Anael crept slowly through the underbrush, making her way toward the stag in front of her. She was only about thirty handspans away at this point, and well within bow range. For better or worse, though, Anael was far better at moving nearly silently that she was with her bow. There was also, of course, the ever present issue of strength. Anael was reasonably tall, and certainly stronger than the women in town who sewed all day, but she had never quite managed to match up to her brothers in terms of strength. She couldn’t even blame it on her gender or her parents, since her father was a blacksmith and was, as he liked to say, “stronger than an ox, but not as strong as me wife”. Meanwhile Anael’s mother, Relina, had been a soldier in her youth and, before she died two winters previously, had been strong enough to lift her husband over her shoulder like a sack of flour. Anael wasn’t entirely sure if her mother was in fact stronger than her father, but she was certainly more than strong enough to work long hours in the smithy, and could fire a longbow from a large enough distance that she didn’t need to get anywhere near 30 handspans from her target. Anael, on the other hand, couldn’t even string the longbow that her older brother used to hunt with, and had been forced to use a smaller recurve bow while he had taught her to hunt. The bright side of this deficiency was that Anael could sneak much closer to her prey than anyone else in town, which was how she was now nearly twenty handspans from the stag, with an arrow pulled back on the string of her bow.
Anael slowly exhaled and paused for a moment, aligning her arrow for what she hoped would be a perfect shot to the heart, before releasing the string. The slight sound that was made caused the stag to notice, but before it could fully turn its head to look the arrow entered its chest. The stag took two steps as if to bolt, before collapsing. “That was a perfect shot, or mealwort cures the shivers” Anael muttered under her breath with a slight grin as she walked towards the now dead animal. Mealwort, of course, is used to bring down fevers and will in fact, if overused, cause shivers. Likewise, Anael’s shot was, as near as she could tell, perfect. “Let’s get you dressed and back home.” Anael had always had a habit of talking to her kills. She wasn’t sure why, but perhaps it was that the fact that the animal was dead didn’t quite set in immediately. As she dressed the stag, Anael removed its teeth and stored the liver in a prepared sack, since both could be used in certain potions and salves. The teeth, when ground to a powder, were useful as a binding agent and to thicken certain potions where other ingredients like flour would clump or even react and ruin the product. The liver, on the other hand, was useful for a burn salve that she had just started learning to make. She made sure to keep the hide intact and unblemished as much as possible so it would sell for more to the local tanner. Once she was done, Anael wrapped the carcass in a piece of cloth and slung it over her shoulders to carry it all the way home.
Even after dressing it, the carcass was still heavy enough that she had to stop a few times on the way home, each time dreaming about the possibility of using magic to strengthen her body, or even to float her burden through the air behind her. Sadly the only sigils Anal had learned so far were ones using basic runes. She knew how to use the elemental rune for fire to light a campfire or, given a magic crystal to power it, cook food. She could fill up a waterskin with a sigil that combined a water rune with a decomposition and materialization array to convert raw water mana to water essence and then into actual water. The last, and most complex, sigil she had learned was a basic healing sigil. It was vastly more intricate than the other two, involving the composition of several smaller component sigils and the runes for light, dark, fire, water, earth, air, life, soul, and time. That was all six of the primary elements, one secondary, and two tertiary runes. Nonetheless, Anael had studied the sigil, as well as the required runes and component sigils, for hours until she could draw it with either hand entirely from memory (Anael liked being prepared, and if one hand was injured, she wanted to be able to heal it by drawing out the sigil with the other).
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When Anael was taught these sigils by the traveling mage who sometimes visited the town, she had become very excited when told that a sigil to make an object levitate was actually simpler than the healing sigil she had learned. The reason she couldn’t use it to transport her prey was twofold. Firstly, since she wasn’t a mage and didn’t have any significant mana of her own, making an object heavier than a feather levitate for more than an instant would require a very powerful (and very expensive) mana crystal, which Anael most certainly did not have (and could not afford). Secondly, that was only the sigil for levitation. Yes, it would make whatever she wanted hover at whatever height above the ground she wished, but it would also make it completely immobile and unable to be transported. The sigil to make a levitating object respond to outside forces but not gravity (i.e. float but be draggable), was far more complex than the basic healing sigil she had spent so many hours memorizing and practicing drawing. The sigil to make the floating object actually follow her on it’s own was even worse, a true monster of runes and smaller sigils so large that even in the miniscule print that was used, the component sigils alone took up over a dozen pages in the book.
And so, in between her daydreams of one day becoming a master sigiler, Anael made her way home. Or almost home. She had just reached the top of a hill from which she could normally see the tops of some of the taller buildings in town, their chimneys letting out streams of smoke from fireplaces and ovens, and a slightly larger stream of smoke from her father’s forge as well as a few other buildings. Today, however, as she reached the top of the hill and looked up, there was far too much smoke. Anael blinked, rubbed her eyes, and stood there with her mouth open, processing what she was seeing. “The town is on fire” she mumbled to herself. A moment passed before suddenly it hit her. “HER BLOODY FUCKING TEARS, THE TOWN IS ON FIRE!” Anael cursed, and began running towards the town, the carcass on her shoulders and the sack of liver in her hand falling to the ground behind her.
As Anael sprinted downhill toward her home, the first sounds she noticed were those of hooves on dirt and cobblestone, followed by the sounds of flames crackling, air rushing, and the sound of timbers breaking as buildings collapsed. It wasn’t long before she stood in front of what remained of her home. The smithy was mostly intact, being open on two sides and made almost entirely of stone. The actual house, however, was a flaming pile of rubble sitting next to a single wall, barely holding itself upright, and likely to soon join its three brethren and the roof. The world seemed to grow silent and turn gray around her as she stared into the flames, seeing a charred and ash covered hand sticking out from under one of the smoldering beams. She was about to rush forward, disregarding the flames, to try and see if any of her family were alive, or at least recover her father’s and brother’s corpses if they were there, when sound returned to her as she heard a shout. “Cap’n said no survivors, we got to make an example o’ this place. You run ‘er through and I’ll go report. I think that’s the last of ‘em over here, and I’d like to get home afore sundown.” Anael turned to look for the source of the shout and saw two mounted soldiers, one in full chain armor riding toward the center of town, and the other in a mix of chain and banded leather riding straight at her. Under normal circumstances, she probably could have dodged the blow, but due to being somewhat in shock and not entirely cogent at the time, Anael just stared at the horse as it came closer and closer. Anael watched the sword, not entirely believing that its tip was sinking into her chest, just to the side of her heart. It didn’t hurt, not really, and she couldn’t even hear it make a sound. And then everything went black.