Kadence Song De Favial

Her family was situated in Snowholme, for better or worse. It was a slight step up from living in the snowy wilds that only the cruelest of predators seemed to strive, where everyone was wanting to make them into their next scarf or pair of boots because their tails were beautiful. Her grandfather’s father had the idea to leave the few snowy trees and enter the town, where they became ingrained with little trouble. All it took was an empty house and a few generations for the Favial’s to be one of the crowd, and by the time it was Kadence’s generation, it was like they had been there all along. This might’ve been because they were of a smaller, nicer critter folk that loved people and were loved by them, and because her great grandmother, grandmother and mother could make a mean, warm bread bowl soup.

Kadence had four siblings, and she was the second child, being a few years younger than her sister, Amarence. After Kadence there were two boys, Fendence and Rendence, and then the young baby girl of the family, Xandence. They weren’t better off than the others around them, not when nothing seemed to grow in the wastelands that surrounded them and there was hardly anything there to really eat, but nature was nature and her mother ended up with more children than she and her human husband could honestly feed in the end, much to their dismay.

When Kadence was around seventeen years old and her sister twenty, people from Meia came in to Snowholme and started rounding up females. Her father had fought back when they had come to their little hovel, and ended up getting himself killed. Over her father’s dead body the men came in and took her sister and her mother, dragging them kicking and screaming out into the streets where they continued to do as they liked. Kadence never saw a hair of them since that day. The hole left by what was taken from them that day was big, and the girl was unable to fill it as well as she would have liked.

Her siblings slowly started dying, one after the other no matter how hard she would work running around, getting whatever was edible and starving herself for just one more day for them. She wants to regret giving them hope that someone would come and save them from all the bad things, that their mother and sister were okay, but she doesn’t because she had been hoping that herself. The youngest had been the first to die, in the night and asleep, unable to keep herself warm despite her brothers and sister there around her. The twin boys had been sturdier, and they would have made it if Kadence hadn’t been grabbed by the hair one day by a man like her mother and sister had been. They fought tooth and nail, scratching and clawing at him to let her go and he did, only to turn around and beat them senseless before leaving. She wasn’t even that pretty—he’d said, not worth the effort.

Kadence had never known what being pretty was, but if it meant that more men like him were going to come and take from her, than she never wanted to be. One of the twins died from the wounds he’d suffered, and then the other slowly dwindled away. She couldn’t stand to stay there and watch him die, so Kadence gathered up the foolish courage to leave Snowholme and wander past the mountains, surviving against bigger predators that would come after her day and night because she smelled like fresh meat to them.

She ended up being picked up by people from Serutia, where she stayed for a few years. Kadence was allowed in because she wasn't human, of course, and was more or less taken care of by a person there. It wasn't like she was completely uneducated, but there were a lot of things about the new world that she had walked out into that she didn't know, and the elf in charge of her person was the one that taught her the 'rules' and some how-to's of life. She like the city because of the trees, but left because of a rumor One that said to her that people were starting to live in a once abandoned town called Thion. Serutia wasn't a start that she wanted to have be the foundation for her life, so she left with what she had in the morning and set off with simple directions on how to get there.