Leia Quinn didn't want to be alone, she didn't think anybody did, and that's why it hurt so much when her father sent her away. "I will come back for you, Leia." He had said, and for a while she believed him. She falsely believed that her father, the man who had begged the gods for a son and cursed them when he received a daughter, would return to the nunnery after a couple years when she had learned the way of Serith and become the perfect future ruler of the kingdom of Wavecrest.
But she was naive, as all kids are. At five years old she was abandoned by the man she called her father, and it hurt. The nuns were nice at first, they were nuns after all. They welcomed the five year old princess with open arms and went right to work. Classes, teachings, hundreds of hours of learning scriptures and verses and Leia obeyed, she had to or otherwise she would be left here forever and become a nun, as empty of self as they were.
"Leia!" Sister Claire called, and Leia rolled her eyes. Sister Claire's voice was sickly sweet, and oozing false kindness like always.
"Coming!" She replied cheerfully, she had to fake her happiness here if her escape plan was to succeed. She left her small room, the one with plain white walls that shimmered in the waves, the hastily made bed sitting in the corner of the room, and the lone, messy desk on the furthest wall from the door made from downward flowing sea grass.
Outside the door Sister Claire was waiting, like Leia, she had deep blue skin, and white hair that floated above her head like a halo. She had lines around her mouth from frowning so often, and Leia often attempted to trace them with her fingers which led to a smack on her hand and a "Don't touch me!"
"It's the big day today, Leia." Sister Claire informed her when she arrived.
"What kind of day?" Leia questioned, reaching out one of her hands and making a motion to hold Sister Claire's, which was met with a quick smack.
"The day you truly become one of us." She said, and rolled up her sleeve revealing the golden tattoo of a rolling wave that started at the wrist and rolled up her arm, almost like it was an actual wave. It spread onto her chest and ended in a flowing formation, "These Leia, are the proof of our faith." She said sternly, "Now let's go."
They walked through the ornately decorated hallways that sparkled beneath the waves. White walls with pictures of each and every nun during their initiation. She would be lying if she said she wasn't nervous, she had heard from some of the other kids living in the nunnery that it hurt, and Leia wasn't too keen on doing things that hurt her. It was too late to try and get out of it though, she had assumed that it would happen eventually but she had no idea it would be so soon. She couldn't bail out now, she had to do it so her father would come back.
They arrived in the nave, it was a gorgeous room. The pews were made out of dark brown wood that contrasted the blue of the glass beautifully, every nun in the convent was here at this moment, the day the princess of Wavecrest would finally be crowned as a woman of a religion, and not a queen. In the middle of the room there was a table and the Reverend was standing beside it, a wicked smile on her face. It was a smile that Leia knew all too well, anytime she messed up anything that smile would appear and then she knew she was in trouble.
"Welcome, Princess Quinn." Reverend Leah projected across the room, with her arms spread wide as if she were waiting for a hug. "Are you ready for your initiation?"
Leia didn't reply, she only nodded and unwrapped the fabric covering her chest and floated over to the table.
"Close your eyes, Leia." The Reverend soothed, "It'll all be done soon." Leia could sense the needle growing ever closer to her skin, so she grit her teeth and clenched her fist, determined not to cry out. The process was painfully slow, each line the needle created was traced over at least five times. She guessed it had been around seven hours when the Reverend sighed, "The outline is done, Princess."
"Don't call me that." Leia muttered, "They didn't want me there, I'm not a princess." She didn't know where the rage was coming from, maybe it was the realization that her father truly didn't care about her, the hope that she had held onto for so long that he wouldn't leave her here was shattered as each line of ink tainted her skin.
The Reverend smiled, the first genuine one that Leia had seen from her in the two years she had lived here. "Very well." She stated, "We will now complete the initiation."
It took forever for them to finish coloring in the outline, and Leia had yet to see what her tattoo even looked like. She was tapped softly on the head twice by Sister Claire who spoke much kinder than she ever had before, "It's done, Leia."
Leia nodded and sat up on the table, wiggling her newly tattooed and bandaged up arm around testing its mobility. Her arm didn't hurt anymore, as soon as the needle had left her skin another one of the nuns that she couldn't quite remember the name of placed a hand and soothed it with some sort of healing magic.
"Why did you guys want me to get these so bad?" Leia questioned Sister Claire once they were out of earshot of the nuns in the nave.
"We wanted to test out the ink." She replied, and noticing the confused expression on Leia's face she elaborated. "Most of the time, we wait until one is done growing to bless them with the initiation, so as to not let the ink warp on the skin, but Sister Mandy developed a solution to that problem. Ink that grows with the skin."
"The ink is alive!?" Leia shouted, "Like an animal?"
Sister Claire shook her head, "No Leia, it's not alive. It's magically engineered to stay the same on the skin no matter what happens. For example if you were to get a cut on your arm, the wound would heal with the branding just the same as before."
"That's weird." Leia breathed, "It's kind of cool too, though!" They arrived at her room and she pushed through the seagrass door into her empty shell of a room. Sister Claire didn't follow her through the door, just bade a goodnight from the other side and floated away. Leia touched the wall, and formed the water above her desk into a flat sheet of ice. She unraveled the bandages covering her new tattoo and looked at herself through the ice.
Starting from her wrist the same golden wave that Sister Claire had shown her but slightly different. Instead of only covering the inside of her arms they wrapped around them, multiple small crests of waves connected to one another climbing up her right arm and when they reached her shoulder they branched out and ended in a sweeping, flowing formation that swept out onto her chest. Suddenly, like a roaring tsunami Leia burst into tears. The reality of what these tattoos meant had finally sunk in, her father was not coming back for her and that was final. Nothing she could do would change that fact, she would be at the nunnery for the rest of her life.
"Are you alright, Little One?" Leia whipped around, her sobs stopping not because of a solution but pure shock. There was a woman sitting on her bed. Her hair was stark white, just like Leia's, and the dress she wore was a bright cyan, contrasting the deep blue of the ocean that the nunnery resided in. Her voice was like the tides, it flowed in and soothed Leia's mind. Her face was round, and her green eyes were kind and sparkled in the depths of the ocean.
Leia had no words for the situation she now found herself in so she blurted out the first thing that came to her mind, "You're the prettiest woman ever, why are you in my bedroom?"
The woman laughed, it sounded like when raindrops hit the surface of the ocean, "Thank you, Leia Quinn. I am Serith, Goddess of the Oceans, Tides, Marine Life, and the Moon."
Upon hearing the Goddesses name Leia bowed immediately, "Why did you come to see me?" She asked nervously.
Serith smiled sadly, "Everything that goes on beneath the waves I can see." She motioned at Leia's door, "The way you are treated here, it is not to my liking or beliefs. I see potential in you, Leia Quinn, so I have come personally to ask you, would you like to get out of here?"
Leia, speechless once more nodded, tears welling up in her eyes once again, And once she finally found her words, she spoke softly. "I would do anything in the world to leave this place."
"There are three things I need from you first," Serith spoke delicately, "Do you promise me that you can do them for me?"
Leia looked up at the Goddesses' face, "Yes! I'll do them, I promise."
Serith smiled at her, "Do you promise to always fight for what you believe in?"
"Yes!" An excited reply.
"Now, number two," The Goddess said softly, "Do you promise to protect the lives of everything under the sea with your own life?"
"Like the animals?" Leia asked, and a nod from Serith confirmed her question, "Of course! I love them all!"
"And finally, do you promise to always stay loyal to your friends, and the people that fight with you?" Serith asked, looking directly into Leia's eyes.
"Yeah, I do." She replied, Serith looked at her, eyes so incredibly proud that it made her emotional, but she forced herself to stay serious just for this moment.
"That, Leia Quinn, is your oath to me." Serith stated, and with that word the tattoos that Leia had been branded with not an hour earlier began to glow a bright golden light, and when it faded she felt a connection to Serith, a divine pact that tied the two together. "Now, I want you to leave this place, swim up the northern river and into Cascade Point, follow the fish to the river and my blessing will protect you on your journey. Good luck, my paladin."
Leia blinked, and Serith was gone. In her place was a beautiful sword, the blade was a shimmering teal that reflected the waves, cascading light around her room. Instead of the typical guard there was a carved octopus that climbed up about 1/8th of the blade. The hilt was stylized to look like it was wrapped in seaweed, but when she held it felt like any other sword's hilt. Just as she was thinking about where to put it when she left, it disappeared in a flash of golden light. On the soft part of her right palm, there was a small golden crescent moon marking that when Leia saw, understood that it acted as a scabbard for her new sword.
"Okay," She huffed, checking her person for anything she might've forgotten before she left. "I got my shiny new sword in my hand, my clothes and that's all I own!" Serith must have opened the small window above her bed before she left, so she swam out of it. It had been a long time since Leia had left the nunnery, the ocean was quiet, but it was beautiful in its serenity. The once colorful and teeming coral reef was eerily silent, like it knew what it was losing as Leia swam silently above it.
She had been worried about following the fish that Serith had told her about, but with the emptiness of the ocean right now it was incredibly easy to follow them into a narrower body of water that Leia could only assume as the Northern River. She wasn't exactly sure where she was supposed to be going, but she trusted Serith to keep her safe. She had been swimming for hours until the scene of the river changed, a couple hundred feet ahead of her it seemed to open up into a wider body, almost like a lake. As she got closer to the opening, Serith's voice spoke into her mind, This is as far as I can help you, I trust that you can take it from here, Brave One.
"Thank you for everything, My Lady." Leia said softly, breaking out into the opening and immediately met with a vast cliff of rock. The water she was in did seem to curve around the rock, almost as if it was a giant circle. She decided to surface and get a hold of her surroundings. Her head broke the surface and she took her first ever breath of real air.
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Leia couldn't see anything notable as soon as she surfaced, it seemed to be a large circle of cliff with no way up. There were strange constructions that passed over certain areas of the lake, and she swore she could hear loud voices talking about things that she couldn't understand. Finally after almost completing a full circle around the lake she found a small set of stairs that led up onto the paved area that sat just above the lake.
She looked around, the place was massive, bigger than anything she had ever seen in her life. There were smaller house-like buildings made out of wood and brick with numbers starting from one, and going up to 100. The houses were brightly colored, and all differently shaped, from tall and rectangular to short and square, it was very different from the uniform strictness of Wavecrest. People of all different skin tones and races looked at her strangely as she walked past, dripping water along the tiled floor of this giant city. Walking up a large staircase into another layer, were hundreds of thousands of merchant tents, and even more people were walking amongst them. More permanent buildings made of stone were found when she walked just a little further past. She was going to enter a tavern and find something to eat before she was grabbed and pulled into an alleyway.
"Good catch." Someone growled, their voice was deep and gravelly, "I've never seen a girl like this before!"
"Relax." Another voice said, this one seemed a little nervous, "If you rough her up too much, we won't get a good price."
A good price? Were they going to sell her? Leia didn't like the idea of being sold all that much so she decided to start kicking and screaming.
"Shut the hell up!" One of them yelled, they were making quite a ruckus in this alleyway, surely someone would come and save her, right?
"Hey." A voice called, "What are you guys doing?" Leia whipped her head around hopefully, standing at the edge of the alley was a small man, he was hunched over and leaning on a cane.
"Ah," The second man called out to him, "I'm just trying to wrangle my daughter, you know how kids get."
The old man laughed, "I agree with that! Good luck then!" He met her eyes, and she hoped, she prayed not to any god or goddess, but to him that he would understand that they weren't her parents. For a second she thought she saw a flash of understanding in his eyes, but as quickly as she saw it, it vanished.
"Good thinking, Curt." The first man sighed, "Would've been annoying to kill an old man as well."
"That's what I'm here for." Curt stated, he turned around and his eyes widened, "Dan get down!" Before he was shot away from her by a blast of pure energy. Dan, as she knew now, was quick to react. He drew his sword and charged at the mysterious figure who sidestepped it easily and with his own sword and one quick flick of his wrist sent his opponent's sword scattering onto the ground. Dan yelled in rage and charged once more, and he was quickly shut down by a powerful smack on the top of his head with the pommel of his adversary's sword.
Both of her captors were unconscious now, and when her savior stepped into view it was the old man, "Come now, Little One." He said softly, reaching out a hand to her, "I'll take care of you."
He picked her up and Leia shifted in his arms, promptly falling asleep.
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Leia's eyes opened slowly, they took in the warm light of a small house. She sat up in a large bed, much bigger than her, looked around and saw the old man from earlier cooking something at a counter. Flames licked at a pot, emanating from his hands. She panicked, this was the man who had left her earlier, did she end up getting sold?
"Ah, you're awake!" His voice stopped her panicked train of thoughts, his voice didn't sound malicious at all, it sounded caring and a little worried. He set down a bowl on a small table next to the building, it was filled with warm brown liquid with bits of vegetables floating inside and billowing a small amount of steam into the air. "Sleep alright, little one?"
"Why am I here?" She asked quietly, she didn't make a move towards the food on the table, even though she was starving. "Is that for me?" She pointed at the bowl.
He nodded, "I decided to take you in after I saved you from those slave traders." He handed her the bowl, along with a spoon, "I would be lying if I told you that you didn't interest me."
She cocked her head at that, "Interest you?"
"Everyone in Cascade Point has heard the legend of the Lakeborne." He explained, "Though I never imagined it could have been true."
"A Lakeborne?" Leia pondered, "I've never heard of those before."
It was the old man's turn to look confused, "A famous, while never confirmed to exist, race of people said to be born from the lake that Cascade Point is built upon, it was said these people carved the four great rivers thousands of years ago." He paused, noticing her blank expression, "But you're not one of them, are you?"
She shook her head, "I'm from a kingdom in the north, not from a lake."
"Interesting." He said, looking to be lost in thought, "My name is Earl, you're free to leave if you'd like but if you want to stay, grab a sword and I'll teach you how to fight."