Mama Nina's Diary - Borderline Dead (Complete)

Introduction.

Nina Dirgefeather, commonly known as Mama Nina, lived in the city of Thentia on the edge of the Moon Sea. When she was very young, she went with her brothers to train at a monastery and learned the ways of Ki. However, her family had always been part of the 'Circle of the Moon Druids,' so she learned dual disciplines from a young age.

She stayed with her two brothers after leaving the monastery and focused on herbal remedies, cooking and cleaning, and did not utilise her more formidable talents in her daily life. She would train occasionally with her brothers, but never as her life depended on it.

When she was in her early twenties, her oldest brother, Matau, signed up to fight in the War of the Twin Mountains. An evil sorcerer killed him, and all that she got back was one of his claws from his bear form.

Nina was against Matau going to war, but he ignored her concerns and left. She sometimes wonders if her life would have turned out differently had she been more forceful and kept him home.

She worked the claw onto a strip of leather and gave it to her younger brother, Paulo, who had idolised Matau. Paulo, the quieter and more thoughtful of the brothers, started taking risks, gambling and staying out into the early hours of the morning drinking. He'd pick fights and come home bloodied. Nina would patch him up and put him to bed. For the next week, he'd be sheepish and apologetic, staying home, but then he would fall back to his old ways.

Until one night, he fought with the wrong person and never came home. Nina found his beaten, bloody corpse behind a pub, abandoned amongst the rubbish and filth of the alleyway. No one had lifted a finger to help him or notify her of his death. She buried him, holding on to the bloodstained bear claw of their brother.

For the next two years, Nina wrapped herself in her grief and avoided people. As a dire wolf, bear, tiger or other beast, she would spend long hours in the woods, letting the instincts of tooth and claw numb the suffering of mind and heart.

This continued until as a wolf she came upon a child lost in the woods, her wolf's instincts signalled "Prey!" and she leapt in to tear up the soft warm flesh, when her humanity grabbed the reins. "Stop, what am I doing?" She regarded the slight form between her huge paws. A young boy with large frightened brown eyes, dirty clothes and torn, bloody knees. She phased out of wolf form and scooped him up onto her hip.

She called on her natural healing abilities, mending his scrapes, and carried him back into town. Settling him back with his frantic family, Nina went home.

After that, her trips into the woods were less frequent, and she focused on her training and strengthening her Ki and honing her martial arts. She still loathed the city and those responsible for the deaths of her brothers, but the ache was tempered by the realisation that they had choices and they had made them. It was not her fault, and she had made peace within herself and could grow into a role of guardian and healer in her small corner.

That was until she saw the posters... two or three appeared around the neighbourhood. Looking for settlers, sheriffs, or missionaries to brave the wilds of the Borderland Forest and make a new life. She read through the information and shrugged. She wasn't a person to pull up her life and head out to the unknown, and she didn't give it another thought.

Then, that night, came a dream, so vivid and real. She woke up in a sweat, tangled in her blankets. Animals twisted and grotesquely leering out of the mist. People with faces one minute and terrifying mask-like visages the next. Crows cawing and circling. Demons and horrors dragging people down into a pit screams and cries competing with growls and cackling laughter. And her brothers, Matau and Paulo, hanging on the edge of a flaming pit, begging for her help, holding up bloodied hands, trying to reach her.

She calmed herself and made some tea. It was just a nightmare. Nothing to concern yourself with. She went about her usual day, but the posters for the trip out to the Borderland Forest seemed to beckon her.

That night, the dream came again. Same as before. Woken with a start, heart pounding and a single thought in her mind. "I have to help them."

She went out with a purpose, searched out the source of the posters and got all the details, and returned home. "This is stupid. I can't pull up my life and go off into the wilds. I'm not an adventurer." She had tea and went to bed. The dream came again. Nature again ravaged, twisted and demonic. People suffering and alone.

But this time at the end, she looked down at herself and noticed her hands were holding her glowing sickle and pebbles gleaming with magic. She could fight back. There were other people in her dream, forms, without faces or figures. They supported her. She was not alone.

Now awake, she resolves to close up her life here in Thentia and head to the Borderland Forest.

She would confront that evil and possibly also her death.

Out in the wilds is as good a place as any...