Continuation from Before

Chapter Zero: Is It Her Prologue

This is a region of beauty, but more recently of war. It was created in the dream of harmony, yet has seen more then it’s share of discord. A land of native benign enchantment now seeped in the foul blood of its children; this is Tat to the sick. This is Tat to the ignorant. But it is not the Tat that lies beneath the war and toil and blood; it is, and shall never be, the Beauty. For in the ancient language, the name of this land that was churned by slaves and torn by soldiers, admired by dreamers and sought by wanderers, Tat is Beauty.

And it is here the story continues, for with each new birth there is a story to be told, some greater then others, others poorly spent. This is not such a life. This is the Safir, and this is her final carnation. This is that story.

There is a land to the northeast in Tat, of an unnatural plateau of ice raised up to the sky until snowy white year round, and in one spot a ring of hills, and on that spot a place, Myje. A village, peaceful, prosperous . . . yet its entire people (should you call them people,) possessed a strange quality unheard of to most the land, and it was that their eyes were blue; a bright, deep, vibrant blue, that very faintly glowed. Here they dwelled in peace until one day came a visitor, a common human, lost on the snow plains. He had heard the legends of this people, which rare, and mostly passed off as stories told to children; though he believed when he saw them, and though they offered him hospitality and kindness, let him sit at their Spring Feast, and gave him warm new clothes, he feared them, and grew to hate them for what he thought to be their arrogant ploys. And he left, taking with him this fear and hatred to his Mistress.

The man was a soldier, belonging to a rank as the Guards of Dehlia, and reported to his Mistress the news of this people. She was anxious, she had encountered them before, and her brown eyes gleamed with enthralled blue rings round her iris. She ordered an attack with a smile, and said with an eagerness to preserve their blood.

Within weeks, her army found its way upon the village, and the people, though strong, were untrained in the arts of war, and could only run and scream and hide and wait and bleed as their swords cut down their limbs, and their torches turned homes to ashes. The people fought back, taking the Fury, but there were those who refused to be consumed. Those who took the Fury lost control, everything went white, and they slaughtered until the streets ran with blood, and the snow was pink, and the air black.

There was still a woman who ran with her two year old child, silent as the tears on her cheeks, holding her husband’s hand, and in appearance they could be no older then twenty five, though in this race you could never be so sure. They were chased by the guards to an end in the town, and the mother looked around, desperate to save her child. She pretended to fall, and rolled the child into an iceberry bush. She rolled over and her eyes widened and flashed, succumbing to the Fury, the guard drove his sword through her. It did not seem to stop her. She grew more vicious, and grabbed the sword in her hands, smile widening as blood came forth from her mouth, her own. She pulled herself up along the shaft of the blade, her eyes wide with a snarl and a thirst, and her arms lashing out at the guards with what was once her fingers, but now long metal needles. She breathed in heavily, and lashed out again, but her neck met another blade, and her head fell, then her body back along the blade of the sword. Her husband backed away, and fell to his knees. . . he would not allow himself to enter the Fury. . . . it was a madness he never wanted to know, and he was strong. He hit the guard who had killed his wife, and the guard flew back, impaled on a giant splinter. Another came towards him, and pulled his sword back, and swung. The father too fell to the ground, lying in a pool of his wife’s all too red blood.

The child remained in the shrub, silent; in its clothes were hidden a small map and a raindrop jewel. And as the parents became gored and maimed, she watched, with frozen eyes on a frozen terrain, with fear growing, glowing in her eyes, and though she was young, a desire for vengeance. When the bodies lay cold and still, she wept, her tears nearly freezing on her cheek as she whimpered. . . . The guards heard her. They soon found her, lifting away the shrub branch with the tip of a bloody sword and smile, “Hejk,” he laughed to his friend, “Kiulmk bijn furr.” His friend came over, and pointed his sword between the child’s eyes, and laughed as the girl grew stiff and frozen with fear. “Nevllv,” said the first, and pushed the other’s sword away with his own, “Hello little girl,” he spoke the universal speech (they were speaking Dehlian before,) “Would you like to go for a ride?” he peered down the cliff behind her, and smiled, raising his boot to her face. He shoved her with a smile, and she fell silently, tumbling down the frozen hillside. She reached the bottom, bruised, bloodied, but alive and shivering. She lay there for a day, but did not freeze to death. . . . her people were not the sort to die so easily, and fate had other plans for her.

She was found by some older children playing, who took her to their parents. They were hunters, but when they saw this child, whose fingers were turning blue, they began to travel back to Illia, their home in the caverns of a giant mountain, as were the homes of many humans on the ice plains. When taken there, she was adopted by a couple who could not have any children of their own. This was her beginning, where she grew up, and where she was taught by the Master Shillo everything she would need to know for fate’s premeditation. But she would not forget the wound that ran deep, though her body never left a scar, this one she always saw, and always knew.