King Arthur: LoS belongs to Guy Ritchie. Italics- symbolizes thoughts and/or flashbacks.
To say that going from living in England to living in the Dark Lands was an adjustment for The Mage would be an understatement. Learning the magic necessary to survive there was not her problem. She seemed to have a knack for channeling her magic into the animals minds. Her problem was her memories.
It seemed that with time, and danger not imminent, the children adjusted to life in the Dark Lands wonderfully. If an outsider were to glimpse them, it would appear that they had lived among the animals, and the wild forestry, their whole lives. And to them, they had. As time passed, the younger children slowly began to lose their memory of life outside the Dark Lands, until all that they knew, was a constant struggle to survive.
Unfortunately for the Mage, she was a few years older than the other children. She was not lucky enough to have the memories slowly fade away, regardless of how hard she tried to repress them. Although she did not fully comprehend everything that had happened, she still remembered. Everything.
She used to live in a village that had an abundance of mages. The village was surrounded by tall grass, and had a lake that the children would play in on warm days. On the days that she could sneak away from her studies for a while, she would run to the lake and peer deep in to it, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious Lady. After a while of gazing, she would slink back toward town, eager to try again tomorrow.
She also remembered the day that a courier eagle came soaring through the village, bringing news that had the elder mages distraught. A crowd had gathered around them, sensing their distress. When she began to approach the crowd, her mother had restrained her to her side attempting to keep her from hearing things she was too young to understand. She recalled hearing the words war, Mordred, and King Uther, but before she could ask why everyone was so upset, her mother had begun to pull her in the direction of their home.
Soon after that day, a mage called Merlin came to the village to confer with the elders. All of the adults were either in awe of him or terrified of what him being there represented. He rode into the village on a white horse, and the entire village had gathered in the square to watch his approach. She remembers thinking it odd, that when he rode past her, his eyes seemed to match the horses. A few months later, her mother had grabbed her in the middle in the night, and with a few more members of their village, began to creep through the forest. Her mother had attempted to shield her eyes from the flames lighting up the night sky, but for one moment, all she could see was her village on fire.
For a while she tried to fit in with the other children. As long as she spoke about something regarding magic and the Dark Lands, everyone got along well. Unfortunately, she learned that the younger children had no mind for reminiscing about the past, and many of them were not interested in making plans for the future. She wanted to talk about how things used to be, the good memories she still had access to. She wanted to have a conversation about how they could go about getting out of the Dark Lands, and how to stop Prince Vortigern from hunting them. Sadly, the younger kids did not want to dwell on something that they could not remember, nor did they want to waste their time on things that they felt like they could not control. They had no time for her ideas and speeches on how they did not belong in the Dark Lands, and how the only way things were going to change was if someone stood up and actually made an effort to change things. So, they wrote her off as being off in the head and ignored her, and she kept her distance.
The elder mages of course, remembered what it was like before the Prince began his purges. They remembered the way the land used to be, and how the mages used to be treated before they were hunted. But the tragedy and horror that came with it, made the purges all that they could dwell on. To her, it seemed as if the elders had given up all hope of returning to England, and so had put all their effort into drilling them with how to survive in this hellscape. But she rejected that notion. She knew in her heart, that this nightmare could end. Someone just had to be brave enough to try.