I never met my father but my mother said he was an erudite, mother said I inherited that from him. A shame that the plague took him.

Mother was a joyful woman, although she was usually occupied, in the little moments together her smile filled me with happiness.

Almost since i can begin to remember we lived in what they called "the holy belief"

We would learn later that by the rest it was called by a very different name:

"The Tulik cult"

We lived in one of the smaller branches of the cut.

From inside you wouldn't notice that it was a cult at first, and the small details may arise some suspicion but when you live there, the rest of the people seem to think that it's normal so you begin to think that too.

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Basically, in the cult, we had to follow a set of rules, of which for me only a few were relevant:

-only the members of the church can read

-no one can go out of the sacred grounds

-if someone acts weird you must tell the priest

Appart from those the rest wasn't so bad, we just had to pray to a statue once everyday. My mother told me there were a lot of worse places.

Even so, my dear mother had learned to read from my father, and she taught me in secret.

My mother was in charge of cleaning the library, and she used to bring me some books for me to read without anyone noticing.

Until one day the cult started to get nervous for some reason and they upgraded their surveillance.

That day they found the book under my bed and as my mother told them that it was hers, they burned her the very next day.

They were skeptics about the claim that she didn't teach me but for the moment they hadn't decided what to do.

And it didn't matter cause not much later SHE arrived