February 16th, 1800
…
My uncle asked if I could go buy his medicine. I said yes.
He was ill in bed and... He couldn't move at all because of the disease. A leg disease. No, he was not an invalid, in fact, he exercised by just walking around the... Around the house. That's as far as he could get in his condition. So, I left home to buy his medicine, and before I came back... I wanted to go home, but the attack had already begun.
If I knew it was an attack? No. Only now that I know. Only now that I've lost everything I cared for.
I know I'm exaggerating. I am fortunate enough to have some living relatives, though, so I guess I shouldn't be, you know, sad, but it still hurts. Not hurt, like, a very intense pain, it's just... I don't know. My cousin lost one of his fingers, he still has both hands. No, it's nothing related to the war. It was his own fault, that idiot. He thought he could fix the dinner table with a hammer by himself. Idiot. I'd say I feel indifferent to everything that happened, the way I feel with my cousin, but that wouldn't be fair.
I could care less about my cousin or his lack of a finger. I know his wife doesn't mind it, either.
Now, if you ask me about, uh... The war, how it began... I have no idea.
It came out of nowhere. Like a tidal wave, it just came. I saw people running against my direction. I was in the market when it happened. A lot of people were in the market, and those people who were running... They looked so desperate and panicked. One of them had massive burns around their back and...I'll say, they did not look like people, at all. They ran like animals. Like rats.
There were no soldiers. No arrows, no swords, I... I couldn't see clearly. The crowd panicked and soon everything came down. After the explosion, the woman who was in front of me collapsed beneath a pile of bricks. Me, two royal guards and five other people helped take the woman out. She couldn't even scream, she was in shock due to the pain and the guards… They took her away from the chaos. With my uncle's medicine in hand, I had no time to waste. I left the market as quickly as possible. Not everyone was lucky. Like that woman, she wanted to go home. To this day, I pray she's alright and back at home.
I saw kids hiding in apple containers, hoping they did not get noticed by whoever was invading. The creepiest looking dolls I have ever seen, as I heard from a passerby. He told me they burned every single thing on their path, and we could hear them utter the word "kill" nonstop. Like kill kill kill kill kill! It did not feel like a word anymore. Just noise. The last your ears would be hearing when you came across the yellow-eyed devils. I was curious, but not foolish enough to wait on the street to see one of them. One of the Black Mages.
Yes, the Black Mages. That's how the Alexandrian soldiers called them. There were quite a few Alexandrians for a supposed mass invasion. Of course, they relied on the power of the Mages to do the dirty job of destroying buildings and the lives that inhabited them.
I had to go home. Lock myself in it, allow no one to enter, give my uncle the medicine and we'd be safe at home. No, we wouldn't. Most of the Burmecians who stood at home were killed as well. But was there anywhere else I could go? I was not given any choice, and besides, my uncle was sick. I had high hopes he'd get better by next week, because... He would get his medicine and he wanted to work so badly. He said stuff like "I got a job, I have to work. I need to. It's what I like to do", he said everyday.
He grew up in a different Burmecia. Perhaps it never looked different. It's all but ruins, and this is where I found my uncle's leg... Within the ruins of what used to be his house, the one he worked so hard to build at the cost of his health. Now I am living with my other relatives who moved on to Lindblum. They asked if my uncle's leg could be buried, and I said sure, okay. Let's bury what's left of him. For respect, and because, to be fair, we had no use for his leg.