Gallimaufry

Story Idea # 4

Nara's story starts with heartbreak.

Well, as far as any story can start, as everything really is just an endless cycle of existence and it would be incredibly hard to narrow down where the story should begin. Perhaps it should begin before the heartbreak, but it really isn't that remarkable of a story.

Born into a family of ten, eight kids and two parents, living on the edge of a village as farmers that sent most of their food to the local baron for distribution throughout the country. Nara was a middle child, and in a land that was filled with Knights, monsters, mages and all sorts of fantastical things, she was just normal.

No magic. No fighting, unless you counted her struggling to get the rocks out of the fields so she could plant beets and cabbages or the fact that her older siblings had gone off to one of the kingdom's many wars and never returned. No hidden ancestry that led to some long lost and very wealthy bloodline.

The rich were merely rich because they were the ones with the most amount of fighters and could take land, which then became populated by the non-rich, who would work it and pay taxes in return for some sense of security that depended on the whims of violent, inbred bloodlines.

Nara was, however, smarter than the average village farm girl, having read through the school's book collection by the time she was ten. Not that big of a deal, seeing as how the collection was around thirty. But she worked extra hours at the dairy and the bakery when they needed help, and when they could afford to pay her with real money and not the day's unused bread or milk, she would squirrel the money away.

And some years, when the giant travelling fair and tournament that followed the parade of nobles and Princes on their summer journey to visit their friends and demand more taxes arrived, she had enough to buy one of the used books being sold by the travelling mages, magicians or collectors of random things that people weren't sure if they actually needed.

Nara would buy the book that seemed to teach her most about the world, and that she could afford, and would read it several times before giving it to the school, which became a sort of library. And because she was probably the smartest person in the duchy, she began to teach those who had not been able to make it to school as children or those who just wanted to know more.

Marriage prospects were pretty slim, though there had not been a war to kill off anyone after she had come of age to fight or marry. Still, it was expected, there were always wars. They had been part of a couple kingdoms, had several reagents from different families or bloodlines, since she was born, though it had never really changed her way of life.

The new ruler parts. The severe reduction in similarly aged, or even older, men meant that she was already a spinster, though most people got married by the time they were fifteen. Sixteen at the very latest. Nara being in her twenties and perfectly happy to live her life at home with her mother and younger siblings, was an old maid.

Nara's only option for anything different was to leave her mother and family behind. Or marry the pig farmer down the way who was older than her mother but had offered to marry Nara. Thankfully, Nara was useful around the farm and this country, despite its other failings, wasn't really super misogynistic. Women could work and live on their own and men were just as likely to be called spinsters as women were. Three of Nara's deceased, or missing, siblings were sisters, all of whom had been decent foot soldiers, and may have been better if they had been given any training before being handed spears and shields and told to stand in a line. Much the same as her father and brothers.

Nara's mother had a limp, an old war wound, that kept her from being an effective piece of fodder, which was why she had not also shared the same fate as the older members of Nara's family.

That being enough back story...

No. Ok. So, in the interest of transparency, that brings us to the last village fair Nara attended. She had brought her younger, by one year, brother with her and before they ventured to the sales booths, they had wandered to the tournament grounds to watch rich men charge at one another with long pointy sticks until someone gave up or died.

Nara's brother had dreams of being a hero one day, somehow beating the odds and being selected by one of the aforementioned rich, inbred, psychopaths that ruled them, taught to fight and kitted out and saving the life of some rich Princess, to wed into royalty and fame and fortune. When the night raiders rode out of the forests and began to massacre the humans, they struck the village first. Don't let their name fool you, they wore all black, but they attacked whenever the hell they wanted to, like high noon on a brilliantly sunny day.

As people came screaming, coated in blood and trailing the dark creatures that moved like death and seemed to kill for the wanton love of it, the armoured, trained and capable warriors fled. Yes. All the rich people who were trying to prove how brave and strong they were, ran as fast as they could away from the danger that people paid them to fight.

Nara climbed under a half-destroyed wagon, already dripping with the blood of its previous owners and tried to drag her brother, Clark, under with her.

They were cut down from behind, as the night raiders rode small horse sized dragons and enjoyed picking off people as they fled. Nara's brother, refusing to hide with her, picked up the sword of a knight who had been picked off relatively early in the whole disruption and attempted to stand his ground. Considering he had never held a sword before and had no idea how to wield it, Nara was pretty certain that the fact that the dark armoured and robed fighter took several minutes to kill Clark, was out of the creature's perversion and not some miraculous skill.

She listened for hours, as the night raiders talked through the ruined remnants of the fair and tournament, killing and looting and talking in their darkly beautiful language. When it was full dark, they disappeared, but Nara waited until the sun rose again, shivering throughout the night in clothing soaked with blood.

Nara walked back to her home in stunned shock, not noticing the scatterings of bodies and wealth that littered the road around her. The raiders had looted, but haphazardly, leaving enough riches for an enterprising young woman to be comfortably wealthy, had she not been in a primal state of fear and grief.

She had held out a small hope that the farmhouse, situated in a copse of trees off the main road would have gone by unscathed, or perhaps that her family had managed to hide in the root cellar. Those hopes were dashed when she realized the copse of trees, and the farm that was usually hidden from view, was razed to the ground. There were barely any solid remnants of the farmhouse that had stood for a couple generations of Nara's dirt-poor family.

Nara sat down on a boulder that was still warm from the fire that had burned itself out long before and started crying.

The gods, if one believed in those things, responded by letting it rain. Though the cold drizzle was hours too late to do anything more than soak Nara, without washing any of the filth off of her.

Heartbreak complete, Nara's story begins.