Aria

Things hadn’t always been bad. Aria could remember a time when her parents smiled, laughed and even kissed. Her mother used to sing to her, and her father would sit by her bed and tell her stories at bedtime. Even when things started to get bad, they didn’t get bad all at once. At first her father only drank at the end of the work week. At first he would only yell when he was drunk. By the time drinking at the end of the work week turned into drinking at the end of the work day and the yelling turned to hitting, something began to die in Aria, something called hope. Wolf, her father would always apologize when he was sober, he would swear never to hit Lilly, Aria’s mother, again. And for a day or two he wouldn’t, but it never lasted, before long he could no longer hold onto a job and Lily had to go find work herself. The only job she could find where she could bring young Aria along was for a local healer, mixing potions and delivering medicine. Before long, after bad nights, Aria would have to use the salves on her mother and bind up strains and cuts. Eventually, Wolf stopped apologizing and even, on a few occassions, took out his frustrations on Aria. Aria decided to look for work herself.

While she was out looking for a job she saw a girl walking down the street nursing a dislocated shoulder. “I can fix that for you” she offered. Suddenly she recognized the girl from a long time ago, before things got bad at home. "Katya?" Looking at Katya’s injuries they reminded her of her mother’s injuries. “Where did you get so banged up?” When Katya told her about the Arena an idea hatched in Aria’s mind that she could go patch up the fighters at the arena. When she tried to get work there the only one who needed help was the overworked, underpaid undertaker. He had Aria clean up the blood (and worse) and help lift the bodies of the dead fighters and animals. Aria was hard-working and not at all squeamish, so at the end of the day he let her take home the kitchen scraps. Far from finding the work onerous Aria liked the idea of bringing peace to the souls who had died such a violent death. She felt she was building up a karmic stockpile of kindness and healing. Before long some of the fighters began to come to her to have her bind up their wounds. One man, a Bahman like herself, gave her a gift just before he went into his last battle, pouch on a leather cord that held a single red tigerseye. “For luck” he had said, and then his luck ran out.

Aria, continues to work when she can, she brings the scraps to her parents and then, fleeing the ghosts of her parents, she hangs out with Katya as much as she can, and is forming a bond with Berhanu who has shown some interest in her knowledge of herbs and tinctures, comparing them with his use of formulas and smithing. Lately… ever since her friend in the arena died just after leaving her the gift of the red tigerseye, Aria has noticed that the wounds she’s been binding seem to heal faster and better. She wonders if the two things are related. (Note “ghosts of her parents” is not meant to imply that they are dead, only that they seem dead inside to Aria)