Whispers began to spread that Shion was the Lady of the Seasons the year her daughter turned four. One of her sisters had found her mother's diary for sale in a Thieves Guild and the young assassin's name was mentioned several times. Yes, Shion had a new last name now - she didn't even know what her old one was, she had been so young - but the descriptions of the dress were dead on, her homeland, the name of her inn. It was all in there.

It was a tragedy that the diary was soon lost after Serena, the blabbermouth sister in question, died. Shion had wanted to recover the diary, her Gods-damned birthright, but it had gone up in flames with Serena's body. The loss was a huge hit to her pride; How dare that bitch go and let the rightful Lady's legacy go up in flames? This information was learned shortly after her meeting her flirtationship partner Giatsu, getting thoroughly wasted on the blood of attackers on La Dama.

Oh, and all of the booze and panties. It would be bad to forget the booze and panties.

Panties aside, she had spent at least a week hiding in the mountains of that odd island, desperately trying to find a way off without shredding herself into fifty-million pieces while going through the barrier around it. Giatsu, the poor soul, had gotten trapped with her, and both soon learned there was naught to do but settle in and wait for the storm to pass, as it were. Days past like slugs when, near the last day of their self-imposed exile, they felt large surges of power coming from near the south of the island.

At that point in time, though, there wasn't anything they could do there, either. All had finished and they watched as the barrier around the island had dissipated. They had been heading to the source, but it seemed that they weren't needed. Good. Shion hadn't really wanted to deal with it anyway. Soon both of them eagerly went back to what they were set to do, getting out off that gods-forsaken place (Corvenius, she learned later) on a fishing boat bound for Helena. Giatsu was a wonderful companion. Once on the Abelese shores they split ways, he to the east and she to Abel. After a much-deserved murdering of the pedophilic son of a whore that was her target, she returned to Selene.

Her welcomes home had never been particularly warm, but the side-long looks and mutters of the ki-manipulating dud having something unique tipped her off that they all knew something she didn't. It was only a matter of asking her squad what the venomous stares were about after that. At this point, her nerves were grated beyond belief. Her Sisters, those gifted little jerks, were going to whisper about her having a dress from her family when all of them could teleport and make arrows out of nothingness and FLY?! Even more annoying, even her squad hadn't wanted to tell her what was going on. It took at least three threats of scratching out eyes and ripping out weaves instead of one to get her what she wanted.

Squads, Sisters, and overall people just weren't were they were supposed to be.

Frustrated in more ways than one, on edge from her Sister's gazes and more desperate than ever to pay her dues and leave, Shion continued life on the island, waiting for the time when she could see Sebastian and Iri.

It was a day and a half after this that word began to spread of a male headhunting assassins - especially those of Selene. He could take on a squad and survive into the night, could track them down and murder them in their sleep, and had a couple of times already. Rumors were obviously fierce around the island for lack of anything to do, Shion thought at the time. They should have just started doing each other. That's what they usually did, yet not this time; Powerful an enemy was this, and it just needed to be talked about. The Daimah didn't particularly care about this heathenistic man until she heard something that made her blood run cold. His means of delivering punishment was the Selene art.

It was a travesty. Something unheard of in hundreds of years. A male? Knowing the art that was their very means of survival? Blasphemy! His name quickly rose to that of the highest headhunt charts in the training halls, bribes to allies made to do any trickery possible to capture him. Dread was the woman who would have to hunt this man down alone, or the squad sent to capture him. Further was the dread that filled the bottom of Shion's stomach when she realized this man's name could only be Sebastian the "Wetboy".

The rest of the island hadn't learned his name by that point, and that was her only solace. She had to do her best to stay away from him, to seem distanced from the whole affair, lest she be put under suspicion. It worked for almost a year. That year, regretfully, was long enough for a Selene ally to capture her husband by way of kidnapping her daughter and Shion, fully aware of what she would have to do, was assigned to the task of murdering the male menace. She had planned to show up with her squad, let them speak to the contact while she got her husband and daughter out, and then claim that he had escaped while they spoke. The Fates had other plans.

The Fates were cruel cunts that liked to see her suffer in her eyes. When she went to break her husband out, the fatass that had captured him spoke, in detail, about how completely he had dominated her daughter. All three of the Sisters were in complete shock, of course. They despised men for the most part, but one of the few they had trusted defiled a female. That, in itself, gave Shion a palpable reason to murder the man, which she immediately tried to do. She almost ripped the man's heart out of his chest. Not because she held back, of course, but because she couldn't actually get to his heart through his ribs. She enjoyed beating the man to a pulp, even enjoyed the surprised faces of her Sisters as she demanded that she be allowed to talk to Sebastian.

"Why?"

Shion stood straight in that moment, looking every bit the regal Lady she had been born to be. A clawed finger pointed at their contact. "Everyone, even this sentient penis, deserves a second chance. Everyone deserves clemency at least once. I don't want to give him that. I want to rip out his intestines and let him die of shock for raping my Iri. But he-"

She had revelled in the fact that he immediately voided his second chance. "The same I'll do to you, you inhuman slut!"

Shion feigned an exasperated sigh, sincerely delighting in the sound of his skull wetly crunching under her heel. "And you know who deserves them based on their actions. See? He obviously didn't deserve it." She explained her reasoning calmly even as her squad was poised to attack her. She knew she had slipped information she shouldn't have. The moment wasn't exactly the beginning of her fall from assassin grace...but it was a fairly annoying part of it. To be frank she didn't enjoy the fight that proceeded with her sisters, nor the mad dash out of Alberian territory back to the cottage with her family. Even less was her joy when five squads of her Sisters were waiting for Sebastian to return, swarming and killing him on site. As she ran she did enjoy watching him in action, seeing him take down four Sisters in the mere three minutes she needed to get away and out of sight with Iri.

She hated herself for it, but Shion saved herself to save Iri. Weeks of hiding in any nook and cranny they could find existing but not living. The pair were broken now. It went without saying that someone not caring for their own life would eventually get sloppy with it. Mother and daughter were caught three months after Sebastian's death, struggling only weakly until Shion's former Sisters separated her from her baby girl. She begged them not to hurt Iri, just to give her to a family on the mainland...to not have her join the Sisterhood. Not to kill her only daughter. Her requests were met with iron-willed silence. No word of Iri or her well-being reached Shion's ears then, and still hadn't, to much heartbreak.