Role

Chapter 1

The Talath had lived on the plains for as long as their oral history could
remember. A simple people they lived as one with the lands, hunting game,
foraging in the low mountain ranges, and raising small plots of wheat and
corn where pastures allowed it. For the most part their life was hard, but
somewhat idyllic in many ways. They traded with the elves from the north that
traveled the plains, with the strange childlike Halflings who had begun to
make their homes in the earth to the west, even at times with the humans who
had built a small settlement to the south. There were dwarves who had
apparently carved halls of stone within a mountain to the east, but the
Talath could not fathom anyone who did not wish to live beneath the broad
expanse of the heavens, and so had no dealings with their like.

Oaneewke was born when the moon sat dark in the sky, a night which usually
portended ominous things, when the dark spirits often roamed and made
mischief. Yet at the moment of her birth, when her lungs first filled with
the gift of air (known to her people as the breath of the Ancient ones) her
first cry, the announcement of new life, was met with a blinding arc of light
across the heavens as a flaming star passed over head. And so it was she was
named Oa-nee-wke, begifted of light. The tribal shaman foretold that this
omen from the Ancients would give the child visions of that which was, is and
would be, that Oaneewke would see things that others could not and live in
times beyond time. Her gift would be a great blessing to her people and she
should study the ways of forest witches, such a heavy burden for an infant
who was yet to see her first moonrise.