The Story of A Girl

Islana wondered for a moment where to begin. Shalia had though said everything and Islana had never really figured out what to leave out.

"I need to start with my family. After my mother passed, my father was shattered. He turned to booze. Became a drunk. My older brother and sister took care of me.

My brother would do the hunting and sometimes my father would go with him. One day, they had gone on a hunt and my father came back without my brother. He was eventually found but it was too late. He had died from an accident with the bow."

While Islana had always believed it to be an accident, she also always believed her father had caused it.

"After that my father got worse. He barely left the house, except to go into town on occasion though we never really knew what he was doing in town."

Islana realized that maybe the story included her family as if trying to give context to what would come later.

"I had taken over hunting after my brother died. I came home one day to find my father in the house with a man I didn't recognize and my sister gone."

Giving herself a moment, it only got harder from here.

"My father had sold my sister to another man. I was to go with the man that was there, his name was Lord Vasant.

Vasant was extremely cruel to me. He would...beat me. Pretty much, any chance he got.

He had a wife who had been ill, even before I arrived at his house. He made it clear that, once his wife died, he would force me to have his children.

I knew that Vasant would never let me go, that had been his plan all along."

She hadn't been told anything about her servitude, at the time, and could only go by what the man had said.

"One day, when Lord Vasant was out, I took an old beat up bow he had and a small amount of money his wife had hidden in her closet, that he didn't know about and escaped into the woods. I was desperate as I knew my time to get out of there was very limited.

When I ventured into town, I found out he had hired a private patrol to look for me.

I ran for three years, mostly staying in the woods, until I came to a port and a ship that would take me to Ostiarium."

There was always a great deal of hurt felt with that story, it was now though combined with a certain amount of justifiable anger.

Islana wiped the inevitable tears from her eyes and waited on Shalia's reaction.