Childhood and the Monster

Growing up, Kosmos was a distant dream her father spoke of like a fairy tale, drawing the little girl in with stories of strange people and odd adventures. She'd look up at her parent with big eyes as he spoke of his role in the attemtped invasion, and the sacrifice that her older sister gave-- a sister Abby only had faint memories of. Growing up, they didn't have much. Orchid was being constantly slighted by his older siblings in a war for power between a family of scavengers, and Abby was caught in the crossfire. Her job would be to quietly follow them around, calling attention to herself when they started snooping or attempting to steal back things Orchid previously took. She was a parrot, listening in on the things they would whisper about her father behind closed doors and relaying them back like a song she heard on the radio. Her father would smile at her performances and give her little pieces of advise to improve her sneaking.

Orchid was too weak to be a threat to the other members of his family, but with his children by his side he could at least prevent himself from losing more ground-- a role that Abby was happy to uphold with her life. Even as her father's fairy tales grew warped and she was told to start carrying knives, she stayed loyal and continued the plans without question. She wanted to win whatever odd game she seemed to have gotten swept up in before she was born. For her father, and her dead sister, and whatever other reason her father gave with incredible gusto.

Her first waver of uncertainty came with her baby brother, the monster his mother-- her father-- brought swaddled in blankets. The muzzle strapped around his mouth was smoking and his pose was tense. When she was told he was sentient, he was as much of a person as herself and her father, she asked why he had to be treated like an animal. Her father explained he needed to be dangerous, the small murderous kitten was going to be a tool to use against first Orchid's brothers, and then the whole of Kosmos. The plan was inhumane and Abby began to waver when following her father's orders. She warned one of her aunts away from the monster's bedroom when her father tried to lure them into going inside with lies of treasure. She tried to teach him how to sing though the door and snunk him candies he wasn't meant to have. Her older sibling, Crimson, laughed at her frail-heartedness, but never told on her. Perhaps they also knew somewhere that a person was not meant to be treated like a weapon.

When Lehoi, the beast, became so dangerous that he could no longer be contained inside the walls of the house, Orchid was forced to seek magical options. He waited up until the creature slaughtered a servant before actually considering him something to worry about, and hope some of his unepathetic nature would carry over. The transformative nature of 'medicine' he was given made him into something completely different, and Abby was surpised to see how old he already was. He aged faster than she and Crimson, and was already at an age where he could do work for his mother without being locked behind a door, though not any more of an adult than Abby was. While she would sneak around and stalk their visitors, Lehoi would slaughter on command. This was where the plans turned from beautiful to deadly, but at this time Abby made herself change with it rather than questioning her father. She would use the knives she practiced with to cut throats and not question how it made her cry as soon as she was alone. Maybe her father found out about Abby saving her aunt-- she was later tasked as being the one to end her. Everything started feeling like an underhanded punishment, even when he smiled.

Still thick at war with her siblings, Orchid needed and heir. Crimson was off-limits soley because they were too... disturbing for the other families, and Lehoi was still a child even if he was taller than Abby already. She was the only option, and she was told over and over about how her sacrifice would give her father much-needed resources and allies. How she would be doing a sacrifice, she would be a martyr. She didn't understand why it was painted like a horrible thing, she never assumed she would marry for love so she never considered it as something she'd miss out on. And so, in the midst of family bloodshed, she met Jacob, her arranged future husband. The only goal in their marriage was to unite two families and give them both more money and power. They were never expected to get along, the parents actually placed bets on who would maul the other first. But, between the two sheltered lonely kids, they found they had something in common. Having to be puppets for their deadly parents their whole lives. The unexpected happened: the pair actually hit it off.

Escape to Kosmos

Compared to Lehoi and Crimson, Jacob was tame. He was soft. He was safe. Abby was excited when she got to see him while their parents talked plans and destruction, the two would sit together and talk for long periods of time. First about the strict interests that their parents trained them to discuss, but further more and more about their lives and the real things that brought them joy. Abby told Jacob about the books she would sneak out of her father's library to read under the blankets, and Jacob shared how he liked to burn the flowers in his mother's garden when he got frusterated. What started as little quirks about themselves turned into talks about frusteration with their parent's plans, their weird idea of a future that neither of them ever asked for but they were forced to participate. They grew dissatisfied with their lives, but not with each other.

Abby started sharing the fairy tales her father told her when she was little, both warped and fantastical. What was once a little idea that the girl kept to herself was now a shared dream with someone she was coming to love. She was seeing through Orchid now and struggling to respect him as she once did. She saw him for his mistreatment of her little brother, for his torture of people he could have just talked to, and for how little he cared about any one of them. She realized she was only being married off because she wasn't seen as a viable tool. She couldn't shapeshift, she could barely possess people-- she was not someone who could further her father's cause any more than the servant that Lehoi left broken and battered on the floor. If anything she was worse, because now she was beginning to push back.

Adopting Orchid's old nondestructive dreams for her own, Abby began plotting on how to escape to Kosmos with Jacob. Both of them knew that staying in Sanapeccum would be dangerous-- both their families ran massive criminal empires that spanned all the planets they really knew, and leaving would get mercenaries to try to drag them back kicking and screaming. Jacob told her about a plant that was supposed to make pods that could tear holes in reality when prepared the right way, a plant that Abby knew Crimson had for their job. Portal travel wasn't supposed to be legal outside of the Courte, but Orchid paid a hefty price to find methods he could exploit. He didn't want to stay in Kosmos without his resources from Sanapeccum, so it eas never enough, but Abby didn't need any of the fancy things her life in the underworld brought her. She just wanted Jacob. So, the whispers of running away together and going to a place their families could never follow began.

As if they knew, Crimson was waiting in their room when Abby snuck in the steal pods off the plant, wearing a face similar to her own from the time of the war. They talked for an hour, Crimson questioning them on what the couple planned to do when they were away, if it was really worth it to leave everything behind like this. Abby told them that this was no way for her to live, that she didn't want to be a failure sitting in the corner watching her father's awful plans come to pass her whole life. They told her she was running, she told them she was forcing the world to give her a future. They warned her that Lehoi would bear the biggest brunt of her choice, but Abby still struggled to see him as a sentient being after all the damage she watched him create. The first thing to make her question this mindset was when Crimson laughed as she explained this to them, she she didn't have time to reconsider the plan. Crimson handed her a completed portal pod, a completed one that she and Jacob could use to escape. They told her to never look back, and she ran.

Abby still thought they'd make it when she ran out of the cage she called a home, digging through a hole in the wall around it she intentionally left incomplete so it wouldn't be fixed. Jacob was waiting for her when she came out the other side, helping her push away the last of the boulders. They got a decent distance away from the house, hiding in tall grass and ignoring the blaring alarm behind them, and attempted to prepare the pocket-sized portal for an escape. What they weren't expecting was for Orchid, brandishing a scythe, to annouce his presence by slicing through the boy he introduced to his daughter. He was supposed to be away, collecting the new attempt at a useful child that he now held in one arm, dripping a mysterious black liquid Abby had never seen before. Her replacement's replacement.

Abby knew she couldn't leave Jacob behind, but she couldn't move. She could only reach him by walking closer to her father, and the portal was already open. Her father snarled at her, eyes narrowed at the girl he once loved as if she was filth, and for once she could see how her monster of a brother came from him. She could see Lehoi was better than him. She could see that he would not hesitate to strike her down too, and when he shouted a single word to her, "leave," as if he was talking to a fired employee, she spun around and ran, tears already falling down her face before making it to the portal.

Collect and Protect

Blood and tears staining her face, Abby was a mess when she lept out the other side of the portal. It was one-sided, only barely opening enough for her to come out the other end, leaving her alone in the middle of the night. She was in the woods, alone aside from the animals hiding in shadows sizing her up. She could usually see in the dark fine, but with the completely new surroundings and everything that just happened, she was too frantic to see straight even with it. By the end of the night her wails filled the forest's silence, while she herself lay collapsed on the ground and hapless. It was the worst night of her life, and without outside intervention, apart of her is certain that she never would have left that spot collapsed on the ground.

The man who found her there originally entered the woods to kill her, believing her to be a banshee whose wails would doom his family. He was surprised to see a young phere girl, face splotched with tears and dress covered in dirt and blood. He sat beside her, offering water and comfort while she got the rest of it out, not asking any questions as they sat in the darkness. He didn't ask any questions, but offered her his hand when her cries turned to hiccups and helped her to his camp, promising company and medicine, but she slipped away when her wits were restored. She wasn't sure if she was followed, and she didn't want to sicc her family on a stranger.

It was several months before she felt safe talkng to people on a regular basis, always worried they'd see her a demon and get out the old weapons from the war she always heard about from her father. Much to her surprise, it never came. So long as she stayed around non-alpherde communities, they never assumed anything wrong with her, and the alpherde communities just assumed she was very sheltered growing up. She decided to spend her time wandering and trying to take in the world, never staying in one place for too long so they couldn't see how slowly she aged. She preferred to be a legend to a person. Following traveling groups of performers, joining werewolf packs, helping small communties in the wilderness with the pox, acting as a mysterious hunter in rough winters. She learned to cook, picked up new languages, learned how to perform and exorcism if needed, and how to repair clothes. The world was becoming familiar to her, and one she could survive on her own after having a variety of mentors... and she realized it was time to truly join the world she had been watching.

When Abby met the disheveled vampire child hidden in a barrel in an allyway a couple hundred years into her self-decided banishment, nothing about his situation particularly sang to her. Following her frequent experiences, she stopped to help him because he needed it, not because she was particularly drawn to any quality about him. She took him into an abandoned building, brought him back from delirium as much as she could, and tried her best to nurse him back to health without giving him a taste of her own blood. It was odd, caring for someone with no instructions on how to do it and being the only superior in the area who could be blamed if something went awry. Maybe she would have blamed herself at every time the recovery went wrong, if it wasn't for the boy's amazement. He was pretty bratty of course, acting like a cornered housecat if Abby had to so much as ask him to remove one of his incredibly unnecessary layers, but it was clear he had been touched by her kindness as well. At one point, the vampire went as far as to say that Abby showed him that kindness still existed in the world.

He continued to follow her after she felt he was strong enough to leave to his own devices, and she let him. Through his explainations of the world, she began to realize how many people were being left behind, how many people she could help.

Defend Against Invasion

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nullam blandit vel nibh feugiat pellentesque. Vivamus posuere blandit lobortis. In vitae lectus quam. Sed aliquam dolor a imperdiet finibus. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Maecenas in porta velit. Nunc faucibus mi ac nisi iaculis ultricies. Morbi sit amet ultricies tellus. Nunc accumsan neque metus, vitae porttitor risus iaculis ut. Vivamus commodo consequat magna vel volutpat. Fusce aliquam quam neque, eu maximus quam convallis et.

Quisque quis posuere arcu. Aliquam erat volutpat. Nullam in sem non sem efficitur aliquet. Donec ac convallis lorem, eu mattis metus. Etiam bibendum justo vel turpis malesuada, et malesuada purus condimentum. Proin suscipit ac arcu a vestibulum. Vivamus lacinia urna eget eleifend suscipit. In vestibulum feugiat auctor. Phasellus ac ornare nibh. Integer condimentum placerat velit, id mollis massa gravida nec. Ut at turpis ut nisl sollicitudin aliquet. Phasellus pretium feugiat eros, vitae aliquam nibh ullamcorper nec.

Dragged Back Below

After months of attempting to counter Shadow, the assassin grew bold enough to bite the Void Sheep gang back.