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| http://jseatonblog.tumblr.com/post/96539645170/inside-the-forest-part-ii-by-jjcanvas |
Twelve years is a long time to be gone, to be imprisoned.
Twelve years since he'd seen his home, twelve years since the raid.
Jaq-ci knew it would not be a heart-felt reunion. It'd had been his bull-bullheadedness that had gotten him captured in the first place.
If only his imprisonment had been the extent of the consequences of his actions. But they weren't.
His anger had brought the wrath of a great and powerful army upon the innocent people of his woodland village. His pride was as much to blame for the death and suffering that followed the attack by the Hatar as any invading army.
And after twelve years of punishing him for his crimes against them, the Hatar had sent him home to face the rest of his sentence.
The timing of his release was not coincidental. It was only after Jaq-ci had accepted his role in the invasion that the Hatar had let him go.
"I was young." Jaq-ci would say. "Full of pride, and ambition. But I didn't destroy my own homeland."
But he'd had as much a hand in it as the Hatar. It was Jaq-ci who'd attacked the Hatar's trade caravans over an imagined slight on his fiance. It was Jaq-ci who'd incited civic pride and moral superiority to whip his compatriots into a frenzy, all so they would help him gain a measure of revenge.
In the end, Jaq-ci had learned there hadn't even been an incident. He'd merely misheard a few words from a language he didn't fully understand in the first place. But the pride and vanity of youth hadn't allowed him to make that determination, and his ambition to prove himself worthy had barred him from acknowledging even a simple mistake.
And the villagers whom he'd so desired so much respect and admiration had payed for that pride, many with their very lives.
He'd thought about running. The world was a big place, after all.
That idea was cast aside. This was his home, even if no one wanted him there.
And so Jaq-ci returned to Tres-Oakes, village of his birth.
He wasn't killed outright upon his return, though that sentiment did run through the village throughout his life. But he was an outcast, shunned by most, and constantly reminded of the mistakes of his youth by the yawning chasm of emptiness left by the death of his beloved, who'd died not at the hands of the enemy, nor her own people, but at her own.
Jaq-ci's life did serve one positive purpose however, as a lesson in humility for generations to come.
