The Gypsy Lycan (Background for a medieval sim)

The night was warm, the moon was bright and full.  I remember it so clearly.  The mare I had taken, was so fast, and her movements so fluid... We wound through the woods outside the duke's land so effortlessly.  IT was as if she and I had the same mind, the same goal.  We were free...  I remember hearing something behind us... something large.  It was.... growling I suppose you could call it, maybe more of a snarl.  Next thing, I felt this..... well it felt like a huge boulder slamming into the side of me and the mare, knocking us both several dozen feet from the path we were on.  Suddenly I felt this sharp, intense pain in my ribs, and I looked up at the biggest wolf I had seen in all my nineteen summers.  It bit a rather large hole into my side before my horse jumped up and took off.  Then it took off after her.  I prayed to the gods that I wouldn't die before fading off... last thing I heard was the shrill whining of a horse being taken down...

I was born in a gypsy camp.  I called a man named Bo father... he often told me my mother was an Irish princess, that he had kidnapped while she was witch child as revenge against her husband for kicking Bo's people off his land.  My mother's name was Alannah.  Whether he spoke the truth or not, I will never know, she died while having me.  Gypsy law revolves around possession, since Bo had her, he claimed me as his daughter.  I grew up with the other gypsy children, only ever once in awhile they would point out my pale skin, the red hair, the blue eyes.  Bo said I was my mother, reincarnated.  As I grew older, a woman whose daughter was killed during a raid, took me under her wing, teaching me the gypsy womanly arts.  Her name was Violca, in honor of her beautiful purple eyes.  Utterly devoted to her husband and her son, she was the model of what every gypsy woman striven to be.  At her skirts, I learned to cook, clean, then later, telling fortunes, tarot reading, healing magic, simple glamours.

However, I had a wild streak a mile-wide.  When I entered my teenage years, I began to sneak off and steal horses with Violca's son, Pali.  We grew quite close as our pursuits grew wilder, more dangerous.  Violca, I think, had romantic notions about the two of us.  Soon, Bo started talks with Pali's father.  I did not like this at all... I never intended on being a wife, I wanted to be like a man.  I wanted to steal horses, raid pirate ships, break into the lord's castles and cart off their goods.  However, Bo threatened me, either submit or he would sell me.  He would not have a daughter without a respectable husband.  I gave up on my own designs for the future and decided to marry Pali.  He assured me, he would love me and treat me like a princess.

Two days before my wedding, I was out walking away from our camp.  I was searching for some herbs for Violca for the wedding stew.  I felt a strong set of arms around my waist, a sack over my head.  I screamed and immediately started fighting back.  They bound my hands and feet, throwing me across a horse and trotting off with my body.  When they stopped, I was at a duke's manor.  I remembered that man... We had raided his home several cycles before.  He said HE intended to take me as his bride, but he foolishly left me unbound when they threw me into my cell that night.  I escaped and stole the finest mare I could find, then took off, hell bent on going home.

After I was attacked, I woke up the next day, so sick, so much in pain... I thought I was dying.  Screaming to the gods I curled in a ball and waited for death to take me in her arms.  I must have been close to the camp because next thing I remember was Violca and Bo carrying me back to Violca's wagon.  She worked on me for hours, I knew the chants, the potions by memory.  I concentrated on that to keep from giving into the pain, to the sickness that threatened to overwhelm me.

Miraculously, I survived, I was better in a week.  Pali, Bo, Violca, were all ecstatic that I was alive and decided to plan our wedding on the next full moon.  So the next three weeks were spent in more preparations, more rituals... all the while, I felt trapped, forced into this marriage.  The night before our wedding this time, I was restless as the sunset.  Bo and Violca blamed it on nerves... I tried to tell them otherwise, I knew my body, it was something else.  That night, I remember being violently ill, and hurting all over.  I blacked out, then woke up the next morning, bloody, the carcass of an unknown, large animal beside me.

I snuck back home, and found Pali, depressed, he thought I had ran away.  I ran to Violca's wagon and told her what had happened.  The looks she gave me, I will remember for the rest of my days.  "daemonium lupum" she whispered, and my own heart seemed to stop.  "Lycan?" I whispered, my entire body beginning to shake.  We revered the Lycan.  Some of our kind even worshiped it.  Our band, however, feared these mythical beasts... Pali and I had spent many of a night scoffing the elder's beliefs.

She ran from the wagon as I grabbed what clothes I could from her trunks.  As I emerged, my dad, the man who raised me banished me from the camp.  Saying it was better than killing me.... he didn't understand, the camp was all I had ever known...  Pride is a very powerful thing sometimes, his pride made him banish me, my own pride kept me from begging him to let me stay.  Even though I know he would have broke, his heart was breaking that day.

So I fled the camp, running as fast as I could.  I slipped around towns, stealing food, sleeping in barns.  I had two more instances of blacking out.  One day, I came across a scent... it immediately, caught my attention.  I had never been attracted to anything like that.  I just knew, that scent was meant for me to follow.  So I began to follow it.  At the other end of this scent, was  a male, an arrogant, irritating male.  And I was his, I knew this from the beginning.  And that is where my story ends, or perhaps, where it merely begins.