[She's quiet for a moment. 'The tragic tale of our people', huh? Guess telling it to a human is traditional, sort of... Even if she's not planning on challenging him for his soul. Or anyone else's.]
The short version? Humans and monsters used to live together on the Surface, in peace. Humans were physically tougher, but monsters had way more magic, so they were equal. Then one day somebody found out that you could absorb a soul from the other species- human taking a monster soul or monster taking a human one- and gain great power.
And human souls were easier to take, because being more physical meant they all stuck around a while after dying but almost all monster souls vanished right after death.
[Now her tone gets more bitter, going over an unfairness that's lingered since long before she was ever even born.]
Nobody had even taken a soul, nobody even tried to, but the humans were so scared that it might happen that they declared war instead of taking the risk. They tried to wipe us all out, just in case we might be a threat. Monsterkind fought back... and lost.
In the end, the few survivors were herded into a series of underground caverns, beneath a mountain, and sealed in there by a magical barrier. To pass through the Barrier at all, you need the power of one human soul and one monster soul- and you need a full seven human souls to break it completely.
[She sighs wearily, remembering the next part of this story and suddenly feeling exhausted on a soul-deep level.]
And that's where the Kingdom of Monsters has been, stuck down there growing and surviving and struggling to get by, for the last couple thousand years. People used to think we might be able to get out peacefully, but that... didn't end well. Seems like humans didn't want to try making peace, and our king's children paid the price for it.
[She doesn't elaborate further- even for this story, the details of that part are pretty grim.]
So these days? Any human falls down through the Barrier, their soul is forfeit. It's been a few hundred years since the last one to come down, and we still aren't free yet.
[That... whatever they were that she'd been fighting aside. She's pretty sure they weren't human, even if they looked a little like one.]
no subject
The short version? Humans and monsters used to live together on the Surface, in peace. Humans were physically tougher, but monsters had way more magic, so they were equal. Then one day somebody found out that you could absorb a soul from the other species- human taking a monster soul or monster taking a human one- and gain great power.
And human souls were easier to take, because being more physical meant they all stuck around a while after dying but almost all monster souls vanished right after death.
[Now her tone gets more bitter, going over an unfairness that's lingered since long before she was ever even born.]
Nobody had even taken a soul, nobody even tried to, but the humans were so scared that it might happen that they declared war instead of taking the risk. They tried to wipe us all out, just in case we might be a threat. Monsterkind fought back... and lost.
In the end, the few survivors were herded into a series of underground caverns, beneath a mountain, and sealed in there by a magical barrier. To pass through the Barrier at all, you need the power of one human soul and one monster soul- and you need a full seven human souls to break it completely.
[She sighs wearily, remembering the next part of this story and suddenly feeling exhausted on a soul-deep level.]
And that's where the Kingdom of Monsters has been, stuck down there growing and surviving and struggling to get by, for the last couple thousand years. People used to think we might be able to get out peacefully, but that... didn't end well. Seems like humans didn't want to try making peace, and our king's children paid the price for it.
[She doesn't elaborate further- even for this story, the details of that part are pretty grim.]
So these days? Any human falls down through the Barrier, their soul is forfeit. It's been a few hundred years since the last one to come down, and we still aren't free yet.
[That... whatever they were that she'd been fighting aside. She's pretty sure they weren't human, even if they looked a little like one.]