Role

Chapter 4

Therisa was in her adolescence now, but far more mature than most girls her
age, mostly due to the hard times in which she had lived. While at market
one day buying bread for her family, she met a young gnomish man by the name
of Keeneno. They talked for a while and became friends. Freindship blossomed
into love and, just over a year after they met, Therisa and Keeneno were
married. It was a joyous, yet small ceremony. Few of the extended family
would come, due to the troubles had at the farm in the past. Not long after,
Therisa gave birth to s beautiful son, and named him Holian after his
grandfather. Life was happy for a short while.
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Holian was four years old when Therisa found herself alone in the world.
She came home one day to find her child screaming over the body of her
husband, his throat slit from ear to ear, his blood pooled on the ground
beneith him. The flies were a cloud above and on the body, sticking to
the blood and all it touched. Holian had blood over his face and hands from
touching his father's corpse. All of this is firmly impacted in Therisa's
mind, a stillframe she sees when she sleeps or if she just closes her eyes.
She grabbed her child and ran out into the street, not knowing where she
was headed, too frightened to even scream for help. She found herself at
the door of her parent's house. The door was ajar, and she puched it open,
rushing inside. And there, seated at their dining room chairs, were her
loving parents, the parents who has taught her to till the earth, to plant
living things and grow them, who had taught her about the cycles of life.
It seemed that they were to rejoin the cycle they had always spoken about.
They were tied to the chairs tightly, their heads obscured by sacks, but
their throats all too visible. They were dead.
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Therisa did not know which way to turn. Her family she knew was dead, her
extended family fled and unknown to her. She went to the only place she
could think of. She went to the Tribunals. They had been unhelpful before,
and seemed equally unhelpful now, even with the evidence of three murders.
They said it was likely the work of anonymous robbers and that there was
nothing they could do. Therisa was at a loss. After the burial of her
parents and her husband, she took her child back home to attempt to pull
their lives into some semblence of order. It was then that she found the
note. It had been left on her bed for her to find, but she had not been to
bed, at least not that bed, until just then. The note said that the deaths
are the last warning. Someone would be by to get the last of the money from
the farm, and she had better have it or she was dead.
-----
Therisa gathered all of the money which remained in the bank account and
awaited the thieves. The money amounted to less than ten gold, all told,
the last of the family "fortune." It took only a few days before Therisa
was greeted by strange men at her door in the night.