------------- The Chronicles of Taure – Jamie

A farmer. Those days were so long ago, she hardly remembered how to milk a cow or slop the pigs. Most of that life she’d forgotten intentionally. The rest had disappeared behind years of pain and torment, of fighting and bloodshed. She’d been taken as a young girl. She had always been big. But when she turned fifteen she began to grow like never before. That gangly twelve year old that was all elbows and scraped knees, began to blossom in more ways than one. Her breasts were first, but her muscles followed soon after. She became more curvaceous than any other girl in the midlands, and her beauty began to draw attention. Unfortunately, it ultimately drew the wrong kind of attention. Bandits attacked her home and stole her away into the woods. She would have been raped and abused and eventually discarded or killed. But the luck of the draw was not quite done with her yet.

Not far away, in a place called Callow Manor, a reasonable and fair man, Lord Dorian Bascombe, was killed by his cousin, Reginald Tavendish. Reginald claimed himself the new Lord of Callow Manor and exiled the good Lady Deneira Bascombe to the wild forests of Taure. Beasts would get her. Some mad pack of giant wolves would track her down and devour her. Bandits might capture her, rape her to death and dump her abused carcass in some forest wayside. He might be so lucky that Trolls would find her first, rape her and then eat her. Always, the rape part came first in his mind. Whatever her fate, it didn’t matter. She’d be dead.

But Reginald Tavendish was not an exceptionally bright man. If he’d had the sense to know who he was dealing with, or if he’d perhaps left one of the Lord Bascombe’s men alive to answer questions, he might have learned that Deneira Bascombe was not like other women of Taure. Her husband had indulged her adventurous spirit. She was taught to ride and hunt, to be proficient with bow and sword. Any guard in the castle could have told Reginald that Lady Bascombe was easily the match of any man there with a long blade. But he didn’t. And he would live to regret his oversight.

Lady Bascombe not only survived in the wilderness, she flourished. She initially became a bandit, praying on the Lord of Callow Manor’s men and supplies. His gold and his food soon became hers, for every path in and out of the region was covered by her and her growing band of partisans. That was when the masked woman that was being called Lady Crimson found a young girl about to be raped by a band of miscreant highwaymen. She herself was struck by the young girl’s beauty, her size, and her strength, and saw in her something she so desperately wanted, a kindred spirit and a lover.

Not only did the Lady Crimson save her life that day, but sent it in a whole new direction. Within a year, Jamie Grant had become one of the Lady’s best warriors, an expert in guerrilla warfare and an unholy terror on the battlefield. She cut a swath of blood through the Lord’s men as sure as the Lady herself had done. In the end, they stood together on the battlements of Callow Manor, soaked in Tavendish blood. It had taken a week’s worth of baths in marbled halls to wash away the smell and the stain. And though she would have given anything to have stayed with her lover, her mistress, her Lady, and live the life of a castle guard,… it could never be.

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