The Blood Garnet

Prologue

An excerpt from "Ametrine: A History of Humble Beginnings to Great Worldly Power/The Jewel of the West"

"There has always been much speculation as to whether any kingdom has ever shone as bright or held such power as the great city-state of Ametrine. From commerce and agriculture to military and architecture, Ametrine leads by example in all areas of life. However, this towering ode to triumph's beginnings were humble to say the least.

Ametrine's genesis was not like those of her neighbors. She was not a branch that stretched away from a mother limb, but rather an entirely new tree; and like a tree, her roots stretched out underground, completely hidden and unknown. This was mostly due to her sudden birth.

No, birth is not the right word. Birth implies a time of gestation, for a final product to be brought to fruition and then introduced to the world. Birth means that there was a period of expecting. There was no such time for Ametrine. She was sudden and unforeseen, coming out of the dark shadows of the forest in a calm fury, planting her feet and seeds deep in the ground and taking up root almost as soon as she had arrived. She quickly began to impregnate the land around her, sprouts of people and villages popping out of the uninhabited soil, confirming her lasting presence in this land.

The peculiarity of her beginning would seem considerably less so with just a simple recounting of all that had happened during that tumultuous time. Unfortunately, and strangely enough, there is no written record to date of Ametrine's history before the civilization had already begun. To make matters even more mysterious, all neighboring accounts of history are uniform in their retelling of this part of the age. They go as follows:

A war between two brothers of the same empire had just finished in the north. A despicable plague had run itself to an end in the south. Both of these events left considerable amounts of chaos, destruction, and death in their wake. Then, a wondrous peace fell upon the people of the west. Crops grew larger, game was more abundant, births were many and deaths were few. Trade was thriving and relations were more than agreeable. Then suddenly, appearing in all scribes around the same time with minimal differences, a new group of people (presumably wanderers at the time) were set up to the east, laying down their foundations and growing steadily. They created good relations with the civilizations around them and, before anyone could protest, were integrated into the system of the land.

It is not surprising for these people who had just come from a time of turmoil into a time of great luxury to miss the subtle pilgrimage of a band of outcasts. What remains unusual and will continue to be unusual until Ametrine is no more - assuming that unlikely possibility ever becomes an unfathomable reality - and beyond, is that the very beginning of Ametrine's history was not even recorded by the people of Ametrine themselves. Historians, scholars, and royals alike cannot even answer the question of this country's conception, as her own writings did not start until debatably five decades after her neighbors' first accounts. The myths and legends are abundant but the history is null; it simply does not exist.

There is, however, unanimous agreement about the general stages of Ametrine's legacy. In the beginning, Ametrine started out as a small tribe on the outskirts of what is now known as the Forbidden Woods. It flourished greatly over the years. Through the centuries, what was once a small tribal village would expand to become a town, a city, a city-state, fighting enough battles and acquiring enough land and power to eventually become the valiant country that it is today. Its territory stretched from the Valley of Serenity to the Western Ocean and its influence was unparalleled throughout the world. Because of its strategic position geographically, Ametrine had good trade and ally relations with nearly every major kingdom and country from the Southern States to the Eastern Ocean, with the exception of Besarius. The cousins of Ametrine to the north and Ametrine herself have always had interesting relations, to say the least. And although the two kingdoms are rife with prominent differences, they are unquestionably linked by their epic integration into this region. Their "kinship" of sorts is merely because of a connection within the realm of their inception.