SMALLEST LIGHT | SHADOW & BONE

i, three

Her feet continued to seek an unknown path. Flowers and grass scratching the little skin bared for nature to touch but others splattered and squashed into the soil beneath the force of her steps.

An aimless path to the mountains regardless of what she was to find there. Surely it was the wrong destination to where she had truly wanted to go back to but it was better then nowhere.

Even if a dangerous route taken when the enemy could be around the corner, and put her through worse than slicing the skin protecting the face or drowning. Or fighting in an generation to generation passed war or your mother be slaughtered.

It caused Emiliya's mind to wander to her past.

There was a time when she was a child that the question hadn't been how the Vass bloodline would end, but when. The hour the Ravkan and Shu Borders would shift deep enough into the small piece of land she was born on that it would no longer be safe.

It was a warning she had learned only weeks from her fifth birthday when word spread across the coastline that the nearest settlement in the mountains to the South had been raided, how little had made it out alive to tell the tale of it.

It too had been the year she had last seen her father. That year specifically he had spend most months away to fight in the First Army as the Shu Han advanced on them more frequently and harsher than they had prior. Days before news would reach them he was another soul lost trying to secure the borderlands.

They had not even known, the forces their neighbouring country unleashed upon them, would only grow to become worse in the many years to come. The many lives that would be lost and citizens left widowed and orphaned, though it was better they had not known what they were to face then.

It was a heads up to be alert of her surroundings as the words last spoken, ones you already know of, ones children at the age she was should not be thinking of nor remembering for the sake of survival.

She had not known true fear then, not until her eight year when Shu came knocking on their doors, rather bursting through them without remorse.

People like the Vass' were merely collateral damage in an everlasting war, an eye for an eye and in the way of their goal, as in most wars.

Aina had heard them coming before they had the chance to arrive. However the problem was that no matter how hard you can try to grab your things, the hand of your child, to flee with the impossibility of no way out but the foot of the cliff in an bottomless pit of water. It's useless to run.

Why they hadn't left sooner? The safety of their home and well-being of her child in a war that she had known for her entire life, as her daughter had, was something that no longer scared a soul until it was too late. Any of those residing near the borders were the same in that particular choice. Naïve maybe, but fearless too.

༄

The world was thunderous that night, not because of the weather or the eight year old in the lodge but Shu Han's Martials imminent arrival over the horizon. There had been an unspeakable silence amongst the two Vass women upon learning the news of a village only two days Southern from where they had been located between the next community in reach another four days away, she knew about it all at that age, knew more than she possibly should've known.

She had nothing to pack even if she wanted to, nothing to remember her mother by but her looks, nothing to take of her father but the blade that had rarely left her side. Blue eyes fretfully observing her mother search the room's little cabinets and drawers for any food to keep them nourished on their journey, a box being stuffed into the satchel that held valuable items of her father and what she had not known her mother too. To each fit in a pack that would not be weighing too much, "Remember Liya, we stay on the coastline and head North until the Fold keeps us from going further. And if you are brave enough then, we find a way back home."