In her distant youth, she thinks she had been happy. She cannot remember her family, only scraps and shadows of maybe and perhaps remain of them in her recollections, the endless march of time burying them where they fell, screaming. It is odd. She cannot remember the village, her family in great detail, but she can remember the screams, the echoing mocking laughter as the monsters came for them. She cannot remember those in great detail either, though she can hear them at times, when the moon is full, their voices carried on the winds....
And yet, in a way, does that truly matter? It had been ages since she saw them, ages since she ran into the wastes between the oasis's, to escape looming death. It was a hard life, as she would move through the sands and the stones, but as the years turned, it was the only life she knew.
She is not sure when the changes began. Was it when she was sick, having eaten something at a pool she could never find again, as she lay on the edges of life and death, as she felt the cold creep into her bones and flesh, as she felt herself stilling, only for the sun to rise once more? Was it when she slept before the broken ruins, before the great statues, and heard them whisper things to her, instructing her in the mysteries of the hidden word and of the long dead? She does not know. It was a slow thing, a gradual shift, though there are moments when she wonders... could she at those points have turned away from the course?
As the alternative, on reflection, was to die, it is perhaps a moot point.
She survived, and grew strong. She hunted, killed and ate, and took strength into herself, though as the years turned on, she would hunt less and less, taking only what she needed.
In what may have been her twelfth year since her village died, she stumbled across civilization, across a caravan. She would talk, broken and halting, and trade small trinkets for goods more useful to life in the wastes. And then, hidden, she would follow them. For weeks, she observed the city, for weeks she learned, and then, she would depart.
She returned to the city from time to time, to sell her trinkets and goods, but always she departed back into the sands, rarely bothering to deal with the city dwellers. She could be charming and friendly, that the merchants and craftsmen knew. But to the others? She was not sure how to deal with the living. The dead and the stone people, those she knew, those she knew how to interact with. She could deal with the beasts and the walking dead.
Still, life to her was good, and continued on for some time. When she saw the notice, she would frown a moment. She had seen this before... as she slept before one of the great statues... taking it as a sign, she would head to the place indicated, wondering what was to come.
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