It started a long, long time ago. In perpetual night the families battled. They fought over land, food and the same things all humans are still fighting over today. It was different then though, very different. Primeval. The true elements of this world were much closer to the surface and much easier to find and use.
Those families who had evolved out of the mud, fighting and squirming, fought the longest and most spectacular battles over the land. Battles that continue even into this time. The land gave them gifts and abilities. Food that was grown out of certain parts of it was sacred. Where food couldn’t be grown, animals were used to consume the plants of the land and they were sacred. All was eaten.
When one family discovered another family had found a new gift or ability, they would try to steal it. Battles would ensue. Horrible battles, some of which tore huge rifts in the sky and plunged the planet into blackest night for long periods of time.
These were different battles. Very different weapons. Like children learning and playing with new toys, the families tested out and experimented with their new gifts frequently and on neighboring families.
Doors to other universes were opened. Holes were punched into the veil. Creatures great and terrifying were brought through to be used against the enemies. Some were put back, some were destroyed. Some were left to roam the planet…
The families became great manipulators of the elements. Illusionists, beast handlers… Psychics, telepaths and healers. Great mystic magic users… Ate up with greed and power.
Great sheets of these special lands were under the feet of these families and the battles they waged over them eventually caused the planet to break. It broke into several pieces and the families left claimed those lands as their own. Blown apart with each family separated from the other, the planet entered the first peace time since the dawn of the human.
Rogue humans would appear at the borders from other families or wherever but they were killed if they did not get away fast enough. Left to wander the new planet alone. To find, fight and die over their own land if they could find some. The families had to keep their bloodlines. Had to keep their abilities, their gifts.
So it was for a long time but the Rogues were multiplying quickly. Creating larger and larger nomadic groups. Wandering and every now and then they would find a piece of land and call it their own. On some rare occasions, these Rogues would find a left over gift in the soil. Some rare thing that the families didn’t find.
The Rogues were silent about this. Knowing those families that they ran from, they kept these rare Earth gifts hidden. Secret.
These gifts from the planet were the best ones of all. The last ones from the planet. The ones hidden in the hardest places to find. True blessings, only found by fate and chance.
In one of these tribes of Rogues was a girl. She was about 12 years old, on the run from one of the biggest healing arts families. They were forcing her to marry her first cousin. A blood mix that was supposed to produce a new healing art, but the thought of it turned her stomach. Not only was it against the natural law to mess with blood, but the family was trying to produce a gift without the Earth’s blessing. She didn’t know what it was, but it was very dark and the family had changed since they began the “experiment”. They scared her. She’d rather take her chances with the Rogues.
They hid her. Died her white hair with berries and roots. They destroyed her golden clothes and gave her a burl wood box for her sacred things. Fellow vagabonds, living on the run. Never telling their true stories. Never revealing which family or where they came from. She loved them, they were her tribe, her clan. “Family” was now a word she shied away from, as did the others.
This girl, though young, was a production of two factors of the finest bloodlines of the healing arts families. She didn’t know all the details about herself, but she was one of the last steps in the family’s goal to create their own gifts. Through blood, not dirt and sacrifice. The child she would have produced with Heinrich would have, should have, been the final key.
Her family had annihilated entire tribes of Rogues looking for her. As luck would have it, the tribe that took her in had discovered a rare Earth gift long before the girl joined them.
It was “meant to be” as the elder Rogues so fondly and frequently said.
For this gift was one of the very last ones. One of the best. With it, the tribe gained the arts of invisibility, the masquerade. They could absorb and become others for a short period of time. They were chameleons and moved about the planet blending in, dazzling and charming everyone. They met many friends, though none remembered they were there.
They had the Shine. One of the most coveted gifts the families could never find.
With this gift and the gifts of her blood, this small girl would become one of the most powerful women that the world never knew. She was a true healer and only rumors of her deeds proved that she was ever alive. The family never found her.
On the run from one of the most powerful families on the planet. This chase that began so many thousands of years ago, would continue on through generations, many bloodlines, and many, many names.
France – End of the 5th Century
They called her the Rogue Queen. It was a degrading title, one that enraged her every time she heard it on the wind.
She was not a Rogue… She never ran away from her small and insignificant branch of the healing arts family and she bore their needs like a mule. She had endured much for her small family to be brought into the prosperous arms of this one. She was tenth cousin to the King. She was not a Rogue. She agreed to be sold into this house as a slave. She did as she was instructed and became the concubine. Then the mother. Then the Queen. Her family dined on the finest sacrifices from the most sacred fields just as the very gifted ones did.
She looked out of the window. Her view was the entire land. Great rolling green hills and slate colored skies. Rain was in the distance. This family was still obsessed with finding “the Girl”. It was historical now. The Queen yawned. “The Girl” would be dust into the ground by now, her grandchildren a hundred years old or more… She had no idea why she thought about her now either.
The king thought about his new Queen. This was all wrong. She was not meant to be Queen, not the right blood, not the right match for any good offspring. His mind began to cloud up and he fought it. He had to think. He thought the woman was a witch but if he told anyone, his family elders may burn them all. He couldn’t have this stain his family name either… Witches in the Healing Arts Family House…
He didn’t know that’s how the whole thing with the Girl began. Manipulation of the planetary gifts. Trying to grow from the body what comes from the Air, Land and Sea. His own family had started the witchcraft long ago. If the king knew this, he would realize how appropriate it was for his Queen to be there…
Ironically it was the thoughts of the king that drove his queen to madness. He was always asking her about witches and what she knew about them. She knew nothing about them but she pretended she did. One day she heard a rumor about a young woman in a tribal village not far from their lands. She healed people, but not in the ways of the Family. She did it with plants and clays from the Earth.
At the same time, the Queen was facing another rival, closer to the King’s own family and it was bad. She told the King that she had found the Girl. Or at least, one of her offspring. She told him and the family elders about the girl in the village and how she knew that she had the blood.
The family gave the Queen the right to find out. She ripped through the villages looking for the rumored “Rogue Healer”. She burned and murdered many. She found the girl who was supposed to be able to heal and found out through horrible torture that she only knew how to pack cold mud into a burn. The girl lost her head with many others for their lack of knowledge.
This put an end to the Queen. The King voiced his own opinions about his wife being a witch and when the elders discovered the extent of the Queen’s madness, she was burned at her very own stake.
The elders told the King that he should kill his children with the witch so that it went no further but he could not. The tainted blood from the lesser family would cause a madness to seep into the already tainted family tree.
And the witches would come out of them again and again…
England 1610
The Scotsman stood at the port. He looked at the line of raggedy people disappearing into the great ship on the black water. He looked over his small family. His odd wife with her white blonde hair shining at him supernaturally. He looked at the Frenchman who had been watching them the whole time and he too was boarding this ship. He wished his wife would cover her hair.
The Healing Arts Family had long ago conceded that they would never find the girl again. Over time, they had seen instances that let them know she had survived and her children were in the world with their Rogue versions of their gifts. They never found them though. After seeing others use their families secret gifts so many times a hatred began to fester. A hatred for the Girl of the Blood and all of her offspring.
Once again a fire was lit under the Family, but this time it was not to get the girl and achieve their final goal. It was to annihilate their new bloodline. It had come down to this moment.
The Frenchman watched as the Scottish family boarded the ship to the new world. He watched as the woman’s shining head disappeared into the dark hull. He wondered how someone so powerful could sink so low.
He walked up and took his place in line.
In the New World the Scotsman managed to keep his wife away from the Frenchman though it seemed he showed up everywhere they went. He stood out in the communities where they did not so the Scotsman saw him way more than they were seen.
The Scotsman knew his wife and his two children with her were special. He figured he was special too as she had chosen him to protect them. He was right, he was special, and chosen.
She was special. In the New World the Africans called her Healer. She only had to walk into a room and the sick began to feel better. She had the Natural Art. An art so long forgotten that only those ancient Africans knew the story anymore. Only them, and the Frenchman knew her story and the blood flowing through those veins.
Through her children’s veins.
Ancient voices call out to one another to protect that special and hunted one. That gift from the Earth… The offspring of the one who started it all. The one who refused to distort nature. Refused the creation of Witchcraft. The one who suffered and endured. Those ancient fellow Rogue tribesman who vowed to protect forever, did. They still do.
The Rogue offspring are not witches. Never will be. The witches chase them down. Trying to steal their gifts for power and then hide them from the world. The Rogues will run from them forever because the Witches never burn, only the innocents…
Modern Times – 2019
The Healing Arts Family has grown into a country, nations and states within them. They grew and spread out. Over time they have manipulated ancient forces, forgotten about them and resurrected them again. They are an entity. They did eventually find the Girl…
Every now and then one of them would marry outside of the blood. Outside of the family. Oddly enough it was usually the same story every time. They were disowned, the differential spouse driven to madness, illness or criminal demise and the children readmitted to the family.
Little hidden bombs on the offspring of the Rogues. Another destroyed, another flame extinguished.
It’s a lot quieter business now. The last great madness belonging to Salem. Now a days its a manipulation of love, of money that brings one to the stake.
Back to the basics of humanity.
And the Rogues are a heartbeat. A presence. The remaining arts, the remaining talents… Shining lights blending in where they are needed most.
The primordial families of old have become the dark and ugly witches of Halloween dreams. Eaten by hatred and greed, they fly around hunting for Rogues, lost. Lost to time and the constant changing of the rules.
The Rogues tribesmen carry on… Quietly, resolutely… Carrying Earth’s gifts like the eternal flame… Forever.