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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 3065280" data-attributes="member: 3448">Some distance to the south of the Archduchy of Canberry lie the Spice Lands.  To outsiders, the Spice Lands are generally viewed as one realm.  Small governments may squabble over internal boundaries, but the Lands are only noted for their trade, and all of the regions within the Lands produce valuable spices.  The view from within the Lands, however, is a different matter.After the fall of the South Kingdoms, a vast number of refugees streamed north.  Most of the refugees were adults in the prime of their lives; traveling with children or the elderly frequently meant being overtaken by the Skaven hordes and enslaved or worse.  But some children nonetheless escaped, carried by relatives, friends, or the simply charitable.  Among them, a young girl named Ilsbet made her way north.  Her family had almost nothing in the South Kingdoms, but they left with even less, making their way north with only the clothes on their back and what they could carry in their hands.But even beyond the reach of the Skaven, dangers abounded.  The lands between the South Kingdoms and Canberry are wild, with numerous monsters and monstrous people.  And slavers viewed the refugees as easy prey.  Years later, Ilsbet’s shattered memories of her trip north after the fall of her homeland left the details of her enslavement hazy.  After all, she was no more than 7 at the time, although her precise age was also lost in the confusion.  But however she was separated from the cousin that brought her north, she became a slave to the Seachen.The Seachen are a peculiar human people within the Spice Lands.  They have a reclusive land, with one major city and surrounding settlements.  Seachen society is rigidly matriarchal; indeed, they expose most males at birth and castrate many of the rest.  Only careful genealogical records kept by a dedicated order within the Seachen allow them to maintain a healthy population with the small pool of males kept for breeding purposes.Slavery is always a vile experience, and Ilsbet’s experience was worse than most.  A petty spice merchant, among the poorest who could afford slaves at all, purchased her.  As the only slave in the household, the work expectations were tremendously high, and when she inevitably failed to carry out all of her duties, the beatings were awful.  Even when she did all that she should, she was often beaten just for sport.  And the cook, a freewoman servant, made things that much worse, taking out her resentment at her own low lot in life on Ilsbet’s back.  Severe bruises were a near constant experience, and her face and body bore the scars of particularly severe beatings, burns, and other abuse.  Only the eunuch servant and seneschal treated her at all well, but he had no influence to protect her from the rest of the household.The sole saving grace was that Ilsbet was far more intelligent than she ever let on.  She had never been taught to read by her own family, but she taught herself from her mistress’s books.  First she read the histories and stories, and then later she studied the tomes of magic and spellbooks that her mistress had as a minor wizard.  Confident in Ilsbet’s ignorance, her mistress never considered that when Ilsbet cleaned the eight or so books in the library, she carefully studied each one.  Her view of the world remained limited-- while the books had some history of the outside world, everything she heard and read was from the skewed perspective of the Seachen.  Even her exposure to religion consisted only in perfunctory lessons about the Seachen state religion, a strange faith dedicated to dead gods and attempting to return them.  But her mistress was not particularly pious, and she never worked on the great excavation to which many other mistresses sent slaves to serve their faith.  Indeed, with her shaky faith in Berta shattered by the fall of the South Kingdoms and the only other religion she had seen providing no compelling arguments for faith, Ilsbet was that rarest thing on Aphonion:  an agnostic, devoted to no god even though she knew of their existence.</blockquote>

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