Su'ami's hands ached when she lifted the hammer. The thing that dared to call itself a "man" that had put a collar around her throat had ordered that the ends of her fingers, as well as her tail and her ears, be chopped off. Ramakith Ard might have also ordered her tongue cut out if he didn't want the secrets of her world from her. He certainly hadn't liked the insults she inserted into their every interaction.

She couldn't allow herself to dwell in that sorrow, though. She had been freed from magically enforced bondage, if not from the horrors in her mind, or the world she had been stolen to. She chose to come to this new, strange place. Her liberator hadn't had to free Su'ami, despite Kestra's protests that she was just fulfilling the terms of her quest. Kestra had freed her, and not just her, going so far as to provide all of the people she freed with some basic skills, food for a month, and coin enough to get started in a crafting profession.

For the transmigrators like Su'ami, there had been another offer, or more of an order for those who didn't know what they wanted to do: go to the new Azure Village, learn about this new world while away from the people who enslaved them for their otherworldly knowledge, and build ties with other people.

That would have been amazing -- if Su'ami had been human. She wasn't; she was xyline, of the vulpine path, though only middling far along it. Her Peaceful form only had her claws, ears, and tail, and she hadn't figured out how to step into a Warring form, let alone her Spirit form. Still, those had been enough to mark her as "lesser" to humans all her life, and the humans of this realm just seemed to perpetuate that.

Except for Kestra. She even offered to see Su'ami's mutilated body healed to her Peaceful form. It was hard to believe Su'ami was safe. Oh, and the pain of losing those parts of herself! Su'ami didn't think she could survive going through that again.

So she endured through the ache in her hands as she tried to relearn how to swing a forging hammer without the last joints of her fingers.

"That's no good," a gruff voice muttered behind her.

The smithy she worked in was shared with a man Kestra introduced as a Divine Creature, one wearing the name Ralouf. But for his eyes, with their black sclera and yellow iris with vertically slitted pupil, he looked like a man to Su'ami. A powerful man, perhaps of one of the dwarven races, but no Creature. It made relaxing around him more difficult than she liked.

She raised her new hammer up once more and started to bring it down on the cold, iron blank sitting upon her anvil. She wouldn't heat the iron until she felt she had relearned the most basic of the smith's skills. The descent of her hammer halted, jarring her.

Ralouf had hold of her hammer and pulled it out of her hands with humiliating ease. He set it aside and stepped back, out of her arm's reach. "You need to at least heal your hands if you have any want to be a proper smith."

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She flinched, knowing he spoke the truth. But the mention of healing her digits brought back the memory of that cruel voice declaring, "Just cut off the claws. For an Awakened, she's almost pretty without those disgusting bits." Then the pain spreading over her body from the collar biting into her spine, the rough hands holding her down, holding her hand pressed flat to the block, the vicious--.

"Hey!" Water from one of the quenching buckets flicked over her face, jolting her out of the memory.

She shook herself and glared at dark dwarf.

"Are you prey?" he growled at her.

Su'ami bared her teeth and growled back.

"Then prove it!" he snapped. He set a bottle and a knife down on her anvil.

Her vision began to tunnel on seeing the knife.

More water flicked into her face. "Prove that you are not prey and reclaim your claws. Or do you enjoy having your dreams eaten by your own cowardice?"

"Oh, this is an interesting scene to walk in upon," a new voice said. Su'ami didn't want to take her gaze off the dwarf, but she had to see what was behind her now. She stepped, careful to keep her back toward the wall this time, and not the one holding the forge's furnace.

Another man, but this one with proud, crystalline ram's horns and scales as fine as skin, had entered the smithy. The serpentine feel of a strong draconic bloodline path weighed down on Su'ami, and as absurd as it was, in this stranger's presence Su'ami finally felt safe. Draconic xylines were rare, nearly never more than one born in a generation, but they dominated the clans.

"Who are you?" the dragon in Peaceful form asked.

"Su'ami, Great One," she answered, already kneeling with bent head before him. The response was pure instinct.

"Yorgin, what are you doing?" Ralouf growled.

"Vost's off communing with the sky's Light Orb so I came to pester you. I didn't expect to find another here."

"Well, you did, and Kestra and Graemire brought her. A partly Awakened Bloodline Ascended transmigrator, one of the slaves freed from Sortalheim. Mangled, but won't take healing, stupid prey."

Su'ami growled, glaring at the other smith from the corner of her eye.

"She doesn't sound like prey," the draconic man stated, a touch of approval in his voice. Then he addressed her. "Why won't you take healing? Do you hate what you are? Do you wish you were only one of the Ascended? Would you carve out your Awakened Bloodline if you could?"

"No!" she yipped, horrified and enraged anyone would think that. No, if she could rip out any part of her heritage it would be the part that made her look so human.

"Then why?"

The confession tumbled out of her lips. "I won't lose them again! I can't!"

"Then you'd better learn how to tear off the faces of all who would dare try, hadn't you?" the draconic man -- Yorgin -- declared more than asked.

A moment for that to sink in, for the predatory feel of those around her to reassure her: these were her people, whether xyline or Spirit Beast. The fear calmed, even if it tried to return her to gibbering prey, and the predator that would survive, that would thrive in the face of the huntsman woke to the call of her people.

She tested the bottle with the stub-end of her pinky, feeling it go numb at the contact. She flicked a questioning gaze at Ralouf.

He sneered, "We're Creatures, not sadists. Numb the stubs. They have to be removed for my Healing spells to regrow them to their proper forms."

Su'ami felt a brief moment of gratitude for that mercy, and set about applying the numbing salve to her digits and her ears. "I can't reach my tail properly to cut the scars off," she admitted.

"You can't hold a hammer. You're not wielding a knife until your hands are healed."

There in the smithy, Su'ami was made whole again. There, she stopped being alone.