In its prime, Descarith was an elegant kingdom, a sprawl of cities with the castle at its heart. Power radiated outward from there. The cities of the inner circle were solidly built, laced with stone roads and ringed by high walls raised to guard both the inner city and the castle.
Past those walls spread the lower city, wider by far than the inner circle. The outer cities ran on commerce and trade, and life there was loud and quick. Their roads, paved in cobblestone, met at the nine entrances that led out past the boundaries of the outer city. A grand gate marked each one, an arch tall enough to see from a distance, bearing the Kingdom's Seal on two banners.
Descarith stretched further still. Beyond the outer city lay the outskirts, where countless villages sat among wild forests and hard mountain ranges. Muddy roads linked most of them. Others ran deeper into the shadowed woods, where it was easy to lose your way and never find it again.
Sephir, the mortal beauty, came from one of those villages, a place called Kashin. She was the cherished daughter of the local potter. Her father shaped the pottery, and Sephir hauled it to the outer city to sell. The trip took a full month. He used to travel with her, but the years had worn him down, and the road was too much for him now.
She packed food for the journey, though the rations were never enough. She foraged fruit and berries in the forest along the way, and she knew which lakes she could refill her water at.
Food and water were not the worst of it. The outskirts of Descarith were poor, and the wild country was dangerous. Animals hunted the jungles. Worse, bandits worked the roads. Sephir traveled with a knife and a torch and little else, against beasts and men both.
Survival was only half the trial. The guards on the outer city walls harassed her every time she passed. The trading was worse. Merchants cheated her, undercut her, haggled her down for sport, and made sure she felt small doing it. Her father had thought about marrying her off to a villager, but she was his only child, and she couldn't leave him alone.
So she made the journey again and again, because her family lived on it. On this day the pottery was loaded, the goodbyes said, and she set out from Kashin once more. Her road took her through the forest of Khalih, where she gathered apples to eat.
From there she came to the great mountains of Kasim. Crossing them at night was a bad idea, since bandit stories followed that road. But Sephir couldn't afford to lose a day. The merchants would seize on a late delivery to cut her payment. So she pushed on through the dark. At least the climb was not steep.
Halfway through, her luck ran out. One of the carriage wheels sank into the mud of the road. She lit a torch to look at it. "Just a small jam," she mumbled. Her plan was simple: stand on a plank to lever the carriage up while urging the horse forward. But fortune had other ideas that day.
She didn't know that three figures had been trailing her carriage. Talk of bandits kept most travelers off this road, and a girl traveling it alone had caught their interest. They came up on the carriage, muttering to each other. "Well. What do we have here?"
Sephir turned to face the three of them. Fear rose in her, and under it a strange calm. She had no idea yet what was coming for her, only a growing certainty that she would not be going home to her father.