Understand, it isn't a bad attitude that gives me pause to relate this tale, my friends, but pain; I AM a friendly sort, but I have my issues.

I never knew my father...at least not that I remember. I am told he was a good man, but "good" is such a relative term, isn't it? Based upon the perspective of who is telling the story and who is listening to it, aye? My mother was a "good" woman, too...she raised me, and fed me, and made sure I knew what I needed to know to survive, but from the perspective of the many farm wives who's husbands she "entertained" in order to keep my belly full, she was anything but "good". I have no use for the words "good" or "evil"...people do what they have to in order to survive, and that's just life. But I digress...

I was never fond of hard work...sigh. Would that I was, I might have a parent left to talk to, though more likely that would be because I was on the other side of life WITH them, and not that I would have been able to save the one of them that I ever knew. And as it happened, I was avoiding work the day my mother was killed. Down at a creek fishing, and swimming, and being as complete a lazy bones as ye've met. Had the wind not been right, I might not have been with her when she died. But it was. And I did smell the smoke, and I did run to the camp, and I did in fact see it set upon by a throng of bandits riding under the banner of a lion rampant on a brazier of black flame on a field of red. They were all setting torch to anything that would take light; hay, tents...people.

Mother was a fetching woman, and so she escaped the fires, but she didn't escape the bandits who enjoyed her "services" for free before sticking a knife in her and leaving her for dead - a scene I watched from the cover of the undergrowth at the edge of the camp. She caught my eyes once during that ordeal, and with a look only a son would comprehend stayed me in my place before I did something courageously stupid like trying to save her. So I watched. Watched while they raped her and watched while they mutilated her.

When they'd left, I ran to her. She was all but gone...everyone was. But she did speak to me then, spraying me with the blood that rose up from her torn internals. She said "Find Sannah and avenge us, my son."

"Who is Sannah?" I cried. But she was slipping away from me. All she could reply before leaving me forever was "Sister. Your sister, Sannah"

I didn't know I had a sister, and I don't know WHY I didn't know I had one. But I'm looking for her, and when I find her, a lot of people are going to pay.