Vasha grew up in the streets, but that was nothing special. Practically everyone grew up in the streets.

Few of the children out there had still-living parents or even a memory of a good life, so she was lucky, all things considered. At first she lived with her unmarried mother and father, and a brother from her mother's previous marriage. Though her mother leapt from nervous episodes to unprovoked angry fits, never shielding the children from her distress (or sometimes blaming them for it), Vasha's father was always gentle. She can hardly remember him now, only a vague sense of how big his arms felt around her, and how the warm darkness of his skin made her feel like nothing in the world could touch her. He used to pick her up and carry her away when her mother made a racket, let her sleep across his lap when she woke in the night. He was a good man, maybe the only one she's met to this day.

She didn't figure out until years later why her father left. As a child, it was a simple matter of there one day and gone the next. She woke to her father replaced by Hardwin, her mother's first husband. She realizes now that Hardwin must have returned to town and either made her mother kick out her father, or else done it himself. She aches for the distant memory of him and the feeling of safety she would never have felt if not for him.

Hardwin ruled the house. He shoved Vasha aside, ignored her when she spoke, and told her she couldn't sit at the table sometimes. She cried until he hit her, then she learned not to cry. She sat and watched from across the room as Hardwin ruffled Dirk's hair, bragging about his son; Dirk quickly grew tired of tossing Vasha pitying looks. Eventually he came to ignore her, too, at Hardwin's behest. Her mother didn't talk to her either, but that was nothing new.

Hardwin lived with them for three years, drinking away their bread money, before he decided he didn’t want "another man’s bastard" in his house. Dirk and Vasha's mother watched from the door, pale with alarm but offering no help, as Hardwin dragged Vasha by her hair into the street. Vasha pounded on the door for hours afterward, begging to be let back in by her mother or Dirk, before it opened to her— but it was just Hardwin, already rolling up his sleeves. He left her bruised and whimpering, and she did not knock on the door again. She wept, fetal, until the sun began to rise. She knew he’d hurt her again if he found her there.

And so she lost her home. She was nine.

Though an upbringing plagued with hunger, and with fear, and with squalor, it did not go as poorly for her as it did for others, not at first. Many of the other girls- and a few of the boys- were seduced into the brothels. Some kids vanished from the streets and appeared weeks later behind the iron-wrought bars of mansions, servants on slave wages. Many starved on the harsh cobblestone. Some fell in with criminals and came back to torment those who had been their friends.

Vasha just… survived. She moved quick and never slept in the same place twice. She minded her business. She forgot how to make friends, or perhaps she never learned.

She thought of her father and mother often. She had to believe that her mother loved her, just a little bit. Her father had to have seen something in the woman.

Once, when she was ten, she tried to go back to her mother’s house. Dirk met her in the doorway with his hands on the frames.

“She doesn’t want you here,” he said.

Vasha went hot at the temples. “She does,” she gasped out, the flare of her anger strangled by the way her throat tightened. “It’s that man who says that. Mom loves me.”

Dirk’s face crinkled. Hardly threatening at the tender age of twelve, but to Vasha, he was fearsome. “Don’t call him ‘that man.’ He’s my dad—"

“He’s not /my/ dad. Let me—”

Dirk shoved her. She stumbled back, twisted to catch herself, and went palms-first into the street. A string shot through her hands as she pushed off the cobblestone. Bloody and wincing, she turned back toward her brother.

“Let me /in/,” she yelped, then tried to shove past him. He stepped into her way and called her a bitch, so she went for his eyes with her nails. He wailed and slapped her hands away. An opening formed— a glimpse at the fireplace inside— and she tried to push her way into the house. He slammed his fist into her ear. With a faint cry, she stumbled backwards. Disoriented, dizzied by ringing, she threw her full weight at him. He caught her by the wrists.

“Vasha,” he snarled, “just—”

Light burst between them. Dirk went skidding back into the house, smoke rising off his clothes. Vasha stared at him, then down at her own hands, skinned and simmering. She looked back up at Dirk and saw blood leaking from one corner of his wide-blown eyes. He heaved for air, still on the ground.

The door was open and the way was clear, but Dirk’s fearful eyes drove Vasha off into the night.

She remembers with perfect clarity the way her heart thundered as she stared down at her hands, the adrenaline so fierce that she could feel the throb of her pulse in her wrists. Her whole body felt alive, and even at such a young age she knew that something more than fear was happening to her. A prickle raced up to her scalp and back to the base of her spine, and her nerves were raw; the night went colder, the slam of the cobblestones against her bare feet harder, the distant sounds of drunken laughter louder. The whole world wavered and closed in on her body, a bright, buzzing point of heat in an otherwise cold city.

Magic.

She had magic.

Vasha tried over the next several months to harness it, but as many times as she watched street performers breathe fire or bards literally enchant their crowds, her magic did not come so easily. It erupted when she was afraid or angry, and came in bursts that she did not know how to channel. Eventually she figured out at least how to aim it, but she could never control what sort of spell came out of her, though it seemed she had a proclivity for the necrotic. A whole crop of food whithered under her feet when she startled at a sound while trying to steal some carrots; a pack of dogs that came over her in her sleep found themselves retching and vomiting to death as she ran away; a man with ill intentions witnessed his hand rot and die instantaneously when he tried to place it on her.

For all that the magic kept Vasha safe, it also made her conspicuous. No one raised an eyebrow at another skinny kid wandering the street in tatters, but when that kid produced powerful magic, people looked. More than once, Vasha was approached by gangs who wanted her in their ranks. Luckily, most weren’t brazen enough to try to take her by force when she ran from their advances.

But one wouldn’t leave her alone.

His name was Morden. He did not tell her this, but she knew because she listened to talk on the street and didn’t like to forget a face. While most of the thugs who approached her would follow her down a quiet street or lean out of alleyways to call at her, Morden did not pursue her so much as happen to be wherever she was going. He sat next to the fruit cart she could usually snag an apple off of, and he always seemed to have a table at the tavern whose bartender let kids buy a little ale, and a few times Vasha even saw him leaning against her mother’s house when she came to spy through the window.

Then one night, she found him smoking his pipe near the crevice where she had kept her bedroll for the past few days, and that was it.

“What do you want!” she shouted, though her voice shook. Morden grinned beneath the shadow of his cloak, then stood and began to walk towards her despite her hands raised in warning. “You—” her voice choked off, “you better watch it! I could kill you!”

“Or you could turn me into a sheep,” said Morden, deep and calm. “Or you could transmogrify all this trash into gold.” He began to move closer, backing her towards a wall. “But you haven’t done any of those things yet because you have no idea how to control your magic. If you keep going like this, you’ll just be a danger to yourself. Eventually you’re going to go off, and you’re going to kill someone, and it’s not going to be some bum or pervert that you kill. It’ll be someone important, and they’ll have your head for murder.”

Vasha’s back hit the wall. “How do you know that'll happen?” She tried to challenge him with her tone, but her voice was thin.

Morden chuckled, then extinguished his pipe and tucked it in his pocket. “Because that almost happened to me,” he said, then drew back the hood of his cloak. His face was unexpectedly kind. Couched in smile lines, his eyes were watchful but not intense, his skin was a little loose over his thin, stubbly cheeks, and his neck was spindly. He looked like someone’s grandfather, or maybe an old uncle.

“I don’t mean to frighten you, young one,” he said, softer now— but still earnestly, like he was talking to an adult— as he knelt in front of Vasha. “I have only been watching to see what you’re made of. And you’re made of the right stuff.”

Vasha frowned. “I am?”

“Oh, yes.” Morden shifted a half-step forward with one foot, still crouching. “You’re resourceful. You’re smart. You’re tough. And you have the wild magic. The universe only gives its wild magic to very special people. It chose you, because it’s seen how wise you are. And I noticed that, too.”

For all that Vasha was distrustful and frightened, she was also still a child, and she couldn't remember ever being complimented like that. Finally she let her hands rest at her sides.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want to teach you,” Morden said, then lifted one hand in front of him and gestured over his palm with the other. Vasha flinched at the bright light that erupted, then stared in awe at the tiny glowing crow that appeared in Morden’s hand: hardly more than a trick of light, but it hopped and cocked its head like a real crow. She managed to tear her eyes away from the magic to look at Morden and found brilliant points of light in his eyes, his hair blowing in wisps around his head, carried on the current of magic.

He closed his hands together, and the spectacle vanished. “See, Vasha,” he breathed, so softly that she leaned in to listen, “I’m a sorcerer. And I can teach you to be a sorcerer, too.”

Just like that, he had her.

Morden gave her a room in his “clubhouse,” as he called it. For the first few days Vasha was a shadow to Morden, following closely and saying nothing as she observed the ways of this strange world. She had learned how to shrink in her years on the street, and she stayed small here among the gruff men and shouting boys. A few women came and went; they either dressed in thin, loose linens and vanished into rooms with the men, or they looked at Vasha like she was nothing and accepted money from Morden in return for stolen things.

Only men lived there. This wasn’t a problem until one of the older boys made a vile comment about Vasha, and Morden— after killing the boy with a snake-strike fist to the skull— calmly told the stunned-silent room that Vasha would now be confined to her room, which would be locked.

Morden, of course, had a key. He brought her meals and books and stories about magic, and though Vasha knew somewhere in the back of her mind that she was a prisoner, she did not try to leave. Better trapped with a warm bed and a full belly than free on streets that might kill her.

True to his word, Morden did teach her how to harness her magic. And he taught her well. Though Vasha had no way of understanding it at the time, Morden had struggled, fought, and killed for the knowledge that made him a great sorcerer, and he passed it to Vasha with an ease to his simple teaching. He taught her first how to harness her wild magic; before she knew a single spell, she already knew how not to have an outburst, which was more than most blessed with the wild magic could say. Then, when it came time to learn specific spells, she already had a tight control and mastered each new lesson quickly. With each passing day, Morden complimented her more, praising every tilt of her hand and lilt to her voice as she cast increasingly complex spells. She flourished under his encouragement. Morden knew, as he watched her, that he had caught a naturally gifted sorcerer in just the right stage of development: he was molding her.

…In more ways than one.

His first advance on her came with a volume of necromancy spells. He put the book on her desk and then sat next to her on the bed. His hand on her waist startled her, but she didn't distinguish the clench of her stomach from her surprise, or have the wherewithal to say no, or to say anything at all.

She was thirteen when he kissed her the first time. She would not realize for years how harmful this was, how foul. At the time, she felt happy to be noticed, to be held. He strung her along on words she had never heard before, compliments like “capable” and “clever” and “important.” He was the only person she saw for nearly a year, and she began to need his encouragement about her magic, about her personality, about her body as she matured.

When he began to do new, strange things to her, she was frightened. But he told her she was an old soul, a wise creature who should enjoy these things. She tried to. (She didn’t, and saw it as her own failing.) The things he did confused and sometimes hurt her, but those hurts were gentle compared to Hardwin’s drunken fists, so she did not resist. Once, when he came into her room and started to touch her, she asked if they could do her magic lesson first.

Following that, they only did magic after.

Sometimes she thought about running away. Nothing she ever planned to act on, just an occasional fantasy to wile away the hours between study and bed; she would take Morden’s spell books and go find her dad, and they would laugh and talk and he would be proud of her. She knew it wasn’t realistic. She didn’t even know her dad’s first name; couldn’t remember it, since her mother and Hardwin had taken to referring to him exclusively by mean names after he left. Besides, now that she was good at magic, she would be a hot commodity on the street. Everyone would be vying for her, and she wouldn’t last a day without Morden.

Or so he he told her, anyway.

“I have a task for you," he said one day as he came in the door.

Vasha looked up from her books. It wasn’t unusual Morden to ask something of her, but there was a seriousness to his voice, and he was standing in the unlocked doorway as if he planned to take her on a rare outing.

She set her book aside. “What?”

“Just come with me.”

Morden led her to a small room in the clubhouse she had never been to, then opened the door onto a sight that made her gasp. In the middle of the room was a man in a chair, bare chest bruised, his head lolling beneath a bag tied at his neck.

"Kill him.”

Vasha stared at the man, shocked. "What?"

"Kill him."

"Wha-? I—"

Morden took her chin in his hand and turned her face him, fixing her with eyes she had lost the will to argue with. "It's not hard, Vasha. You know how. Do it."

Of course Vasha knew how to kill. She'd been the death of more than one stray animal, and Morden had brought her her rats to practice more difficult spells. But a person?

"I can't," she whispered.

Morden whipped his hand away, then crossed his arms as he considered her, brow hard.

"Vasha," he sighed, "I thought you could do better."

Hearing his voice thick with disappointment made Vasha's stomach twist. She reached for his arm, only to have him snatch it away.

"No. You can kill him, and you will."

Morden took the short sword off his belt and cast it at the unconscious man's feet. Then he pulled his wand from his robes and flicked it at the man.

The man jerked awake under the bag with a yelp.

"A few Scorching Rays should do him," Morden said, and pressed his wand into Vasha's stunned-open hand. "I'll let one of you out of this room," he said as he opened the door, "and you get to decide who."

He slammed the door behind him.

"Morden!" Vasha screamed and threw herself at the door. She jerked at the handle with one hand and pounded the metal of the door with the other, but the door did not budge.

A groan behind her. She spun, wand at the ready to defend herself.

The man still sat in the chair with the bag on. He felt around his neck for a moment, then tugged the chord free and pulled the bag away.

He was young. So young that Vasha stopped still when she saw him. The bag left his hair ruffled, sticking in soft tufts away from a babyish face that hardly matched his strong body. His left eye squinted shut at the focal point of a bruise like an open rose, and his lower lip was split down the center, swollen where the blood had caked up. He was a little older than Vasha, more substantial and much lighter-skinned, but when he looked up at her, she saw in him the same fear that had been growing like weeds in her heart since she came here.

He flinched up out of the chair and snatched the sword in a single movement.

"I'll kill you," he snarled. Vasha was struck by the rasp of his voice. Bruises ringed his throat; had the cord on the bag been that tight?

Vasha put up her free hand. "Hey," she said, fighting her quavering throat, "I don't wanna fight you. No one has to kill anyone."

His eyes narrowed and he began to approach, sword leveled backwards as if to strike. Vasha pressed back against the door.

"Don't come any closer! Please!"

He stopped. He looked her up and down, then wiped a hand over his mouth. "You gonna light me up?"

"No!" Vasha said, hand still up between them, like that would stop him.  "I don't— I don't do that." She threw the wand to the ground for emphasis.

The boy blinked down at the wand, then to her, brow furrowed. "You don't work for Morden?"

"I do, I just— I don't kill people."

The boy frowned, then winced and gasped softly. He put his free hand to his jaw, where Vasha heard a soft clicking as he flexed it.

She drew a tentative step away from the door. "What- what happened to you?"

"Got put in jail," the boy said quietly, then slid his sword into his belt and sat back heavily on the chair.

Vasha stayed where she was. "For what?"

"Morden screwed me over," he said, looking at his feet. "I got arrested, but then Morden had someone take me out of jail and beat me up. Said he was gonna kill me so I didn’t snitch.” He quieted as he twisted the toe of his boot against the stone floor. “Wasn’t even gonna snitch. Didn’t think of it.” He looked up at Vasha. "If he thinks you can kill me—"

"No." Vasha shook her head. "I’m not going to. I don't want to."

The boy looked her up and down. "What do you do for him if you don't kill anybody?"

Vasha's stomach went funny. "Nothing, really. He teaches me magic."

Suddenly the boy's face lit up, and he sat forward. "You know how to hold somebody? Like with the spell?"

"Yeah. Sure."

He let out a little laugh and tipped his head back. "Man. I wish I could do that. I would make Morden stand still, and I'd cut off his head."

Vasha went rigid at that. "That's— Don't say that. He’s not bad."

"What!?" The boy's head jerked forward. "He just tried to make you fight me, and you said you don't kill anybody. He let me get arrested. He acts like he's good, but he doesn't care. He’s bad."

"But he's— he taught me everything I know. He gave me a room."

"A room?" the boy asked. "That's stupid. I never got my own room." Then his eyes widened. "Oh, man. I know about you! You're the girl he keeps locked up." His face twisted in disgust. "Does he really have sex with you? That's so gross. He's old. You’re, like, a kid."

Vasha's heart pounded. "It's not what it is. It’s—"

It wasn't. Was it?  Of course- of course, she knew what he had been doing to her— sort of— but hearing this boy say it like that—

She went cold.

It /was/.

She thought of how she always felt when she heard Morden walking toward her room, the feeling in her chest— the terror? — every time he got into her bed. It /was/ gross. It hurt her. He never cared if she was tired or frightened or if she cried.

He was ready to let her die if she didn't kill for him. That's all he wanted her for. That's why he taught her magic. He didn't think she was wise, or special, or any of those things.

He didn't care.

The first feeling was sorrow, welling up from her throat like drowning in reverse: sorrow for her own foolishness, for the faint memory of her father, for the loss of her home, for the years she'd been hurting, for the trust she'd had, ripped away suddenly with the realization that he'd been distracting her with magic so that she wouldn't realize she was a slave.

The second feeling was anger.

"You can fight?" she asked the boy.

He looked confused. "Uh. Yeah."

"If I hold Morden, can you fight your way out?"

His eyes widened. "What? Yeah. Really?"

"Yeah."

He grinned. "Sure." Immediately his face fell. "But he’s not gonna let us out unless one of us is dead."

"Not an issue. I'm gonna blast some magic, and I need you to yell like you're hurting really bad. Then you'll lay on the ground, and when Morden comes in, he’ll think you’re dead, and I'll surprise him."

"Oh." The boy nodded. "Sure. That's a good plan." He frowned slightly, careful of his ruined face. "Hey, you're— are you supposed to be floating?"

Vasha hadn't even realized it. She looked down and found her feet several inches off the ground; her short hair floated in wisps around her cheeks, and she could feel her loose tunic fluttering at her knees. She closed her eyes and concentrated on what Morden had taught her about controlling magic, how to imagine it as a tangible thing, then imagine taking that tangible thing and crumpling it into a tiny ball of energy to release it back into the universe.

This time, she did not send the energy back. She flung it at the wall in a mote of fire, blowing out the back wall of the room and sending the boy to the ground with a scream he didn't have to fake.

Vasha landed on her feet and jumped to the side of the door. The boy sat up at the elbow, his face soot-blackened.

"What the hell!"

Vasha shushed him violently. "Lay down," she hissed. He did as he was told.

Vasha does not quite remember what happened after that. She knows Morden came in the room and she hit him with a spell, though she's not sure whether it was Hold Person or something else, because the magic left her hands with a white-hot pain, and Morden screamed on its impact. The boy moved faster than Vasha expected, coming down on Morden with a flurry of sword strikes. She watched, frozen, as Morden's body opened into bloody fissures, and found suddenly that it wasn't as easy to dismiss him when he was standing right there, yelling for her to stop this, to save him.

Vasha shoved the boy back.

"The fuck!" he yelped.

She turned to Morden, beginning to apologize, to ask if he was okay, only to see him snatching his wand from the ground as he began to utter the verbal component for Blight. On reflex, she pulled the magic from the air around her and slammed him with it, countering the spell.

The boy ran.

Vasha almost followed him.

But she looked back. She saw Morden leaning against the wall, practically holding his own arm on, blood already soaking his front.

And she couldn’t.

Morden fell. Vasha caught him. She lowered him to the ground, already whimpering apologies.

“You— bitch,” he coughed out.

She felt choked, stabbed, struck all at once. But she believed it. She’d betrayed him. Whatever Morden wanted from her, didn’t he deserve it, after all he’d done for her? Hadn’t he earned her loyalty for feeding her, clothing her, giving her a bed, teaching her magic?

“I’m sorry,” she choked out. She put a hand to her mouth, trying to quell an oncoming sob. She tasted his blood.

“Sorry doesn’t—” Morden broke off, wincing, “-doesn’t cut it. You’re- you’re going to make this up to me, you ungrateful cunt!”

Vasha nodded. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Morden was good as new within the hour. The boy had cut a path through his guard, leaving the clubhouse in chaos, but eventually they rounded up those with healing abilities. Vasha cowered in the corner of the room, watching and trying not to catch Morden’s scornful eye as his casters drained their magic on him one after another. When he was able to stand on his own, he came directly toward her.

She shrank into the corner. “Morden—”

He snatched her by the arm and jerked her to her feet.

“I don’t want to fucking look at you.”

He pulled her towards her room, walking too fast and twisting the skin of her arm in his tightening grip. She stumbled behind him, looking up at him for any hint of mercy, finding none. He threw her against the wall beside the door, where she waited, trembling, as he fished the key from his tunic. Without a word, he unlocked the door and threw it open. He began to reach for Vasha, but she scurried inside before he could get a hand on her. For a long moment he watched her, a gargoyle-still silhouette against the candlelight in the hall, then he slammed the door.

She wept.

Morden did not teach her any more magic. He took most of her books, leaving only a few of the ones they hadn’t gone over yet with a scornful remark that they’d be useless to her now that she’d cost herself her instructor. “You’ll need something to fill the hours,” he sneered.

He still came to her room often, and during those visits she could think only of the disgust on that boy’s face when he’d realized who Vasha was. Somehow the memory of his revulsion affected her more than anything. She thought on the way he’d looked at her, and what that made her. Then, one day, she wondered what that made Morden. She began to wonder that a lot. Sometimes she reproached herself for it, told herself she should just be grateful to him. More and more often, she began to think that maybe Morden was just a bad man, like that boy said. Maybe he was just like Hardwin. Maybe she was still just a little girl being pushed around.

And one day, as Morden shoved her to her knees before him, some part of Vasha died.

Then it was reborn.

A maelstrom of magic licked up from Vasha’s fingers to the back of her brain, fury and sorrow and hatred expressed in sheer energy. Her hands, curled fist-tight on her knees, trembled with hot arcane pinpricks at her palms.

When she looked up at him, her eyes were black.

“Wha—” Morden’s scorn broke into terror as Vasha cast Eyebite, filling him with an unholy fear. He began to scramble back on the bed. “Wha- how!?”

“You left me your fucking books,” Vasha snarled, feeling suddenly five times bigger, ten times older, “and I read them, and I learned.” She stepped up onto the bed, looking down at the twisting man below, old and revolting and drooling a little as he squirmed.

“You made me think I was nothing without you.” She leaned down and relished the way he shrank from her. She stopped with her face a few inches from him to listen to him whimper. She reached into his robe and took his wand, then she leaned in and whispered,

“But I’m better than you.”

As she left the room, she thought she caught the scent of piss.

That night, Vasha fought her way to freedom. She took an arrow to the back and nearly passed out from exertion as she ran away, emaciated and atrophied as she was. It had been three years since she’d seen the sky, and the galaxy-wreathed moon overhead nearly made her cry.

She was fourteen.

She spent a few months on the street before hearing that her mother had died and Dirk was now running with a man named Zeke. Immediately she set out to find him. It wasn’t hard— everyone seemed to know Zeke, and most spoke of him fondly. After asking around a bit, she found her way to a back alley where a middle-aged human man sat smoking a pipe. He answered to Zeke when asked, and told her she could find Dirk staking out a noble’s mansion uptown.

Despite the harshness of their last interaction, Vasha welled with relief when she saw Dirk. She ran to him and threw her arms around him, trying to squeeze out of him any semblance of normalcy she'd once had. He shoved her away, eyes wide with alarm.

“Vasha?”

“Yeah! Hey! Is mom really dead?"

He look at the ground. "Yeah."

Vasha looked down at her brother— she’d grown up past him in the years they’d been apart— and tried to feel the sadness she thought should come with knowing her mother was dead. Nothing came.

"What about Hardwin?" she asked.

His head jerked up so that he could glare at her. "Go away, Vasha." He began to walk away, but she jumped in front of him.

"Dirk! Don't go. What are you doing? You're with Zeke?"

He sighed. "Yeah."

"He seems nice."

"He's fine. He teaches us stuff. How to steal and shit. Look," he poked her in the sternum with an accusatory finger, "I'm a thief now. We do dangerous stuff sometimes, and I don't want you getting in the way."

"I won't be in the way! I’m really good with magic now!”

Dirk’s eyes narrowed. “Oh. /That./” He looked her up and down with a distaste impressive for someone who’d only had sixteen years to cultivate it. “Look, I don’t want you hurting anybody, or yourself. Just don’t get in my way, okay? Leave me alone.”

“But—”

“Fuck off, Vasha.”

He left her standing in the street.

Vasha went on, alone. She fell into the old patterns of destitute with a grim ease, looking for the cleanest gutters to sleep in and stealing to eat. It went well for a while. Then, raiding the stock room of a general store for a blanket one night, she heard someone murmur the incantation for Hold Person.

She went rigid; the supplies in her arms tumbled across the floor.

“Got ya,” a gruff voice said. She strained to look behind her, but couldn’t turn her head. She caught a glimpse of a big hand on a spellcasting staff. “Now,” said the voice as footsteps neared, “I’m gonna cut off your hands, and then you won’t steal from me again, capiche?”

She welled with tears. A big hand landed on her shoulder.

Then, the ring of sword on scabbard. A thick “shlunk” of blade into body. The spellcaster fell, and so did Vasha— but someone caught her.

“Hey! Hey,” said a familiar voice.

Vasha found herself looking up at the boy she’d freed from Morden. “You!”

“Yeah, me,” he said, looking her up and down with his brow furrowed. “Lucky I was here, I guess.”

Vasha gasped a thin laugh, then pulled away and stood to brush off her clothes. “Popular store to rob.”

“Not really,” the boy said, standing, too, as he absently wiped his bloody sword across his trouser leg. “This was my first time in here.”

“I meant—” Vasha shook her head. “Never mind. You look…” she took inventory of him, of the few inches he’d grown and the filled-out angles of his face. He looked like an adult. “Big,” she amended. Distantly she thought him very handsome, but something about his demeanor registered wrong, almost like he was too young for her.

“You look sad,” he replied flatly, as if people actually said that to each other.

Vasha sighed. “Yeah. Look, you— we make a good team, don’t you think? And it’s kind of destiny. I save your skin, you save mine. We should. Team up, you know? Watch each other’s backs.”

“Huh.” The boy tilted his head. “Sure. What’s you name?”

“Oh. Uh, Vasha. Blackwall.” Her mother’s name. She hadn’t said it in a while. “Yours?”

“Carver.”

“Quite a name,” she said, brows raising.

He shrugged. “It fits.”

Vasha glanced down at the dead man on the floor.

“Yeah. Sure does.”

So Carver and Vasha became friends.

They worked well together. Where Carver faltered in planning, wisdom and cunning, Vasha compensated in spades; where she was held back by physical weakness or hesitance to get her hands dirty, Carver was more than capable. He kept her safe, scared off most people who wanted to bother them. She directed him, encouraged him, kept them out of trouble. He wasn't... all there, so far as she could tell. Sometimes he didn't quite understand, or needed guidance, and she felt a strange maternal draw to help him, despite that she was younger. He needed her, and she needed him.

They kept their heads low, for the most part. Carver wanted to do big jobs like Morden used to put him to: robbing nobles and the like. Vasha wanted to keep their noses clean. Last thing they needed was someone like Lord Drake dragging them into his dungeon.

Things went well, for a time.

Carver and Vasha roamed the streets of Varrock for years, an ever-synchronous team, making friends nearly as fast as they cut down their enemies. They came to be respected in their own right, and could often make good coin on a little bodyguard work for the city’s more paranoid gang lords. Vasha could generally keep trouble at bay with just a warning flash of magic or a nasty breath of necrotic poison, but where she failed, Carved wouldn’t hesitate to draw his blade. Maybe Vasha felt a little bad about Carver’s violence, but she was bitter. She’d been beaten and raped and used in every conceivable way. Surely it was her turn to watch someone hurt.

Over time, Vasha grew into fine hips and harsh cheekbones, and was soon at no loss for suiters. She took a few, though never got the taste of Morden out of her mouth. She preferred being with women (which she discovered quite by accident when she once mistook a sexual proposition for a business one and had an unexpectedly wonderful night) but most of the women who ran that way paired off quickly in the streets, or else seemed too good for Vasha to approach. She met a nice girl right after turning twenty, and thought that she was the sort of person she could settle with. The girl objected to Carver, though, saying that Vasha should ditch him, so Vasha pulled away, feeling betrayed. She wonders sometimes what would have happened if she had chosen that girl over Carver, but it might not have mattered anyway.

Dirk fucked everything up.

He’d done some shit— some stealing, lying, murdering shit— and managed to frame her for it. Left her name on all his contracts, said it every chance he could. He spread rumors about her. He got his friends to corroborate them. And suddenly Varrock was not safe for Vasha.

Carver left with her. They holed up in a nearby city for a while before the one of the nobles Dirk had wronged sent his goons after them. It soon became apparent that as long as they were in Pendallin, there would be no rest.

Farmouth became the goal. They scrimped. They saved. They stole. Vasha forgot what it was like to spend two nights in one place. More often than not, she woke up thinking she was still at Morden’s.

The road got no easier. She lost Carver to his own avarice. She found purpose in wishing Dirk death, then lost herself for the brief time she thought she’d actually killed him. She stumbled, penniless, toward Farmouth, so desperate that she promised years of her life for a few weeks on a boat. She was strapped to a table and stripped of her magic, screaming and weeping as each needle tore a new shred from her connection to the universe. She spent a few weeks that way, cut-off and helpless, and decided that she could live that way no longer. She was nine years old again, shaking in the cold, powerless, friendless.

When she went to the arena, it was with the tightly held realization that she was not meant to live without her magic. Waiting behind the door, too numb to weep, Vasha put the cold resin of the pendant to her lips and tried to remember the face of her father.

She couldn’t.

There in the dark, she accepted that she was meant to die.

Jael had other ideas.

Her whole life, Vasha has relied on men to keep her safe. As she leans against Jael in the dark, feeling the warmth of her powerful shoulders and the curve of her narrow hips, she thinks that perhaps she was looking in the wrong place entirely.

Maybe that’s why she likes Jael so much.

Jael looks at her and sees someone who deserves to live, magic or not.