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?))
"And why is it you need my story?"
Dunhael eyes the hag suspiciously. He knows that perhaps he should be a little less skeptical, she was offering to help him after all. It's the least he can do to tell her some details. It's been hammered into him since he could remember to say nothing but what was needed, and never the truth. He isn't there anymore, so who cares about their rules? The hag watches him expectantly, and at least he's used to being scrutinized like this.
"Sorry, miss, I'm just... On edge."
The hag nods and leans forward, fingers curling around some sort of talisman Dunhael has never seen the likes of. He decides he will ask about it later.
"I grew up in a home with lots of other children my age, I guess. But we weren't really... We were never meant to get along."
The times he had seen kids his same age snap each others bones and be rewarded for it, it all cements to him now that this is the right decision. Dunhael clears his throat as if doing so can also clear his mind.
"Our parents were more like teachers, I guess. They taught us things like etiquette and manners,"
When they were old enough, they said. He'd seen the older kids taken into rooms with tea sets and a stern old woman nobody ever liked to talk to outside of those walls. He'd seen those older kids come out of that room with bruises and welts and a symbol burned into their shoulder. He didn't understand why a class making you nice would do that, but then he became one of those older kids.
"And even earlier than that, they taught us to fight,"
He was never the best at it, despite his teacher's high hopes. He was quick on his feet, sure, and there wasn't a kid there who could beat his reflexes, but he was a coward and useless without a weapon. What good are reflexes if you can hardly use them?
"But the first thing they ever taught us was how to be quiet."
This, at least, was something Dunhael was good at. His mandatory year's vow of silence became two, three years easily. He learned quickly how to move in a way that avoided detection, and he was fast with it, too. Sneaking through the underbrush became his best skill, and his bow became an extension of him in its familiarity. In fact, it was hunting in the woods a year and a half prior that brought him here.
"I thought these were the only things to learn, but I know now that's wrong. There's more out there than I ever could have imagined, and nobody ever told me."
He'd had to figure it out for himself. Teenagers from the neighboring village, they were the ones to show him what he now regarded as the truth. He hadn't gotten along with them at first. Confused by them, and threatened by their attempts to hunt on what should have been his land. Apparently they didn't know anybody lived there.
They told him about their lives, and he kept his own details brief and deliberately vague. They told him of things he had never heard before as if they were common knowledge. Like, apparently there was a God who created everything. He couldn't say he'd ever wondered about things like that, but it was cool to know, right? And they talked about all these places in the world, and all these people and things to do, and he began to wonder why he was never told of these things before.
"My defection had started when I had met these people from the outside world. It's hard to trust your teachers blindly when you're no longer blind."
The hag's chapped lips curl into a grin that makes him feel uneasy, but she waves a hand and he continues.
"I started to see all the cracks. Realized that we were all being lied to, or at least having some things hidden from us. I learned that if I stayed there, became the person they wanted us to be, I would never be able to see the world. Not the way they did, at least. Every person I met would have been... A job. And that's..."
Dunhael takes a deep breath in through his nose, and pushes it out through his teeth. He rubs his shoulder idly and feels the scars that live there.
"So I'm leaving, now. And I'd be thankful if you could point me towards the nearest hiring military force."
