Donnitta

Your character has just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As they look around, their gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. They duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? She begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”

((How do you respond?))

Aela’s slender fingers trace the rim of the cushion before she sits, her posture stiff at first, as though the weight of her story resists being spoken aloud. Her brown eyes flicker toward the candles, their light catching in her caramel hair like faint moonlight. When she finally speaks, her voice is soft, laced with a quiet strength—one tempered by loss and wandering.

“I did not come here by choice. Not truly. Places like this…” She gestures vaguely at the tattered tent, at the distant drip of water outside, at the damp air clinging to her cloak. “…they seem to find me before I find them. Perhaps it is because I carry the scent of the lost.”

A faint, humorless smile tugs at her lips, but it fades quickly.

“My story?” She pauses, collecting herself. Her hands knot together in her lap. “I was born among a people who prize tradition above all. Each step of my life was marked before I could walk it—every word I spoke measured by the rules of my kin. But my heart… it wanted something different. I wanted to choose my own path, not one carved by those long before me.”

Her gaze grows distant, softening with a bittersweet ache. “When I was younger, I met someone. A man, a mortal. His world was free in ways mine never could be. With him, I felt… alive. As though I had finally found the air my lungs were meant to breathe. But our love was a crime in the eyes of my people. When they discovered it, I lost everything—my home, my family, even the dream of a life we once whispered to each other beneath the stars.”

She draws a slow breath, steadying the tremor in her voice. “I left it all behind. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to. Now, I walk from place to place, searching for something I cannot yet name. Peace, perhaps. Or a reason to keep moving forward when the past clings so tightly to my heels.”

Her coffee brown eyes lift to meet the hag’s, a glint of defiance sparking beneath their melancholy. “I seek no power, no title, no grand destiny. I want only to be free. To choose for myself. Even if the world—or fate itself—seems determined to remind me of what I’ve lost.”

Aela leans back slightly, as though bracing herself. “So tell me, old one. Why is it that you have been expecting me? What is it you see in a woman who has nothing left but the road beneath her feet?”