Summer the 51st, 519 AV
Broken. That was all Oresnya’s life consisted of. Broken things. Broken things and what she did with them.
It began with her birth. The moment she entered the world, she was already part of a broken thing. The Symenestra way of life. With her people, life required death. That was not meant to be the way of things, but it was and always continued to be. Oresnya lost two sisters to that way of life, and those lost seemed to get forgotten. To remedy that brokenness, she had resolved to come to Wind Reach, to bring her sister’s memory to where it might not end up lost forever.
But the journey had not been direct, and during it, Oresnya had met many broken people, had become a part of a broken family, and had done her part to put it back together. She had left it still imperfect and half-broken and, in doing so, had broken her own heart. Now, to not break the oath she had made to herself and her late sister, she had left more things to be mended, but she knew those would have to wait.
Here, in Wind Reach though, she had just been confronted with more broken things. Broken people accepting their broken system, just as the Symenestra had done in Kalinor. The mountain itself had seemed ready to break last season, as the world shook and pieces of rocky cliff faces fell away. But even her quiet day to day life was filled with broken things. Most often, all Oresnya found herself trusted with at her work was the clothing of Deks, and Deks most often only came for the Fabric’s services if their clothing was tattered or torn. Mending torn fabric seemed to be Oresnya’s only task, but she did it to the best of her ability in hopes it would ingratiate her with those above her.
It had not.
Sure, it had impressed Felicity, to some extent. Perhaps impressed wasn’t the right word, but it had proved that Oresnya was useful, that she had a place here, that she shouldn’t completely dismissed and ignored. However, every success Oresnya had had bought her disdain from the Inarta who worked under Felicity. That too had come to a head in the middle of last season when one of them had had Oresnya dragged to the Fighting Pits and forced her to fight. Oresnya had left with a myriad of broken bones, but it was perhaps her Inarta cohort who left with the worse wound. In a desperate bid to save herself, Oresnya had bit the other woman and left a potent dose of venom in the woman’s shoulder. Symenestra venom was a frightening weapon, and it had eaten away a large amount of flesh.
The woman was sitting at her station in their little shop, working quietly and diligently on the work that had been assigned to her. Quiet work from an Inarta was not a regular occurrence, but she sat a little apart from the other seamstresses she had once counted as friends. The initial weeks following the fight, the other seamstresses had flooded their fellow Inarta with their support, and Oresnya had been unsure if she would survive the season. But as the weeks wore on and the injured woman showed little progress in her recovery, the woman began to distance themselves from her, certain she would soon be demoted in her standing. Even as Oresnya watched her work today, she could spot the trembling of the woman’s hand and the lack of surety in her actions. The skin over the wound was as healed as it would ever be, but there was a grotesque scar where the skin had sloughed away and had to regrow that covered a better part of her should.
Though it hadn’t been her fault that the fight had begun, Oresnya still felt a modicum of responsibility for her fellow seamstress’s current state, and she wished she could do something to repair the relationship between them. Not that there had ever really been one. Except to snicker at and belittle her, the other workers had had little to do with the Symenestra in their midst. Felicity had helped to further that rift by segregating Oresnya to a place where she was practically out of sight.
Realizing she had been staring for several chimes and not wanting to get caught doing so, Oresnya looked at the pair of bryda in her hands. She had been staring at it for the better of a bell and still didn’t know what to do with it. One leg was coming apart at the seams but was so threadbare that every time Oresnya tried to sew it back together it only ripped through the fragile fabric and frayed the material more. Her knowledge in tailoring and sewing was limited. The only thing she knew how to do was stitch a simple pattern into things that needed to be held together. Anything beyond that, and she was at a loss.
Picking up the pants to try once more, Oresnya frowned as a whole corner of the fabric frayed completely, leaving her with nothing but individual threads hanging loosely. She swore in Symenos and dropped the project back on to her table. She looked up to find several people giving her a wary look, Felicity included. It was the common reaction any time she spoke her native tongue.
But one eye that caught hers was the woman she had bitten, and an idea, likely a bad one, began growing in Oresnya’s mind. Gathering all of her supplies and putting them into the basket that kept her table tidy, she placed the bryda on top of it all, picked it up, and walked over to the woman in question. Her mind raced, trying to think of what was the best thing to say, not wanting to be overly forward with an apology but not wanting to appear to be using the woman either.
In the end, she settled on the truth. “I need your help.”
