“Who comes?” We heard from the trees.

“Ah, don’t worry Brak, it's just me.” 

As soon as Rasha said that, out of a tree dropped a big burly man. Probably the size of two average humans.

“God, am I happy he wasn’t the one attacking us.” Kaelen whispered to me.

“Who are those men with you? And what happened to Tovin and Jorren?”

“Let’s first get them comfortable and healed up and then we'll talk.” Rasha responded kind of commandingly.

“You the leader of this group?” I asked her quietly while we were bringing Tovin and Jorren into the house.

“Eh, not necessarily.” she responded “We don’t really have a leader. We are just a group of people bearing the same fate.”

“What kind of fate is that?” I couldn’t help but be curious.

“We are all outcasts. We were exiled from our communities for one reason or another. For example, look at Jorren here. He’s still a kid and he has already seen a lot in his life. His parents gave him to an orphanage when he was a baby because they couldn’t afford another child. When he turned 14 he wanted to find out who his family was so he searched for them. When he found them he wished he didn’t. He found out his parents were killed by one of the senators of the area, so he found him and beat him to the brink of death. So he could choose a public hanging or exile. Or look out the window. That’s Mira. One of the most brilliant architects of our time. She was renowned in this area as a genius. But one time the construction company that worked for her decided to steal some money by not using all the materials on a library they were building, but still putting them on checks. Mira was of course unaware of this, but when the library collapsed killing 6 people she took a part of the blame as well. And although she managed to keep her head, you cannot say she managed to keep her life. All of us have a story that is the reason why our lives are finished. We are just surviving at this point.”

“What’s your story?”

“I… I am not ready to talk about it.” she said as tears started filling up her eyes.

“I…I’m sorry for asking. I shouldn’t have been so insensitive.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” She said, wiping her tears. “Let’s leave these two to rest here and go eat dinner, shall we?”