Prologue: The BackstoryGod will provide. That's what my father always used to tell me. One of the earliest memories I have, before everything went hard and cold round the edges, is of riding through the forest with my father, the sun making strange patterns through the leaves overhead, his hands in front of me holding the reins, old Mikael's hooves clapping and clopping against the loosely-paved road beneath. We'd just left our first home, my first home, moving out from the cities to the towns and villages beyond. I'd asked him something about why we were leaving - too young then to understand it all - and why we were going somewhere where we didn't know anybody. What were we going to do? What would I do in a strange place? And he'd smiled that distantly-happy little smile of his, ruffled my hair with one hand, and had chuckled as he replied, "God will provide, Isme."
That smile grew more distant and less happy as the years went on, though it never went away entirely, and he never spoke of it. He never mentioned the scorn, the insults, the beatings he received from some of the townspeople, who wanted nothing less than a priest wandering into their lives, who saw his presence as a sign of some religious all-seeing eye, that had to be blinded before it saw what they were truly like.
His smile never went away entirely, not even at the end, not even when they banged on the door of our little shack on the outskirts of town and woke me up to show me the body, to dump his corpse on the doorstep and to tell me that I had to leave now, had to be gone by morning. They walked off into the dark and the rain, leaving me staring at that curled up form in front of our door, my door, the bruises and the final, obvious knife wound still clearly visible on his chest, that distant smile now so very far away, eyes staring at something I'd never see.
I left that night, after burying him in the sodden earth behind the shack, heading back to the city of my birth. I'd hoped to find people there who'd remember him, who'd remember me, who'd care for what had happened.
I was mistaken.
If anything, the city was worse than the towns and villages. At least the people there had hated us for a reason, however imaginary. The people in the city simply hated, without thought, without reason. On my first night there I was robbed, beaten, old Mikael slaughtered, and it was only by virtue of a strong kicking leg and a panic-fuelled sprint through the dark streets that it didn't end up worse for me.
The next years were...hard. I lived where I could, ate where I could, stole what I could. I even robbed people a few times, when I had no choice, when the pain of hunger in my stomach had become a demon controlling my every action. I'd lure unsuspecting victims - men, usually, young merchants who should have known better than to follow a girl down shadowy alleyways at night - and then snatch their coin purse and run. Running, always running. I grew good at it - it was necessary. Many things were necessary.
Occasionally I would work with some of the more established gangs of the city - the important ones, the ones who ran the streets like a business. The ones who knew enough not to kill off the independent little street girl just because she'd helped them out once or twice. I even formed a few...no, friendships is the wrong word. Partnerships. There were people I worked with regularly. People who I relied on to back me up. People who I, perhaps, even trusted.
Ocho was one of them. He was a flag for one of the gangs - a distraction, quick with his wits and quick on his feet, used to cause a commotion to catch the eyes of the city's guards and then keep them occupied while the others went to work. He was funny, which was in short supply in those days, and he treated me with something approaching respect. In hindsight, it might have been more than that, but at the time the world wasn't working that way. We stole together, fled together, laughed together. Those were perhaps the best times.
As time passed on, the city became more dangerous, more built-up. More merchants, more nobles, more guards. I saw a number of my gang-related partners caught, arrested, beaten and sometimes killed by the guards, or even just by the city public. The world was becoming more dangerous. Ocho and I saw that, and got out while we could. Oh, we still worked the city, but our main source of money moved outside, to the forests and pastures of the nobility. They raised livestock for food, or for hunting, and it would have been a shame for all that to go to waste. We grew skilled at slipping between the trees, avoiding the noble hunting parties, and then killing what we needed. I found I was a dab hand at skinning a deer - a skillset I'd never thought I'd possess - and Ocho excelled at finding the best price for the skins and meat that we brought back into the city. For a while, we lived in relative comfort, finding an abandoned warehouse deep in the slums of the city and building it up until it was almost...home.
One day, Ocho didn't come back.
He'd gone into one of the forests alone, just wanting 'one more run'. He was after the goddamn stag again, I knew it, but I didn't object. He wanted to kill the thing before the nobility got to it. Some kind of proof, I think, some kind of internal argument to show that he was just as good as them, that he was better than them.
I guess they objected.
Ocho was hanged the following day, in the central city square, in front of a crowd of the jeering public. I was there, standing at one side of the square, watching. He saw me, a few moments before the drop. We both just stared at each other. There were no tears, no mouthed phrases, no displays of desperate pleading. We both knew these things happened.
And then he dropped.
I left the following day. I crept onto a caravan heading west, to a far realm known as Calradia. I didn't know anything about it. All I knew is that I had to leave, had to get away from those merchants and nobles and lords and ladies and all those people who'd done it, who'd done it all, who'd set themselves up above Ocho, above me, above my father, and who had done all but twist the blade since the very first day I'd opened my eyes. I would leave the city, leave the land, head to this Calradia...and there, I would create a new life, I would find new people, good people, who would know the value of a hard life lived well. And one day, with those people at my back and a weapon in my hand, I would come back. I would come back to the city, to the towns, to the villages, and I would raze them to the dusty, bloody ground. I would take everything that the guilty inhabitants owned, and I would burn it. I would have my revenge on the whole damned pack of them.
God would provide.
Well, I went with a blend of the suggested options. I also tried to spice the backstory up a little bit, but it's still clichéd as all hell. 
Ismelda's on her way! Also, while I forgot to enable Fog of War on the starting screen, I do enable it as one of my first actions in-game, as it makes things a little bit more exploration-ey, especially as I haven't really memorised the map yet...
I've played through some of the first mission too, but haven't written it up yet. Minor spoiler: I suck at this game. I mean, really suck. I didn't realise how much I sucked until I started recording some of these screenshots coming up. Eesh. 
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Topic: An Arrow To The Synovial Joint - Mount & Blade: Warband (Floris Modpack) (Read 10126 times)