Adeste Fideles (Saga EQ2)

[Sagacity]

Name:  Adeste Fideles
Guild: Saga, EQ2
Profession:  Carpenter and monk
Race: half elf
Gender: female
Alignment: neutral
God: none

Hobbies: stealth ninja interior decoration overhauls

History:

Sensei asks me to tell of how I came to Qeynos, and the path that has led me to the dojo, and so I sit in the ornamental garden and contemplate the patterns drawn in the fine sand.

The lines flow in smooth curves, wrapping around the rocks, running smoothly around all obstacles. The same can not be said of my journey to Qeynos, which was filled with obstacles most of which I ran into head first, clumsy as a wild pig.

I lived all my life in the village of Hillshire, established during the cataclysm by the human refugees from Highkeep. The village is high enough in the hills to escape the worst of the flooding, and a stream comes down beside the village, allowing fishing and the watering of cattle.

This makes Hillshire sound like a good place, but it is not. It is small and isolated, and the people are untrusting of strangers and hostile, and those who are unwanted are not in any doubt of it. This includes me and my brothers, who, being the offspring of Tunare-knows-what parentage, scraped and scratched our way to maturity in the shacks and hovels that cling to the outskirts of even the smallest town in these days of trial.

Who my parents were, in truth I cannot say, nor even what name they gave me. As for my brothers, well, perhaps we were related and perhaps not; we were all brothers in the poverty and despair of Hillshire, and no two skin colours or ear shapes alike between us. We would have been abandoned in the hills to die, if we had been young enough to do so; but they had not the spine to kill us in cold blood, and so we lived from day to day by catching fish and stealing food from the villagers who mistrusted and disliked us.

I think, looking back, it was not always so hard for us to steal the food as it might have been. Perhaps it saved them the trouble of finding another reason to hate and distrust us. They were not evil folk, or unnecessarily cruel, but they were very isolated and had a narrow view of what was right, and we interracial by-blows were a reminder of history they would rather deny out of existence. Starving us and then denouncing us for stealing food allowed them to hate us without examining the real reasons for their fear and hatred.

It was in the summer when the floods came late that my life started to change. The floods had always come before in the first week of spring, depositing the rich earth from other lands onto our rocky shores so the village's meagre crops could grow. That year we were three weeks past the spring thaw with no sign of the floods, and the tension in the air was almost audible. Even we outcasts in our slums were affected, for during the flooding we would rise early and search the waters for other valuables that might be worth wearing or trading -- in particular, clothing and jewellery might be washed up, often still attached to their former owner.

The villagers looked to the headman for answers, and the headman blamed us, the accursed outcasts, the crossbreeds. The gods were angry because of our parents' sins, they said. Not that we had had much choice in the matter; nor, most likely, had our mothers, during the great time of trials and upheavals. The headman said the gods abandoned Norrath because of accursed ones like us, and now they were abandoning Hillshire.

They were desperate, and afraid, and we were slow to realize how scared they truly were. When the first of us was dragged out, screaming, and messily killed to appease some god who has long abandoned us, the remainder of us decided not to wait for the floods to arrive. They did not worship the old dark gods, no. But there is no room for compassion in the heart of a man in fear of his life, and we were no more than animals in their eyes.

And so my foot was set on the first step of the road to Qeynos, though I did not know it at the time.