The bandit cried out in agony as he rolled in the blue fire surrounding him, trying desperately to put it out. She stood over him, a frown on her face before she forced another orb of blue-tinted fire in his direction, silencing his protests. She looked over her shoulder at Jaysehn, watching him cut the throat of another that had ambushed them. He gave her a grim look and nodded before she offered him a smile. They made a good team, together they were getting stronger, faster…better at taking out the outlaws on the road.

This had been her life for the last couple of months, learning and training herself to be a woman hardened by the fire she wielded. If it wasn’t on the road, it was at Sea, taking out pirates. It didn’t seem to matter to her, they were a problem to be dealt with and in her eyes, Vengeance would be happy with her targets. While Jaysehn liked to focus on undead and releasing them, her only aim was to rid the world of as many wayward men and women as the guilds would allow her.

It was a curious thing, she thought to herself one evening as she sipped at her ginger tea, perched on a barstool at Greth’s…just how much she had changed. She never wanted to be what her grandmother had demanded of her and yet… and yet she was doing the very thing her grandmother had wanted her to do… Protect. She had always been quiet and out of the way… now she had a voice and wielded it when it came to mind doing so. The thing that scared her the most though was the anger.

The anger she had hidden and kept buried for decades finally boiled just beneath the surface. It scared her the most, more than anything she had faced. The anger of being used like an instrument more than a granddaughter by her grandmother. The anger at her late husband for keeping them in a village that had despised her; the damage to her wing the night they decided to try and kill them both. The house in flames after they had killed Daerd. Being unwillingly sacrificed to Eorgina, Elspie’s actions, The Flock, Selbi’s death. It had all become a swirling mass of anger she tried to and failed keep buried.

She had tried so hard to let go of the anger she told herself, but no—that wasn’t entirely true was it? She realized. That anger had fueled her, kept her moving, kept her out on the roads and at sea taking out the bad people of the world. The ones who didn’t deserve pity, they had taken on the faces of her ire, her anger, her malice.
That anger she was so afraid of was the fire that kept her going and that, that terrified her most of all.