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Welcome to Cloverleaf Orphanage

I believe only what I've seen. Can you say the same?

By Noaria07Published 3 years ago 7 min read
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Welcome to Cloverleaf Orphanage
Photo by Frances Gunn on Unsplash

According to a study conducted during the First World War, having grown up in a rural area was the best indicator that a soldier would excel in a military setting. To measure the tendency to excel, the study tracked the reported mental health of the soldiers, suicide rates, the likelihood of promotion, likelihood of contracting illnesses, and ability/willingness to perform assigned tasks. It makes sense. Healthier from growing their own foods and eating diverse meals. More used to “roughing it,” waking up early and sleeping later, and more used to the solitude of not knowing many people. There’s just something about those farm boys. Except, that was total bull. The study actually found the opposite. That people from big cities tended to do better. They were more used to being in close proximity to others – having their personal space invaded constantly. They were used to participating in structured behaviors like waiting in lines. They had stronger immune systems from being exposed to more people over their lifetimes.

I hope now you see it. How I can assert a fact in that way and your brain will accept it. That it makes sense even though the opposite is true. Your brain works toward justification of the world – not toward the facts of the world. Seeking logic is…learned. Another study performed on 500 random respondents in New York City (100 randomly selected in each of the five burrows, at varying hours of the day) and replicated (poorly) with 500 respondents from rural Georgia found that respondents only 3 out of 500 respondents questioned the presented results and/or the origin of the data. Similarly, none of the respondents from Georgia questioned the results.

Neither of those studies ever occurred. At least, the results and parameters of the studies are entirely fabricated. I’m fairly certain that at some point, I read a book with a similar study in it, but at this point, I can’t even remember why the study was cited in the margins of the book.

I say all of this to prove a point. That I can trick you, dear reader, by asserting that something is the truth. Even beyond that, I could fabricate a study myself, print it out and pass it off as fact. Then I could pay 20 more people to replicate my “study” and you’d believe it wholeheartedly. Your brain seeks justification – not facts.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” ~ Joseph Goebbels. (Are you Googling these quotes too yet?)

That’s what they do to us. That’s how they keep us in the Fourleaf Orphanages of the world. Fourleaf orphanage is, in actuality, a massive, decrepit barn that sits deep in a forest roughly 50 miles from the nearest city. When we – orphans of the Fourleaf – learn to read for the first time, the first question we tend to ask is why “Fourleaf” is all one word. It’s because our founder, Zephyr Destinara was illiterate and this is a fact of history that we choose not to omit. He was elven, like us. He was a victim of human hatred.

I once turned over in bed, the sound of a heavy rain beating against the barn and the intermittent flashes of lightning shaking me to attention. I was young. Probably 8 years-old. I wasn’t afraid of the lightning. Not particularly. My concern – what was jarring me awake at every flash of lightning – was the 7-year-old girl gripping onto my arm for dear life. She wasn’t afraid of the lightning either though. It was the sound – the thunder. It reminded her of the bombs – the sound of humans tearing apart an elven neighborhood attempting to pull itself up by its bootstraps. The sound of the crumbling bricks and steel of the building that hundreds of elves had called their homes and their lives. The sound of an independent, self-sustaining economy, the bonds that sustained a community, and elven lives themselves fading away. Martha was there. She was there in the arms of her father when the boulder fell from the roof of their home and crushed his skull – sending his brain matter into her hair. She was there, pulled along by her mother’s hand into the woods when the shrapnel from the second explosion tore through the both of them, embedding itself in her mother’s heart and Martha’s right arm. Martha was there, hidden in the forest nearby, when the human soldiers marched into the city and finished the scrambling residents. Martha watched as they moved oil and natural gas tankers into the city and prepared a story for the others. She was there listening as the newer soldiers – the state funded murderers – slowly voiced their descent and were silenced one by one. Not with a bullet. Not with violence. But with words. It was a preemptive strike. That wasn’t the phrase they used but it’s what they meant. The elven people were a danger to the surrounding population. Making refugees and sacrifices of a few innocent elves for the sake of the human race was worth it. All of the stories they’d been told as children, the photos of the burning human villages, the elves who wore human ears on their necklaces – who painted their faces with human blood and ate the entrails of pregnant women – those elves were who they were fighting against. Not the women who laid bloody and dead on the riverbed – their children drowned attempting to swim to safety. Not the mothers bleeding out in a forgotten corner clutching their lifeless children in their arms or arguably worse yet, wondering if their children had died afraid elsewhere or made it to safety. Martha was there for all of this. She was there at 5 years old. And she was there now. Not physically. But with every thunderous boom that sounded in the sky, she heard the cacophony of screams, crumbling brick, and panicked shouts.

Maybe it’d be forgivable – all of it – if I had a more specific target – something other than “the human race.” But there was nothing of the sort. When Martha and I enter towns, it’s as though each and every one of them is united under the single purpose against a single common enemy. But beyond that, the thing that reaches into the depths of my soul and sets alight what I personally believe to be the holiest of flames – what motivates me to do what I do – is the cruelty. Not just the cruelty of the acts, although that’s quite honestly almost enough of a reason for me. No. The cruelty in their willingness to kill with such a low burden of proof. The majority of those photos? From decades ago when elves could still be convinced to wear “traditional jewelry.” When we knew nothing of human customs and believed a man with a badge and a license. None of these murderers had ever seen an elven force attack a village or even known someone close to them who had. Men who were paid to tell stories of elven attacks – to lie to the public for the greater good because “Men don’t survive elven attacks.” That’s where the stories came from.

Elves don’t attack villages. Even while oppressed, they believe in personal morality. They are not a people who act first for the sake of what may happen. They wait. And they die with honor. With their morals. I am not so honorable.

So, this is my diary to you, dear reader. With any luck, by the time you are reading this, I am dead and gone. But I swear to you, reader – and if it is the case that nobody will ever read my story, then I swear to myself, to Martha, and to the animal from which this leather diary was made: I will chronicle and end the oppression of my people, or I will die trying. So welcome to Fourleaf Orphanage. The beginning of my story.

Fantasy
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About the Creator

Noaria07

Young Writer.

Young King.

Young...Money?

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