Jessamine is a runty desert kitsune with seven older brothers and a blacksmith as a father who is determined to sell her away in an arranged marriage because their family is too poor to feed a girl. Her father thinks she is a mindless nothing who sp...
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They called her Scrapper. Tiny, shivering, feisty Scrapper. Her real name was Jessamine, after some yellow flower, but she was a fighter since birth. Hardly standing at four feet including her huge ears, she was small, even for a desert kitsune. And truly, her nickname was fitting, for she was the youngest of seven brothers, the daughter of a blacksmith, and could easily take on any man many times her size. With her light build she could easily use an opponent's size and slowness to her advantage, and her huge satellite ears could detect a movement before it was made. In fact, her fighting skills were the only thing that stood between her family and starvation. Almost every night she snuck out disguised as a boy and she won every fight she entered, sneaking home beaten and exhausted with a large pile of gold. And yet she had to keep that secret, or else her father would disown her and her brothers in the disgrace of his sons being bested by a girl, especially a tiny runt like her. The family was too poor to really support her and the seven boys, and after the death of their mother, Scrapper held the weight of the family on her shoulders in secret.
She had to fight, the rush of battle echoed in her veins, and the day she stopped would be the end of her family. Her oldest brother Marten counted on her to win the fights in the ring to bring in cash that he could hand to his father because of a major injury he had received that had rendered him unfit to fight. Her brothers teased her, mocked her, rubbed her face in the dirt, and even spit on her at times, but that was nothing compared to the wrath of their father if one of his children didn't bring in a good sack of gold. Each of them worked so hard to pay their dues making swords and working endlessly for hire, yet the gold that came in seemed to only pay for their father's drinking habit which continued the endless cycle of misery. In her father's eyes, Jessamine was a useless nothing, just another ungrateful mouth to feed. He couldn't have been farther from the truth, because she was the one to work the hardest and the longest, and the one who faced the worst of her father. She took the place of all of her brothers for the terrible beatings and verbal outbursts of her father. And soon her father was going to sell her away to some wealthy Monitor, probably the big lizard man she had given a concussion not too long ago in addition to a couple fractures.
Jessamine spat in disgust at the thought of it. It wasn't right. Her father didn't have the right to sell her, his daughter, not a day over fourteen, off as some lizard brute's wife equivalent of a slave just so he could get fat and rich while her brothers starved one by one because she was the glue holding her family together. Morteo let out a creaky groan, stretching out his bald head to comfort her. She sighed and said, "Great, I'm so pitiful even a vulture takes pity."
The bird nuzzled her in response, and she playfully shoved his head away.
"Don't you have some other carrion to pick on?" Jessamine said.
Morteo squawked a response, looking at her with a glassy pale blue eye.
"Yeah right, as if you understood. You're a flying garbage disposal. You can't have feelings." She muttered, spitting again.
