Half-Marked

I've been called a great many things in my life. Most of them deserved. Some of them while someone was actively trying to kill me.

But I've never once had my own body used as a reason to call me something I'm not. There's a condition among the Evolu that does exactly that to the people born with it. I've met one of them personally. Someone I happen to think rather highly of. I wanted the record to actually say what's true, instead of what a frightened stranger assumes at first glance.

Half-Marked

The Evolu, if you've never had the pleasure, run small, green-skinned, sharp of tooth. Entirely their own people. Distinct in every meaningful way from the grotesque Vallen who serve as cannon-fodder for darker powers. Nobody sensible confuses the two.

And then, roughly once in every few thousand Evolu births, a child arrives with the family healers already bracing themselves. That child's skin will thicken unevenly across the shoulders and jaw, raised in patches that read, to an untrained eye, uncomfortably close to boils. The lower canines grow long and forward instead of neat and sharp.

None of it changes what the child actually is. All of it changes what strangers assume the child is on sight.

That's a Half-Marked child. As far as every healer I've consulted can determine, it's purely a developmental variance. No curse behind it. No dark bloodline. No external cause anyone has managed to isolate, despite what I'm sure is considerable University interest in doing so. It simply happens, the way any body occasionally builds itself slightly differently than the pattern calls for. The child who carries it grows up Evolu in every way that matters, except the one that gets noticed first.

The Word That Isn't True

The cruelty of it isn't medical. It's social. It starts the moment someone who doesn't know better takes one look at those raised patches and that jawline and reaches for the nearest insult that fits the silhouette.

Troll. I've heard it said to his face. I've watched him absorb it the way you absorb a wound you've had long enough to stop flinching at, which is its own kind of injury nobody counts properly.

He is not a troll. He is not a Vallen. He is Evolu, purely and completely. The elite guard of his own people know him on sight and never once mistake him for what strangers assume he is. That tells you rather plainly which group actually understands what they're looking at.

He was raised, from what I've gathered, by a man who never once treated the condition as anything worth apologizing for. Who nicknamed him instead for the way he used to swing and scramble as a boy with more energy than the ground could hold. I like that nickname considerably better than the one strangers reach for first.

I'm recording this because the Archive should have the truth of it in writing. Plainly stated. So the next fool who opens his mouth without looking closer has one less excuse. A body can be born unusual. That was never, in any record I trust, the same thing as being born wrong.