[Here's a little something to read while ye wait for the server to come back up
It's my alt's backstory.]
A tribe of feral Enkidukai lived on the outskirts of Ojaveda, hidden away from the well-trodden roads. They occasionally wandered towards the road on large group hunts to take down Ulbernauts; the hulking beasts provided enough food to last them quite some time before they had to hunt again. Most able-bodied warriors of the tribe had seen this road before.
One, however, had not.
She was a little fenki named Asailie, and she was the runt of her birth year's litter - in fact, she was one of the smallest fenkis in her tribe's known history. The other cubs taunted her, saying they didn't know an Enkidukai could be so tiny. Her parents were immensely protective of her, but everybody else in the tribe - even her own siblings - rejected her based solely on her size. The ones that didn't simply ignore her told her - both indirectly and otherwise - that she would never be a mighty huntress like her mother, and that she wasn't going to live long enough to even see the next summer because she was so small and weak. She proved them wrong in the latter, at least - she lived off of the meat her parents brought her and the tiny creatures she could catch. She tried to get stronger, but every time somebody saw her fighting the large rats, they assumed it was in self-defense and jumped in, finishing off what could have been her kill.
One day, in the middle of a particularly hot afternoon, everyone around the tribe's camp was asleep except for Asailie. She snuck around, nibbling on the best of the stored food, trying a few swings of her siblings' weapons while they slumbered, pouncing on small rodents and enjoying the taste of their fresh meat and blood. Then a thought occured to her.
"Now is my chance; I can get away! While nobody's watching, I can run from the camp and find a new tribe, where I'll no longer be the runt!"
Excitedly, she bolted towards the outskirts of the encampment. She paused, a little too fast, nearly crashing into a pile of armour and weapons that the adventurers who discovered the tribe traded for supplies. The fenki silently reminded herself that it was dangerous outside of her home, and guessed that the torn and dirty dress she wore wouldn't last the journey. She picked through the pile, taking a belt, dagger, and short sword. She stalked over to the tent in the middle of the camp, where more things that could be traded off to adventurers were stored. She plucked some cothing tailored for a Yilan male, much larger than herself, out of one of the chests, and a simple pack out of another. She stole some supplies for the journey ahead of her, and bolted away before anybody woke up.
Silently vowing that she would never come back to her first tribe, Asailie followed the road, sneaking past the Trepors and skirting the Tefusangs. She found a dusty, hot city where people spoke an unfamiliar language. Staying there for a brief time, she picked up quite a bit of the common tongue, with the help of merchants that spoke the Enkidukai language, though it was a different dialaect than her tribe's. She learned that this place was called Ojaveda. She fought rats and did quests, until someone asked her to go to Hydlaa.
Asailie tried to ask where Hydlaa was, but found no answer. She tried to look at a map, but the lines and words meant nothing to her, so she set out to follow the road again. As she did so, she observed the Eagle and Serpent Gobbles along the way. Her tribe told tales of them, but she had never seen one before. When she did lay eyes upon them, they were fighting over a fish with the same energy the menkis of her tribe sometimes fought over fenkis - or the other way around. Asailie respectfully kept her distance from the hunched creatures, and passed through the large stone tunnel that another traveller she'd met told her marked the halfway point between cities.
As she left, she discovered a new sort of creature: strange Clackers with pretty blue shells. She had seen Clackers before - one had been brought to the camp once - but never Thunder Clackers. She camped a safe distance from them, watching the little creatures as she fell asleep under the darkened Azure Sun. When she awoke, she felt mild self-pity as she realized nobody was coming after her. Perhaps they had assumed some monster had come into the camp and plucked her out of her tent, eating her up, but she thought it more likely that they just didn't care about losing one pathetic little runt.
Her empty stomach soon distracted her from her heavy heart, though; she needed to find something to eat. Driven by hunger, she ran and ran until she found a rat in the wilderness. She snuck up behind it, awkwardly swinging her stolen sword at the rat. It turned as it heard her do so, and she only managed to cut the rodent's tail off. The rat reared up, screeching in pain. Asailie saw her chance, thrusting her dagger into the rat's tiny heart, and then tearing it open with her bare claws. She ate as much as she could before its corpse vanished into Dakkru's realm, and then looked around as she cleaned the gore off of her fur. She didn't see the road any more. Blinking in confusion, she stalked around the area, eyes trained on the ground, ears swiveling to detect any oncoming monsters or people. She did this for days, surviving off of rat meat and taking the things she found on a truly dead traveller's corpse - she didn't mind that it was a dead man's posession; as far as the wild fenki was concerned, he was a lump of meat now that his soul had left what she considered to be Xiosia's realm. Eventually, when she was looking at a handful of stones scattered on the ground trying to remember if she'd already passed them, she heard footsteps. She panicked, looking for someplace to hide, but the menki running by simply waved in a friendly manner as he kept going, evidently on some important business.
Asailie followed him and found the road again. The rest of her trip was fairly easy. She saw that same menki fighting a bandit on her way, thinking to herself, "I wish I wasn't a weak runt - he looks like he needs help". Her self-depreciating thoughts dissolved as soon as she passed the rocks that had previously blocked her view of the city, though. Footsore and weary as she was, her eyes widened in awe at the huge stone walls expanding farther than she could have imagined. She took a deep breath, and passed reverently through the gates.
"Nobody in the place I used to call my home would have thought me able to make this journey," she thought as she took her first few steps into Hydlaa, her fur bristling with pride.
