I own nothing.
A/N: Ranger character study? It started out as a one-shot take on the Dominus fight, too bad I'm not exactly skilled enough to write a very bloody "1800s Colonial Dark Fantasy Polynesia" (a term accredited to otherwindow on tumblr) work without making it sound like some hoity, toity vampiric piss-lord narration.
She was a tailor's daughter.
Her father taught her how to sew the clothes she wore. He taught her how to treadle a needle faster than she could shoot an arrow. Stitching was a skill that made your fingers firm, steady, nimble. It taught her fingers character. To truly submit the material into order, you needed to possess that skill.
She didn't remember how many pricked fingers it took to learn that.
She began to apply this to her other works, like her father's old bows. She knew father's schedule by memory. He would nap exactly at three in the afternoon. Their little shop would close temporarily.
She would then lift up the latch of the dusty chest – hidden underneath the pile of clothes, where he placed his beautiful bow. She would run her fingers over it - feeling almost too dirty, too inexperienced, too afraid.
Back in the old days, he would hunt – before the government began to set hunting laws. Before the corruption filled the halls of the city. Before slaves were dragged into Oriath for the means of labour – factories, buildings, the engines began to crank.
Before the world began to move in the direction of a chugging, steaming new age.
Before they began to purge the city, place taxes upon the citizens - everyone was given a name. Before it became nothing but white washed tombs carrying dead-men's corpses.
Before all of that – her father was a hunter. Free, wild and with nothing but a bow.
Perhaps she was too loud. Perhaps she made too much noise. She woke him up.
"Your fingers do not know character for a bow yet – Prudence."
She would watch as he pulled down the latch and locked the bow away. When she was sixteen years old, she confronted him. Her mind swirling with anger. Was it because she was a woman? Do women not hunt? Did they sit and look pretty in sewn fabric, make-up and the smell of noxious perfume?
Some women might enjoy that. But she wanted to hear the melody of a bow, know the intimate dance with death and experience the beauty of the wild.
And her father simply sighed.
"No life can be owned. Not yours. Not mine. Not anyone else's. You do not understand this, for out in the wild – you live with this understanding. You too will return to the earth, one day."
This was something she remembered as she would sew her own clothes, years later, damned to wild wild Wraeclast.
"– and just as you feed, you will be fed on." She whispered, as she appraised the new leather vest in the light of the crackling bonfire.
"Huntress you are beatific because you answer to no-one. And that's why no-one will miss you."
She'd been called so many names – mostly cursed. The bitch, pitiful exile, poacher, thief, unruly, a wild wretch. But people forgot their names after a while in a place like Wraeclast.
"Rebellious filth!" The lords pointed their ringed fingers at her insubordination, they screeched, "May you be damned to rot in Wraeclast!"
But none of those fattened, doddering fools realized that her freedom and life lay in this damned continent.
Over here, no one was given a name. There was just the hunt. The ranger only knew her bow, and the bow only knew her. Everything around her was dead.
There was a scream as the bow pierced through the vitals of yet another creature – silencing it. There was a pregnant pause as its companion registered the sickening splat.
"Hush," She shuddered, "Please don't speak."
Another sharp twang. The snuff of breath. A bitter cry to the dark skies. .
"You'll wake up things and creatures everywhere!" She reached for her quiver. Her eyes slid over to the right.
The forests rustled. The ground shook and cries erupted from the darkened foliage. Wiping the sweat from her brow, the ranger raised her bow again, and drew the bow-string backward. A precise twitch of a finger.
Dead-eye.
And the arrow sang with freedom, piercing through the shrieks in the night.