In 1351, Vosland was a nation divided by an cultural and economic boundary. Off the coast of western Ireland, we found ourselves to be isolated from the rest of Europe. However, this was pretty fine for us, seeing as we had plenty of minerals all over. In fact, Vosland was one of the few places in Europe that is so rich with natural resources. Great soil, large mountains, and animals everywhere. However, one thing always divided us: the Osharia Mountains. If you lived north of these mountains, you were living good. You had money and food at all times and never really had to worry about your life. If you lived south of those mountains, it was very poor. Some nights, I would go to bed hungry just because nobody in the town had enough food. I blame this discrepancy on the corrupted government. Our king, Zenith II, has been in pretty poor health for a few years now. We all know he should be dead but somehow, he wasn’t. Since he’s too sick to run a country, other people have been taking his place. It’s great for them but horrible for us. If only I could get a piece of that.
	I spent my childhood living in a small hut in the town of Zoscia. Although not the largest town in South Vosland, life was better here than anywhere else that wasn’t the north. Despite the food shortage and the fact that nobody had more than 30 coins to spare, we were all a community. Whether it was playing with the other kids in the streets or helping my father fish, I knew everyone around. My father worked as a fisherman and would always bring us a fish or two when he wasn’t supposed to. When I would help him, he’d tell me to look for worms living in the Earth that he could use as bait. When I captured every worm in his eyesight, he’d sit me down and rant to me about the politics surrounding Vosland. I always found it hilarious when he stereotyped people living in Vudril, the capital of Vosland, as a bunch of “good for nothing suckers.” To him, everyone would pretend to be apart of royalty. He believed the people of Vudril to be no more than desperate characters telling lies about their supposed ties to the king. My father had great respect for the king, but believed his aire, a man who I would come face to face with ten years later, to be human filth.
	My mother on the other hand was very different. She spent her time bargaining fruit at the marketplace, gossiping with other local merchants about everyone. Although I never got to go to the marketplace with her, my sister got to go almost every day. In Vosland, men and women were rather equal. However, my father was a bit different. He believed the genders should be kept separate entirely, only coming together to make new children. My mother always blew him off as being egotistical and trying to be tough in order to impress his fisherman friends. In fact, she blew a lot of people off who weren’t her merchant friends or her family. She was sociable, but only with a select few. I guess all that marketplace gossip got to her head.
	My parents were quite the characters, but I think the best character of them all was Oenel, the local blacksmith. He was out neighbor and he was very friendly. Although my memory has lost the physical details of my parents, Oenel’s physicality has always been fresh in my mind. Tall, wrinkly, and very bald. He was very proud of his baldness for a reason I will never be able to comprehend, and his arched back was always the first thing you would notice about him. I guess 30 years of building weapons and tools was enough to really take a toll on his body. When I was about 7 or 8, Oenel showed me how to make and throw ninja stars. He showed me how to collect the iron from a nearby deposit, and how to weld and shape it into a super sharp throwing tool of death. The one thing I will always remember from his lesson is that I should never harm a person with these stars. Thankfully, my rebellious mind would save me years later.

	It was a rather hot summer night in the month of July. I remember continuously waking back up just because it was so hot. I was tucked in a small corner of the hut in a shelf, which was hidden in sight. I couldn’t see the door, and according to my father, “If I can’t see you, you can’t see me.” I always assumed people walking in couldn’t see my sleeping quarters. I heard a loud bang, and looked over only to see the door being broken open by two men dressed in all black. Luckily they didn’t see me, and I hid in the corner. All I heard were the noises of my family screaming in agony, and the sound of iron daggers poking themselves into the flesh of the people I knew best. Eventually, the screams of my parents ended and only my sister was screaming, but it was later muffled as the two walked out. I was only eight years old and my ears had witnessed a murder.
	I stayed in that corner for hours upon hours. The sun had risen once again but yet, I did not move. I kept my eyes glued to the ceiling, horrified. I really had no idea what to do or even how to do anything, I lost all thought. I was in a state of absolute nothingness, I knew my parents were right there next to me. I knew they weren’t alive either. I listened to the screams of my parents turn into silence as my sisters screamed became muffled and eventually too faint for me to hear. I was in a trance of trauma but out of nowhere, the face of Oenel sprung up from above the table.

 “Slovak! Slovak! You are alive, my son! Come, we need to get you out of here!” I didn’t say a word.

Oenel picked me up and said, “Come on kid, we have to get you out of here! Those people, I have no clue who they are, but they could be looking for you next. It is NOT safe here.” Although I wasn’t speaking, I was running. I had no idea how to comprehend what happened to my family. I was too young to grieve and let my emotions out, but sadly old enough to know that I would probably never see my sister again, and that my parents were now dead.Their bodies, laying on my old homes dirt floor, were completely lifeless. I would never get to hear my father ramble about the port cities of North Vosland, or my mother tell me about how a dirty Spanish merchant tried to con her out of her grapes. It was all over.
	Oenel took me deep into the Zoscian forest, and told me this area is my new home. He showed me a small hill where iron could be found. He taught me how to make a fire, then said that I needed to smelt my own iron and build my own ninja stars. I would have to eat the birds and squirrels that I would be forced to share this unconquered land with. Oenel threw a ninja star at a bird, decapitating it. He grabbed it, and said I needed to learn how to cook. He had me build a fire. While I did that, he skinned the bird, leaving just the meat. He threw it on a stick and roasted it. He told me this would be my diet for the foreseeable future. I still couldn’t talk, and while he was weirded out by it at first, I think he got the general idea that I was still traumatized.
	I took to sleeping in a small pit covered by a large tree. Thankfully, this tree was so large, the leaves would protect me from any rain. Although the nights were lonely and cold, I had a sense of hope. The sense of hope that in a few days, maybe a few weeks, Oenel would take me back to Zoscia. However, that hope dwindled as time went on. Oenel promised that he would check on me as much as he could, yet as time went on, he checked on me less and less. With each visit, he looked older and weaker, only making sure I was alive. After a month passed without Oenel, I had assumed he had passed.

	As months turned into years, I spent my days fishing and smelting iron. How I was able to live off the land for so long, I will never understand. I was still afraid to go back, but I really wanted to. I missed my friends. I missed my family. I missed Zoscia. However, I figured that I should just wait until I’m old enough to look like a simple man moving to a new town. I could change my identity completely. I never thought about my name being anything else other than Slovak, but it’s totally possible. I thought about the life I could live. I could be a blacksmith like Oenel, or I could be a fisherman like my father. Maybe I could get involved with local politics, I’m sure that would make him happy.
	One thing I would do is hunt the way Oenel taught me to. Other than fishing, it was all I knew. These small animals were too fast and if I wanted to get a bigger animal, I don’t think I could. That thing would probably eat me before I ate it. However, as I threw these ninja stars every day, I got better with my aim and precision. Hell, I think I may have gotten too good. When you’re a kid robbed of your childhood but you can throw ninja stars and you have to kill your food yourself, you get pretty good at what you do. And trust me, I was.
	By the time I had grown a full beard, I could throw a ninja star with 100% accuracy. Decapitation was by far the best method of getting these creatures, and it became what I was good at. It got to the point where I had never missed a shot. If I wanted to hit an exact leaf on a tree from a couple hundred meters away, I could. It was really all I had. There wasn’t much else I could spend my time doing. No friends, no family, no human in sight. Sure, there were plenty of animals around me, but they weren’t any horse. They were either large and vicious or small and timid, no inbetween. I was bored.