Mytacea: Rayyan's mistake

Prologue: the Tale of Ese

Once upon a time, tens of thousands of years ago, there was a young girl named Ese. She lived with her group of hunters and gatherers and loved looking at plants rather than playing and running around with the other children. Although most of the hunters and gatherers she travelled around with didn't mind, a boy named Neka would often make fun of her for it and demean her relentlessly as soon as the adults weren't around. Ese felt alone and didn't know how to stand up to Neka or ask someone for help, as the other kids all seemed to agree with him. In reality, the other kids were too scared to say anything but Ese grew quieter and angrier as time went by.

Ese learned a lot about plants from observing them and wondered how they came to be, eventually considering the option that something in plants could grow other plants. Soon, it was time once again for the group to migrate, to follow the food as the season changed the land. Ese had been collecting pieces of wild oat plants and buried them in a place where those wild oats usually didn't grow. The next year, when the group came back to the same environment, Ese snuck away and found that wild oats had indeed grown where she had planted them. Full of excitement, Ese decided to set up a big experiment. Once the season to migrate came once again, Ese separated the newly collected wild oat plants into pieces and buried them again. This time different pieces of the plants got different burial grounds. When the group returned, Ese found that only the burial places for seeds had new plants.

Through years of experiments, Ese grew up and learned all about how the plants grew. Time and time again, she would sneak away and grow beautiful flowers and other plants in a valley that the others had deemed too barren to gather in years earlier. While spending so much time alone in the valley, Ese developed a love for her plants and a hatred towards the other humans.

Gradually, the climate started changing. At first the humans didn't think anything of it, they might not have even noticed it. But when the pass they usually migrated to dried up and the animals living there died off, their food supply for the colder season slowly disappeared. One year, when the group migrated back to the woodlands nearby the valley, the now adult humans that Ese had felt so rejected by since they were children, were in desperate need of a solution. The group decided to no longer migrate to what had turned into a desert, even though there wasn't much food to find in the woodlands during the colder seasons either. Everyone made an effort to gather more during that warm season so that they might have enough to last the winter. Even the new generation of children was expected to help rather than play. Ese started bringing food back from the valley, which thrived thanks to her care.

Neka, the man that had always been disrespectful to Ese, now grew suspicious of her. How was the woman who had previously hardly gathered, now suddenly bringing in so much food? He spread mistrust among the others and then confronted Ese in front of everyone, demanding to know where she kept finding so much food. Ese, who felt cornered and resented the group for once again letting Neka bully her, lost her temper completely. She screamed that they should be thankful for her help and that she would never let them into the one place where she felt like she belonged because they would only destroy it.

Storming off in anger, Ese failed to notice Neka following her.

The next morning, Neka called the group together and proclaimed that he had found a solution for their hunger. He had everyone follow him and, to Ese's horror, lead them right to the valley. "This is what Ese has been hiding from us!" his voice bellowed, "now she must be cast out for trying to starve us all!" A murmur spread along the small crowd, but Ese realised there was no point in awaiting the verdict and fled. She had always lived her life as a reject, how much worse could it possibly be?

As she ran, however, she realised she didn't know anything outside of the woodlands and the pass where she had grown up. The unknown scared her, as it would anyone, so she decided to stay near the group's camp - far enough to avoid them, without having to leave the only environment she had ever known. She remembered a field some distance away from the group, where she had previously only found a few edible plants during her wanderings as a child, and judged it a perfect place for her to resume her gardening without the group discovering her.