Varla could feel the last breath leaving her body. As a warrior, she had always known that she would die young. She had long lost her fear of the men following her. She was a warrior of the Grand Metosan Kingdom and a commander of many legions. She was. Therein lies the problem.
The Metosan Kingdom followed the pantheon of Vardos, god of light and chivalry. Varla was a follower of his brother, Chern, god of war. That all sounds great but the truth is that Varla was born the wrong gender to be a warrior. She had been going by Varn since she was a little girl.
Her father had asked for a son and when her mother had three daughters and was left baren, he didn’t take it very well. He would often beat them all while drinking. When Varla was maybe five or six, she had gone to a neighbor’s house and stolen a pair of pants from the laundry while her father was busy beating their mother. When she returned, she was wearing the pants and told him to stop beating their mother because she was a boy now.
He laughed and smacked her several times. When he woke the next morning, he treated her like a boy and started calling her Varn instead of Varla. To her absolute joy, he stopped beating the others and only focused on her. Sure, it hurt but not as much as watching her sisters and mother bleeding and crying. He would rant for hours about what a wimpy boy he had but he would also tell her how he expected a boy to act.
Varla, now Varn, never forgot his lessons and always did her best to live up to them. When she was a teen, the twin plagues crossed through their kingdom and her parents died. Her oldest sister sold herself off to get the money to support her little sisters but it ran out quickly. Then the war erupted.
Varn had been working to support her sister and keep their house but it was slipping. Too often she would come home without enough money to buy everything they needed and pay taxes. Her sister would try to eat less to make the money last but it only made her weaker and less got done at home.
Varn pleaded with her older sister to eat her share and vowed to find a job that would pay more. When the war came, she saw her opportunity. The military offered much better pay for soldiers than any of the local jobs she could get. She didn’t hesitate.
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The recruiter she talked to asked if she was really a boy and she lied her best. It didn’t work. She insisted to the last that she was a boy but he only told her to prove it and strip. She knew she was caught and wanted to run away but he threw out a proposition. He would keep quiet about her gender and send her into training but he wanted something from her, that was a horrible night.
Now in the military, she was able to send money to her sister. The training was hard and the beatings hurt bad, but not as bad as her father had given her. She was picked out as a potential leader because she kept giving other recruits tips during training.
A little over a year ago, Varn got word that her oldest sister had died to a disease often found in brothels. Other than that, everything was working out fine until a few weeks ago. A message came informing her that her house had been seized due to lack of payment of taxes. She wrote desperately to her sister back home hoping to find her in a church or something, it worked but not as she was expecting.
The church wrote back saying that they had her sister in the crypts. They condemned her for leaving her sister to starve to death. Her world went red with rage and grief.
She left the encampment and told her second in command she would return in a few days. She followed the mail route all the way back to the kingdom. There she found the man who had recruited her. He had been snatching her letters and taking the money. When her sister tried to protest, he threatened to expose Varn as a woman. A woman in the military could only expect two outcomes, executed if she was lucky or violated and then executed if she wasn’t. Fearing for her little sister’s safety and unable to get any work she let herself starve to death.
The bastard actually had the gall to threaten her exposure as a woman! Her whole reason for the ruse was to keep her sister safe! Now, thanks to this greedy perverted piece of filth, her sister was dead. He began yelling about a woman attacking him in hopes of getting her to run away but instead it just made her smile, the last smile he ever saw.
Regardless of the circumstances, the military condemned her to death. She found she really didn’t care anymore. She was ready for death but after she drew her final breath, she was betrayed again. “Hah, Varn, you must be joking! You’re a woman! I have no use for women distracting the might of Chern’s Chosen! I banish you to the shadows of Naught!”