Oath of Steel

13 |An Undying Oath|

Few were the memories that Rosalynde still possessed of the time passed up in the mountains north of Lowen, and even fewer were the ones she remembered bringing her any sort of emotions that could be compared to what people these days would call happiness.

A normal family, a mother always busy taking care of the small house they lived in and a father never present during the day, one always out hunting the wildlife that infested their lands. Boars were what her father used to catch more than the rest of the fauna, especially young boars that weighed more or less the same as her.

He would depart at dawn, before any other hunter would even think of stepping outside, and come back just before the sun would set behind the mountain peak. Rosalynde would rejoice each time he would come back with a new kill to show her, she remembered stepping on her father's foot as he would drag her around the house.

Joyous times filled with nothing but bliss, even when the winter came crashing against their village walls, there was nothing that could make Rosalynde sad when she had her parents close to her heart.

But all pure feelings must come to an end, and that time for her had arrived earlier than expected.

She was just a child then she lost them both, when she lost all three of them to the same blade that only appeared at night, when all chimneys had their fire lost thanks to the wind hitting the rusty cardinals of the shutters of village homes.

The first one that was taken away from her was her father. He'd gone out like always with the advent of dawn, but when he didn't come back before sunset, both wife and child sensed that something had gone wrong.

Just as they had predicted, or just like Rosalynde's mother had, he didn't not come back alive - at least.

He was the first sign of imminent disaster, he was the warning they had sent to mock and ridicule, but none had decided to take action.

What they hadn't anticipated however was that the whole village would have gone silent the night after, in the exact moment the clouds had decided to cover for their crimes.

It all happened within half-an-hour, just before the clock was going to announce the advent of the new day, not even a single house was burned, nobody had even the real time to scream at the perpetrator of those atrocious crimes.

Rosalynde kept on cursing the day where everything had started deviating from the path she'd been set by birth.

She'd cried when her fathers body had been found, holding the hems of her mothers' simple dress to make sure nobody could see her tears, not taking into consideration that the villagers could still hear her sobs filling the air.

She was just a child.

She was just a child when those men entered her family home.

She was just a child when they grabbed her mother by her hair, bending her backwards before stabbing her in the chest, cutting her womb in half.

She was just a child when she saw her mother and brother die.

It seemed like yesterday when her mother had hushed her behind the only mirror of the house, telling her to keep quiet as she went to hide behind the front door, clutching her stomach as if it would fall.

But that didn't stop him from finding her and executing her in front of her daughter, the light slowly draining from her eyes as the man dressed in black quickly started rummaging through her pockets. Searching for everything that could be taken, anything that in his eyes had any kind of value.

She'd promised she would have kept quiet, that'd been her mothers last wish. But when that bastard had started doing something that the eyes of a chaste child should have never witnessed, her hand had acted before her mind and eyes had registered the fact.