment, pretty much all by herself. She tried to take the leaders down, and open up people’s eyes to the damage they were doing to civilization. Unfortunately, people had already made similar attempts before, and they had always failed. She didn’t really have anything that the other rebels didn’t. The authorities snatched her up, and stuck her in a room, so they could ask her where she had been for the last eleven years. Well, she wouldn’t tell them anything. No matter who asked, or how they asked, she literally remained silent. She would not tell anyone what happened to the source mages, or where they were now. The interrogators couldn’t even be sure that she knew the answers to their questions. They kept her alive for her time power, and because she was useful in many other ways.

They wanted Ecrin to propagate her species. It was already clear that the children of former mages had powers of their own. These powers were weak, however, and often not all that helpful, which was why this new class of people was called mage remnants. Ecrin never lost her powers, however, so if she had children, the assumption was that they would be full mages in their own right, and could bring Durus back to its former glory. At this point in history, there were a lot of things that men were allowed to do to control the women around them, but rape wasn’t one of them...yet. Ecrin didn’t want to bear children for anyone, and no one was going to make her. So they locked her up in a very uncomfortable cell, and every single day, someone would come back, and ask her if she changed her mind. She never did. She took the torture, and never budged. The world had changed so much while she was gone, though, and there was no reason for Ecrin to believe they would magically get better while she was in hock. She feared the government would only get worse, and policymakers would make her do what they wanted. There were a few options. They could keep rape illegal, but not enforce it strongly enough, or deter it. They could twist the wording of the laws, so that their way of forcing her to have children couldn’t be construed as rape at all, but something else. Or they could simply make rape legal, or legal under certain circumstances. She couldn’t take the chance that any of these would end up happening, so she took dramatic action. Luckily, her doctor was sympathetic, so he agreed to a medical procedure that the government wouldn’t like. He performed a tubal ligation, which served to sterilize Ecrin’s body, so that she couldn’t have children anymore, even if she wanted to. This didn’t guarantee that she wouldn’t be raped—in fact, she figured the chances were high someone would do that to her as punishment—but it did prevent her oppressors from getting what they wanted. The truth was, had the world turned out differently after the war, she might have considered settling down, and starting a family. But she couldn’t do it if it benefited a misogynistic government, or really anyone but herself. They moved Ecrin to a slightly more comfortable cell, right next to her doctor. She wasn’t released until 2161, when the Republic finally came crashing down.

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