Page 6 of Those That Don't Exist
Nevermind. I pull myself together and continue walking. I shouldn’t be allowing myself to get distracted anyway, but maybe I do need some fun soon.
I’min the library a couple of hours later, determined to catch up on the stats lecture with the notes I did manage to take. It’s making no more sense than it did in the lecture. Thoughts of the hot postgraduate guy successfully interrupt my concentration again and I decide to take action. Picking up my phone off the desk I open the group chat with my housemates.
I need a night out.
Claire: Agreed! You’re working too hard.
Bree: What are you thinking? I’m totally in BTW.
Drinks at a pub followed by some dancing?
Claire: Yes please! It’s been too long since we went out. When?
This weekend?
Bree: Sorry, I have the showcase thing this weekend… What about the middle of next week?
Claire: That's sooo far away!
Bree: It's already nearly the weekend, so it's not that bad. Plus most places have a midweek 2-4-1 deal on drinks. :)
I am happy to wait for cheap drinks! Plus, I should be caught up on my first assignment by then. Claire we could catch a movie this weekend so Bree doesn’t feel left out?
Bree: I’ll still feel left out! But I guess you can have fun without me.
Claire: Sounds like a plan.
Plans in place with my best friends, I stare back at my notes. Giving up on the lecture notes I pull out my dissertation plan instead. We were meant to have it finalised by week four but as I wasn’t here I’d received an extension. It’s due in a few days, and whilst nearly complete, I wanted to add some additional resources I plan to use.
I want to write my final assessment on the Cleansing Wars. I’ve known that for months, but I just need to narrow down the angle I want to take.
I openThe origins of the Cleansing Wars,the book I’m using as my main inspiration. I’ve read a lot of H J Fitzroy but this is his most acclaimed research.
I’ve always been fascinated with the war. Maybe it's because it only ended forty years ago, and changed our civilization fundamentally. An entire species of supernaturals was wiped off the planet, and another’s numbers were decimated to the pointonly one community remains in the northern hemisphere. It was an inhumane travesty leaving millions of families bereft.
Which is probably the bigger reason I want to learn everything I can about it. All four of my grandparents perished in the fighting, leaving both of my parents to grow up in an orphanage.
I’ve no idea if I have any extended family alive as the residence where my parents spent their childhood had no information to pass down to them. They’d simply been left on the doorstep together with a few other children one night. Their parents never returned to claim them, and with the death tolls sitting at astronomical figures, they were assumed dead.
With the peace we have today it's hard to believe people were forced to make those kinds of decisions. That parents would abandon their kids to join the fighting.
That's why I’ve been fascinated with Fitzroy’s work. He delves into the social elements of the war. Politics between the Fae and the Vampires might have caused it, but both sides had masses of supporters from the humans, shifters and demi-breeds. It was centuries of propaganda and inter-species relationships which ended in five years of destruction. Peace only being restored once every last Vampire was dead.
What’s interesting is many people refuse to talk about the Vampires today. With the long life spans of the supernaturals, there are many who lived before, and through, the war but in popular culture the extinct species is never mentioned. Only amongst academics do they seem to not have been written out of history entirely.
Froan was one of the last places to see the Vampires wiped from their population, their defences one of the last to crumble.
This is what I want to write about. There were huge sections of the population still fighting on the side of the Vampires at theend, the general public still gave support in masses and yet they have been silent ever since. I want to find out why.
CHAPTER 5
TY
Another three weeks have passed and still nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary anyway. In fact she seems entirely human, and behaves like a human. If I didn’t know her scent I wouldn’t have known she had Fae blood. She doesn’t use her magic. Ever.
Most of them would show their gifts at least once or twice a day. Not her, not in public anyway. My main observation is that she has an unhealthy coffee addiction, but show me a student who doesn’t.
She seems to have settled back into her life, simply busy working to catch up on the classes she missed. No odd behaviours or new magical abilities anywhere. I’ve not seen her move at speed or get rid of any bloodless bodies.
