Years passed. Men forgot about the ancient Rillisian race that walked among them not so long ago. They went along with their lives, unsatisfied with the class system, but forever trudging on in acceptance of the unjust world. They forgot their crimes; bloody murders all over the kingdom. Brutal attacks on Rillisian famillies. They forgot about Kirin. They let him slip through the fingers of extermination.

But Kirin lived on. The memory of his parents’ deaths stung at his heart, burning away at his soul. When the plague had taken his sister from him at the age of eleven, it snuffed out the fire. He no longer burned with hatred and pain. For now his anger was cold. Frozen. The dangerous kind. For hot anger is feuled by passion, and is as easily a weakness as it is a strength. It cannot be controlled, like a roaring fire, spreading relentlessly over everything it touches. Ice. That is what his anger was. Ice, freezing. Cold and unmercifull. He shunned all emotion, and denied that which remained.

That was when he was fifteen years of age. Since then, three years have passed, three years of eating other peoples garbage. Kirin spent most of his time training himself as a pickpocket, he trained himself how to avoid being seen, and how to move like a shadow.

He stood up from the pile of hay where he slept. Looking around, he surveyed his home; a broken down house who’s stone walls, covered in the moss of decay, stood only a foot higher than Kirin. A burlap bag was flopped over in a corner, it contained everything he owned.

Wrapping the blood red scarf his mother had sown for him over his mouth, we set out. ‘Today,’ he told himself as he walked towards town and up to the fountain to get a sip of fresh water, ‘Today it will all change.’

Kirin was not quite sure how he new this, or even why anything would change, but yet he knew. He felt it. And it would. All would change.

(This message has been edited by moderator (edited 03-24-2003).)