“Most people only look at the nobility to envy them of their fortune and status, yet at the same time fail to realize how those born into nobility often had the least say on how they would live their own lives.” - Marquis Gregor Albrecht Podovniy, from the Clangeddin Empire, circa 419 VA.
Under most circumstances, the lives of Salicia Adenauer and Grünhildr Sigvaldi would have been mostly pre-determined from the day they were born, within weeks of one another, four decades ago in Aldenstadt, the capital city of Aldenburg Viscounty of the Clangeddin Empire.
Born as the seventh child of then-Viscount Bernd Adenauer and his third wife – the Viscount had some elven blood running through his veins, and remained a very hale and hearty man even in his fifties, looking no older than a twenty-something year old man – in a cold autumn night, normally Salicia Adenauer would have had the life typical of a young noblewoman in the Empire waiting for her.
However, she was born with a physical deformity, and that changed everything.
Despite the prevalence and capability of healing magic to heal most any injury short of death, deformities and disabilities people were born with was the one thing that it was helpless against. As such, in many nations, those with such “defects” were often discriminated against, and the Clangeddin Empire was no different.
Had Salicia been born with a more easily hidden deformity, it might not have changed her life too much, but the blank eye socket where her right eye was supposed to be was impossible to hide without attracting any attention. In some ways, it was both a misfortune yet also a fortune, as it allowed her to live life more freely than if she had been born whole.
Her childhood was a relatively pleasant one, with a stern but kind father and a mother who loved her regardless – Salicia’s mother was the Viscount’s third wife and she was her first child, the viscount having outlived his first two wives, one of whom died in an accident and another in childbirth – as well as a playmate the same age, which happened to be Grünhildr, daughter to the mansion’s guard captain who was born two and a half weeks after Salicia herself.
While normally a noble daughter would be on the receiving end of all sorts of classes like etiquette and dancing, Salicia was excused such things and instead allowed to freely live her life. Her missing eye practically ensured that she had no future amongst the nobility circles of the Empire, the vast majority of whom would have seen it as a defect, even if her family had not cared about it.
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It was while she was a young child, barely six or so, that she saw some of the mansion’s guards train archery under their captain’s – Grünhildr’s mother – tutelage and grew interested in the subject. With her parents giving their permission, the little girl soon took up a bow for the first time, and before long, grew enthralled with archery.
At the time her parents had thought that it was a good thing for her to learn, as long as she enjoyed it. If the activity could help her later in life, then all the better, but they had not put much thought into the matter at the time.
It was that attraction to archery that later set Salicia on the path she ended up walking down for the rest of her life.
During the years when Salicia was a young child, the situation in the Empire was more or less stable. It was something that only started to change around the time she was ten, when Maglos – who was later known as Maglos the Tyrant, the Last Emperor of the Clangeddin Empire – rose to claim the throne for himself.
Maglos’ rise to power caused a lot of unease and discontent amongst the populace of the Empire of the time, both the nobility and the peasantry. The formerly disfavored prince was known to be prone to fits of anger and was particularly cruel to those who opposed him, having slain all his siblings and cousins in his bid for the throne, as well as his parents.
The political situation in the Empire started to deteriorate rapidly during the reign of Maglos, and when Salicia was fifteen, her father decided to enact a contingency plan to ensure that their family would survive through whatever upheaval might take place.
Viscount Bernd Adenauer sent all his offspring – other than his eldest daughter and heir, who was determined to stay and weather whatever happened along with her father, as well as the youngest four of his children, who were too young to leave on their own – into various regions of Alcidea, the siblings separating to ensure that the family would survive the storm in some manner.
Salicia, with Grünhildr as her bodyguard, left towards the south-west, in the direction of Knallzog, where Grünhildr’s family had some friends and relatives that could shelter them at least for the short term. It was during those final moments of separation that her father bestowed upon Salicia the family heirloom, a massive longbow that had once been their ancestor’s own.
Since the family mostly kept away from martial matters in the generations since, the heirloom bow had mostly gathered dust in storage, as there was nobody suitable to wield it. Bernd Adenauer thought that perhaps it was fate that Salicia happened to be interested in archery – and indeed, at fifteen she was already wielding longbows with draw weights well into the seventy kilogram range – and decided to pass down the heirloom to someone who could actually use it.
At the time, neither of them knew that the heirloom bow was not only made out of near-priceless Yew Heartwood, but was also enchanted by master elvish enchanters from the northern plains, where their ancestor hailed from. Those were things that Salicia only discovered later on, after she started using the bow herself.
The timing of Bernd’s contingency plan proved to be fortunate, for not two years after Salicia had left her homeland, Maglos the Tyrant was slain in public by the Bounty Hunter, sending the Clangeddin Empire into an unprecedented civil war.