When I first met the child, she was still quite young, already the sharp inquisitive look beginning to mask itself behind a face of calm gentleness. I had come looking for a body capable of selling my wares in my absence, yet was astonished that this place marketed employees of such tender years. Reflecting back to those times, it seems incomprehensible that these people could be called anything but slaves. Their whole life was reduced to the servitude of another, allowed to keep only a paltry portion of the earnings they collected for their master merchants. Thus, paying her contract, young Nadia was bound to my service.

Now, as you may recall, our friend Buntaro owned and operated a popular tavern in the woods near Yew. This is the location that I charged Nadia with the proper trade for my wares, the usual assortment of scribe paraphernalia including runebooks, spellbooks and many, many recall scrolls. My hand still trembles with the thought of how many of those cursed scrolls I have created over the years, but I digress. She handled her duties diligently and without complaint, and it was only many years later that the realization that she was asked to stand in the harshness of the open weather dawned on me.

I had never considered myself to be a cruel man. In fact, I often thought of myself as fairly kind-hearted and generous, helping friend and stranger alike, often without their request. I can see now that my kindness may have overlooked this slavechild of mine, for as much as I attempted to attend to her needs, I was unprepared for what was about to happen.

The time had come for Buntaro to announce to us his plans for the great remodelling, the pleasant barkeep was about to get a facelift. It was during this time that young Nadia decided she had enough of the merchant life and slipped into the shadows of the nearby forest. When the building had been erected, I was surprised to find the face of a different young girl in the place of where my vendor should have been, who called herself Nadya. She told me that she had been bought as a replacement slave by a young woman who matched the descriptions of my former assistant, and this is how the scribe to be first bought her freedom.

It was some time later that the trusted knight Gilgamesh met me one day with an interesting tale. It seems that he had the fortune of finding a young girl that he knew to be my former vendor, although she gave no signs of recognizing him. She shared with him her desire to find and ride a horse of her own, and the mighty warrior offered to accompany her to a place where they may be found and tamed, to which she happily accepted. Strangely, learning this brought me both joy and discomfort. I was elated to know that she was still alive, of course, but my discomfort was brought on with concerns about what I feared she may be planning on doing.

Many years later, she recounted to me some of the things that happened during her first tentative steps away from the protection she had known before her escape. My fears had been correct, for she had been testing her mortality by learning how to employ the arts of magic against the less powerful of the aggressive monsters of the land, no doubt training to duel larger more dangerous adversaries. But her encounters had given her many new opportunities and experiences that I could never have safely been able to share with her, such as her first near-fatal experience.

It had come early in her independence, as it had with many adventurers. She was still learning many techniques in using combative magic, this time locked in a mortal test with a troll. These fights took their toll on her mentally, for she only had enough ability to cast a higher circle spell with some success, and then only once before having to renew her ability to think clearly. During this particular duel, however, she sensed a spirit nearby, distracting her enough to not take notice of the repulsive visage of a giant spider approaching. In fact, she had just cast a poison with the intent of draining the troll of the last of its life when the spider returned the favour, surprising her by injecting its poison into her right leg with a frighteningly real and painful bite, destined to drain her of her life.

The pain of the attack, the surprise of the spider, and the convulsions starting to work its way through her body was too much for her young senses to endure, for she started her mount down the road in search of assistance. It never occurred to her, she told me, to inoculate the poison with magic. It was as she heard the death howl of the troll that darkness overtook her vision, her dreams of independence would've been lost if not for the presence of a wandering healer that managed to save her. When she came to, it was in the safety of some trees, not in the openness near the mountains as she last saw. Looking about, she was horrified to find the slain corpse of her horse, Smoke, bleeding silently from wounds created by swords and arrows. The healer told her that brigands had arrived on the scene shortly after he did, and he was only able to save the life of one.

This was the pattern through which she lived her life, collecting new spells as she strengthened her mind and body. When the foreigner Genjuro had invited her into our fellowship, I marvelled at the changes in her. Although the intelligence and kindness was still there, she had the look of one who has seen life and accepted it for what it was, the look of quiet acceptance. Upon offering to complete her spellbook, it somehow did not surprise me that she had managed to collect all but seven spells in her travels, although I suspect she had purchased the one eight circle spell that was entered, Resurrection.

Our patriarch, Aeolus, leapt at the chance to take another aspiring mage under his guiding arm, and the adventures these two have had together and in the company of others is another chronicle in itself.
I am honoured and humbled by her choice to become a scribe in her own right, although her steadfast dedication to testing her mortality often worries me. One day, I fear, I may have to erase Nadia from the pages of the living, but her strength has given others strength, and for that I am grateful.