Ryn

[Ryn]

Name: Ryn
Age: ???
Height: 4'11
Weight: 100 pounds soaking wet


Backstory:

Ryn doesn't remember when she first noticed humans encroaching on what she considered 'her' territory. There'd always nomadic tribes at the fringes and once or twice small groups foreign even to the surrounding lands. But now she'd begun spotting their foul-air spewing chariots with some regularity. Even then she may have no bothered and simply withdrawn further into the inhospitable wilds to avoid the men and their oil and gun-powder drenched smell if they hadn't started bringing women. And not as part of their tribe but cowed and beaten beneath tarps to hide them from even the darkness of the new moon.

She should have simply let them pass, perhaps wait for them when they returned, but then they made camp in the foothills of the jagged mountains where she occasionally fetched the small, sour fruits form the citrus trees stubbornly growing in this desolate place. And they were close enough that Ryn heard the tortured screams in the night. They set her teeth on edge and made her blood sing. She would brook them no quarter. Even at her weakest no man could stand against her and her claws drank deep of their blood, but these men had tricks and weapons she did not recognize. The slugs they fired stank but would not find their mark, their explosives powerful but clumsy. But they had canisters filled to the bursting with rancid air and she did not know it would scorch her lungs and strangle the life from her long enough for the surviving despoilers to descend on her.....

It was near the break of dawn, while they discussed with rising panic why Ryn would not die, that more men came. And even now she still took pleasure in one of her tormentors pleading with the new arrivals. "Ne vypuskay yego! Ad zhivet v yeye glazakh!" he begged. The new arrivals - reeking of soldiers though not nearly as foul as her captors - took one look at what's been done to her and gunfire finished what Ryn couldn't. But instead of simply cutting her loose they dragged her into their metal cage that cut the air with rhythmic thudding and spoke in their faddish tongue of treatment and shelter.

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The inside of a cell. Reeking of the old sweat of previous occupants and the grimy filth that permeates ever square inch of this floating metal fortress. She'd kicked out the supports of the cot on one side, creating a kind of triangular cave. A soldier steps into the room and sits as far from the cot as the tiny room allows. It's the one that stitched up her wounds and clipped her wings, thinking them more torture by the traffickers. But he smells less like rot than most other soldiers and not just because of the sharp sterile smell of the cleansing agents they use to scrub away disease. "Look, I know we've done this before but you have to give us something."

After long minutes of silence she bites off a short "Me." in response to the one question they kept asking and asking.

"Even if I wanted to believe you, the brass is not going to buy that you killed all those men."

"Don't care." is the response. Followed by an equally short "Take me back."

"We're not going to just drop a young woman into the wilderness. That camp was a hundred miles from even the tiniest village. It's a miracle you're alive at all, no one's going to okay that. There has to be somewhere you belong. Home?"

Ryn falls quiet again. Her home has been the wilderness for so long and it has been ever shrinking. There are so few places left without humans. "My home no longer exists."

"If those were your relatives that--"

"No!" she sharply cuts the man of.

"There's programs for people like you, victims of--"

"Not a victim!" she snaps with a rumbling growl and she feels satisfied to see the soldier visibly flinch.

"Alright, alright, but we have to put you somewhere. If not your own people then asylum?"

There's nowhere left for her to go. The ancient curse that banished her from civilized lands has made her weak to their laws and customs and of course they have rules about what to do with captured women. Either cruel or belittling, they would not, could not let her make her own choice. It didn't matter. There's nothing to return to and the sooner they release her the sooner her strength will return.

"Then do as you must."