Gifts
None

Though emotionally detached from the decisions she makes, Althea is in no way detached from her emotions. Her brutal history has ingrained a paranoid psychosis regarding challenge to her authority, and she is quick to anger and punish when it comes to "mutinous behavior". Driven and defined by protocol and rules, Althea governs the men serving under her with an iron fist, and will not tolerate any challenge of authority. When still a young soldier she witnessed how one man breaking rank snowballed and brought down an entire battalion, and is determined not to let mutiny bring about the downfall of her soldiers.

Though swift and sometimes harsh, her punishments generally are just and fit the crime; they help her hold the reigns of her company. Her policy can pretty much be summed up in one statement: "Either you're with me, and you follow the rules... Or you're against me - and I will bury you." She is quick to give scathing tongue lashings or, controversially enough with those not used to the "tough love" of good Weaponsmasters, physical ones ones as well.

With the nation of Valdemar at war with its southern neighbor Karse, it wasn't long before Althea realized that the 'easiest' way to diffuse into the new and strange society was to join the army. She enlisted in the Guard and was quickly shoved into training; with her scrawny appearance and pitifully inadequate grasp of Valdemaran, Althea was an easy target for bullies - but in some sick and twisted way, the tormenting and beatings were at least attention of some kind - by far preferable to the utter lack of regard she had fled from.

And so it went for the young northern barbarian; she made it her business to learn nearly flawless Valdemaran. She did well in all her training and within just shy of two years she was shoved directly to the front lines. She quickly proved her competence as a scout, messenger, and smaller-battle skirmisher; during larger battles, she was also often utilized with the mounted archers; her slight proportions generally kept her from the front lines, which probably saved her life given the way the Karsites regularly tore through those poor souls.

The enemy's fanatical religious zeal was not the only reason for high casualties in Althea's company, however. Her Captain, though a decent enough tactician, was a man with a soft heart - he was hesitant, often hemming and hawing over major decisions. If there ever were one truth of war, that truth would be that time is a luxury bought with the lives of men. For two years Althea served under the cautious Captain's command; for two years she watched the lives of his men and women (her comrades and friends) trickle through his fingers like so much water. Althea secretly wished that something would happen to put someone more decisive in command - she could never have dreamt what would happen next...

The Karsites, in the thick of battle, had managed to wrap their forces around the company on three sides. The 'right' decision was clear - to 'cut the losses' so to speak, call the retreat, and run like hell through the last open side. While many of the men would not have been able to disengage and retreat, there at least would have been a chance for some to live. Unfortunately, the Captain couldn't bring himself to make a decision that would damn so many of his troops. Though the battle was not quite yet lost, a single man broke rank - and chaos erupted. Half of the troops panicked and mutinied, trying to run for their lives even though retreat had not been called; the other half uncertainly tried to fight on. The rebels and loyalists physically clambered over one another in the field. With the Valdemarans quite literally tripping over themselves, the Karsites hemmed them in with sickeningly swift ease.

The slaughter was terrible. Even those soldiers who knelt to the ground in surrender were viciously beaten and trampled to death by vehemently triumphant Karsites. Althea, only 21 years old and faced with her imminent doom, entertained one last charge before she was knocked from the saddle and tortured. By all means, she should have died of the grievous injuries she acquired, but she didn't; instead, she awoke to find herself, along with about 30 other prisoners, tethered to poles to be sacrificed to demons the Karsite priests summoned. The young girl took charge and managed to free herself and her fellow prisoners - and in the heat of the flight from demons, she made a decision that would forever change the way she viewed justice... (See "Forged in Battle", below, for the story of Althea)

When the escaped prisoners, bludgeoned to within inches of their lives, eventually reached a Guard outpost, they were treated. Not all made it, and not all lived when they did make it - but those who did spoke fervently of Althea's bravery and pledged themselves wholeheartedly to her service. The army decided to make the best use of the resources, and Althea quickly was shoved up the ranks to become an advisor. She "apprenticed", so to speak, in the heat of war, leading men on the battlefield and learning from the most brilliant commanders of Valdemar. She worked her way up the ranks even after the war with Karse ended, riding and leading soldiers against bandits, brigands, and (ironically enough) northern barbarians. By the time hostilities erupted with Hardorn, Althea was more than ready to claim her place as a Captain and tactician - and that's exactly where she was placed.

~Forged in Battle~

Althea reigned in her long-legged hunter with a last minute yank of the reigns, wheeling the beast desperately as she looked for a direction not saturated with Karsite soldiers. She and the rest of the battlefield-scouts had fled to the crest of the hill where the noncombatants stood side by side with the Captain, all staring wide eyed at the carnage that was hastily closing in on them.

"They haven't closed the East yet, Captain," one of Althea's fellow scouts shouted above the din. The Captain blinked stupidly and looked to the east, but he didn't seem to comprehend.  The moments for action were slipping away, just like the lives of the soldiers on the battlefield below...

"Call RETREAT!" another scout shouted, this one afoot; heapproached his dazed superior and grabbed him roughly by the shoulder. "Call RETREAT Captain, we still have time to run a'fore they close us in -"

The Captain, again, turned a confused gaze to the East, then back to his assailant. His brown eyes flashed and flickered with fear and guilt in turns. "The men in the thick of it -"

"Call it NOW, Captain!" "NOW! We haven't any more time!" "PLEASE! I have children -" The shrill voices of the noncombatants, scouts, and advisors swarmed and overpowered one another until they became an inarticulate jumble of sounds, inseparable from the stiflingly close screams of the dying. Now, their voices were not discernable - Althea scanned the panic contorted faces of those around her, then focused back on the Captain. Though she could not hear his words, she could read his lips -

"I can't. I can't." Tears streamed down his worry-lined face; he had never been a man of action, but this time he seemed to know the price his own hesitation would demand - and at that moment the northern woman hated him more than anything or anyone else that walked the face of the earth. The realization struck her like a blow to the stomach - he was unforgivably weak. He couldn't see the forest from the trees; he couldn't cut his losses and sacrifice the few to save the many. He was soft and feeble; he didn't deserve the stripes of command on his sleeve - he didn't even deserve to live. If he had made a decision - any decision, either to stand and fight or to run and flee, what happened next would never have come to be...

One of the scouts broke, and who could blame him at that moment? Though Althea didn't hear his strangled cry of exasperation, she saw the flurry of hooves as he urged his sweat-streaked mount down the hill, galloping due east at breakneck speed. He couldn't possibly have known his act was to be the final blow that brought the Valdemaran company to its knees - how could he have? How could he have known that his action would be the damnation of the entire battalion? As he urged his horse madly across the back lines, the men in the lines witnessed his retreat - and it snowballed. Men mutinied, directly disobeying orders as they clamored over one another, trying to follow the retreating scout; others, who hadn't heard the bugle for retreat and resolutely decided to stay the course, were hacked down mercilessly once their comrades so readily left them unguarded. If it hadn't been for that one man inciting the mutiny, the Valdemarans could have held their own - the battle could have been won. Divided, however, they didn't stand a chance; the Karsites easily finished surrounding the Valdemarans, and not a single man escaped through the quickly blocked eastern escape.

Even if they hadn't been so soundly hemmed in, the soldier's spirits were broken; how is a man to fight on when his trusted and beloved comrades had left him to die? The sudden change in strength was almost palatable. Hands went up in surrender, men fell resolutely to their knees -

And then, the true slaughter began.

An unwitting gasp of absolute horror tore from Althea's throat as she saw the first kneeling man knocked to the ground; she watched in revulsion from afar as Karsite soldiers swarmed over him, kicking and stomping, spitting and stabbing. The surrendering soldiers gaped, aghast - some tried to leap to their feet to put up a fight, but they were never really given a chance. With an unbelievable surge of renewed energy, the Karsites swarmed over their weakened quarry like a fierce wave of malice. If she hadn't witnessed it with her own eyes, she would never have believed men were capable of such pure evil - as it were, all she could do was watch as her friends - her comrades - were massacred right before her eyes...

Sickening apprehension flushed coldly through her body as realization seeped into her mind - she was in the middle of it; she was about to die. No - not die - she was about to be torn to pieces, beaten to a bloody pulp into the unforgiving earth - and all because of the indecisive woes of one man.

"Let it never be said that I bent my knee in surrender to any man," Althea whispered in perhaps the most passionate utterance of her life. The young woman - not even yet 22 years in age - drew her sword and kicked her mount into a mad gallop directly into the unwitting Karsite ranks. She didn't even let out a scream of defiance to warn them - she just slammed into the thick of them, slashing and kicking, not screaming until she felt the first bite of metal into her skin. A hundred blades screamed against her light leather armor, eagerly seeking - and finding - every opening and covering her with their deadly caresses...

 Her arm screamed in protest as her sword caught in the body of a Karsite, but she rode on, driving her frothing and screaming mount through the mass until the powerful blow of a mace connected solidly with her chest, unhorsing her and knocking the life clean from her body...

Or rather, almost knocking the life clean from her body - would that it had. She was vaguely aware of the men swarming over her, stripping her of her meager armor; she drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to even draw in the breath to scream from the staggeringly painful kicks and stomps, stabs and slashes - and later, the rapes. Eventually, even those whose wrath she had incurred became bored with their long since 'dead' prey, and she was abandoned to lie among the rest of the slaughtered.

By all means, she should have died - many of her comrades had died that day of much less and had left the world in much less pain than she found herself in when she awoke. It must have been some cruel god's trick to leave her lingering - or perhaps her life was fueled by her internal, bitter hunger for revenge - and a startlingly intense need to win, a desire to prove to someone - to anyone and everyone - that she would not be defeated.

Whatever brought Althea back from the dead, it worked; with one eye swollen completely shut and the other only opened a slit, most of her ribs cracked, and an innumerable assortment of broken bones and oozing wounds, the woman slowly became aware of her naked, unrecognizably battered body being dragged through the center of a cheering crowd.

She was being dragged with about 30 other stripped prisoners, all of them in various degrees of grievous injury. As she drifted into a more keen sense of consciousness, she realized that she was tethered to the others by crude, chafing ropes tied about her wrists, ankles, and neck. Some of her comrades stumbled uncertainly as they tried to pull the weight of those being dragged as lifelessly as she. At first she was sure they were being dragged towards the center of camp so the soldiers could have 'second dibs' on them, but oddly enough, none of the taunting soldiers laid a finger on the prisoners. Some did, however, spit ale at the hostages; the foul brew burned and stung her open wounds, but she smothered any signs of consciousness.

The brilliant rays of sunlight were fleeing from the sky by the time they finally reached the center of the camp; Karsite soldiers gathered around to listen to men in robes speaking with great fervor over the broken prisoners. It was hard enough for her to understand Valdemaran; she didn't have a snowball's chance in hell at understanding their foreign babble, but she recognized the ornately robed as being the gods-cursed priests who directed the Karsites. Althea knew at her very core that before it was all said and done, things were going to get a lot more ugly...

She was right; men came forward to roughly undo the bindings holding them all together; they started wrapping and lashing prisoners in threes and fours around poles. The priests chanted and paced among their captives, whipping those who resisted (and most who didn't) into submission. Althea took the lashes without protest; she was tied with two others, and there she hung limply, waiting for whatever cruel death the monsters had planned.

The nothingness stretched on and on; in some absent corner of her mind, Althea wondered if this was what it was like when someone was waiting to be beheaded - she strained with her entire being to find out what was happening, but was rewarded only with their frenzied, foreign babble. It seemed like hours they chanted and shouted, the sounds angry and frightening to the bloody Althea, hanging limply in their midst...

When the last rays of sun fled from the sky, however, the atmosphere of the camp changed with an almost visible snap; the men hurried to get back to their tents in a fearful frenzy. The Valdemaran prisoners, however, were left in the middle of the camp, left dejectedly to the deepening, eerie darkness, waiting submissively for whatever unpleasantness the enemy had planned next...

The silence stretched until it was almost unbearable; it seemed to stretch and settle over them like spun glass. The only sound was the ragged, irregular breathing of the beaten prisoners - they were too afraid to make any other noise, for fear of shattering that fragile 'blanket'.

After everything she had just been through, the devoid of sensory information - sight, sound, smell, taste - might have seemed like a respite - it should have been a respite  - but it wasn't. No; the utter lack of everything was too eerily close to death. A crushing sense of dread had settled over them, and that fragile glass was feeling more and more like lead; there was more going on here than was apparent. "What's happening?" Althea croaked, unable to stand the silence any longer.

"Thought you were dead," an emotionless voice replied. No one stirred; a paralysis born of shock and fear dictated their every move now.

"Well I'm not. What's happening?" the young woman demanded again, a little irritation seeping into her voice. Her spirit was not broken - she would not give these Karsite monsters that final victory over her, and she had no patience for any of her comrades who would.

The uncomfortable silence was the only reply for a long time; finally, someone replied.  "Demons. We're being sacrificed to their demons."

"We'd be better off dead," replied a distant sounding voice, its owner speaking from an unbelieving daze. "They say their demons devour souls; tonight we become nothing."

In that one moment - that single, trivial second, something inside Althea morphed and changed. She was disgusted by the way her comrades had given up. "You have already become nothing."

Her words were harsh, but she meant them with her entire being. "If we're going to get the hell out of here, I need more slack - NOW!" Though Althea had not been born with a commanding aura, she acquired one in that single, decisive moment in time. The men tethered with her didn't even question her command; they wiggled and huddled closer to the jagged wooden stake, taking splinters without complaint. Althea, meanwhile, sucked in a painful breath and began working her blood-slicked hands back and forth, working the minor slack in the rope to her wrist bindings, ignoring as her vigor reopened fresh wounds...

And, after what seemed like forever, she was able to slide one hand out. After that, things moved as if in a blur. No one dared to speak nor to cheer as Althea stumbled in blind pain to the nearest tent; she yanked a metal spike from the corner and ran back to the next pole, chiseling, yanking, and fumbling at the ties of her countrymen with swollen fingers until they, too, were freed and followed suit. And so they moved; Althea didn't even look at the faces of those she was freeing. She almost began to feel hope - could this possibly be so easy - could they possibly escape without some terrible hitch?

A distant, chilling howl was the cruel reply to her silent query. Time was a luxury they no longer had.

"They're coming - oh gods, the demons are coming -"

"Where are the Karsite horses?" Althea hissed, numbly finishing freeing the men she had been working on.

"What?"

"Their gods-damned horses - where are they?" Though she kept her tone low, her voice was viciously commanding and left no room for protest. Several of the men who had been awake during the parade through camp babbled at once. "If you can walk, do it - carry others if you can - leave those who won't make it behind." No; Althea would not lose sight of the forest for the trees - she knew that war was a game of sacrifices.

Althea was the last to reach the horses; she dragged herself onto the back of the first startled mount whose mane she was able to wrap her fingers around; she hugged herself around the beast as tightly as she could, and without hesitation kicked it into a gallop directly into the other horses, spooking them into a stampede. By now, she heard the Karsites stirring within their tents, but none dared leave the safety of their pavilions now - not when the strange, unnatural howling was growing closer by the second.

She never looked back, even when the demonic sounds imaginable only in the darkest, most terrifying nightmares became deafening, even when the cold breath of the inhuman hunters licked the back of her neck. She somehow knew that if she were to look, the last shreds of her sanity would be wrenched away, lost forever. The things in close pursuit were never meant for the realms of man - their screams were haunting and ethereal, unearthly and offensive to mortal ears. The horses screeched and frothed, their eyes rolling in wild terror as their thundering gallop became more frenzied by the second.

And yet, there was no imminent escape for the prisoners; there was nowhere to run nor to hide from the wicked predators in close pursuit...

The demons would fall back if they had a warm body to tear to pieces; they were hungry - all it would take was one person, Althea realized slowly. If one person were to fall back, the demons would swarm upon them and give the rest of those in flight the kind of head start they needed to escape imminent doom.

Even with her mind in an uncontrollable whirlwind of doubt and fear, Althea knew what she had to do; she gently pulled the mane of her horse, whispering comfortingly into its back-turned ear.

The others began to pull ahead, and Althea felt herself being swallowed by the darkness of no return - she was about to die, but through her death, many others would live. She was no hypocrite; she was prepared to end her life in a most horrific way in order to accomplish what she knew, in her heart, was right...

The young woman absently took note of the last fleeing Valdemaran, now abreast with her... Though the initial moment of recognition was a jolt, everything slowly sifted into a trancelike daze as Althea looked from the Captain to the tent spike still clutched in one swollen hand, and back again; everything whirred wildly in her mind. Two righteous factions of her screamed for two very different forms of justice; her moral compass became blurry as she blindly clawed and foundered to make a decision -

That decision was heralded by the muffled groan of the Captain; he was already tumbling from the back of his beast before his confused gaze shifted to his naked chest. Blood poured and ran down his chest, seeping around the metal tent spike buried to the hilt there. Althea heard his strangled screams of momentary terror - and then, the longer screams of unbearable pain as the demons swarmed over him; she heard the wet sound of tearing hide and the challenging snarls of the creatures fighting to taste his sweet flesh.

Everything became absolutely crystalline, in that moment; she felt no regret squeezing at her heart, no remorse over what she had just done. No; today was not her day to die. She would have sacrificed her life this night - but it had not been necessary. No, tonight, the Captain had paid the final debt to his men for his unforgivable weakness, for the hesitations that had led to their ruthless massacre. Althea had passed judgment and made the decision he would never have made for himself, and in doing so, she had saved the rest of the men. In some twisted way, she had, in her first act as a commander, done that which he had never been able to do - she had assessed, and cut loose the losses.

No; let them never say she lost sight of the forest for the trees.  Ever.