Pip was born with lavender eyes and acorn skin. Her hair grew in sunrise red with flaming orange highlights. Even as a young child, it was clear that she would grow into a fragile being. It was not that she was any more beautiful than anyone else, but rather that she had the ability to put everyone around her under a spell that made her parents wary of setting her free into the world, or even the community. When she was born, the elders came to her house to bring a gift for her parents. They could not look away, and could not leave the house for hours. It was the first time that the elders had asked to return with more gifts for the baby herself. It was not customary for the new child to receive anything before the first birthday, but the elders insisted. News spread of the remarkable child. Villagers came to the house just to see Pip and to look at her. Some young children tried to take her away with them, and her parents decided that she had to stay away from everybody for a while. And so Pip grew up very differently than the rest of the villagers.

In the village of Nihlom, all youngsters at the age of two were brought out of their parents' home and raised by the elders to be wise and careful, but not so for Pip. Three days before her second birthday, her parents went wailing into the streets in mourning over the death of their child. Nobody asked for proof as looking upon death was something that only the immediate family members could do, and in the village's mind, Pip's shadow was added to all those who met Keilil, Lord of the Dead, without notice.

A week after Pip's alleged descent into the realm of the shadow, her parents boarded up her room to keep her spirit in. All of Nihlom came to help nailing boards onto the door leaving only space for Haval, Pip's mother and smallest in the village, to go through. From then on, all noise coming from the room was attributed to Pip's spirit. She could cry and scream as loud as any sound ever to be heard on earth, but the villagers would only think that the cries were manifestations of her death.

"I heard that she was carried into the tree beside her window and ripped apart by the branches in the wind. That's why they tore up the tree." One man told a neighbor after a particularly noisy night.

"No, no. It was an animal, something that came up that tree, and that's why they cut it down." The neighbor replied.

And so the bickering continued for two years about the death of Pip. She had been such an exceptional baby with such a conneciton to nature that the villagers could not figure out why nature would take her away, or what would be powerful enough to do so. She had not begun to fall apart since she was not an elder, and she was not a child weak enough to be plucked from her body. She was a sign, they eventually decided. Her death was a warning. If someone so pure and connected could be uprooted, it must show that Nihlom was about to be torn up and destroyed.

They gathered around the house below her window whispering about what they should do to deter the demise trying to draw strength from her spirit. Upstairs at the window, Pip sat peering down at them. Too young to understand their topic, but old enough to understand their words, she cried for her people. She knew that she had been kept away from them because she was a danger to everybody around her. Because of her, the whole village was going to be destroyed, so she was being kept out of sight, hidden away, so that whatever was out there would not find them and harm them. She knew that she had a responsibility to her people, but a four year old was too young to have any ideas. All she could do was wait and hope that something came to her.

For ten years Haval tried to comfort her daughter's sorrow. Though Pip wouldn't tell her mother what was wrong, it was clear that the girl was troubled. Her hair lost its highlights, and her appearance did not give off the spell that it once had. Only her eyes held the same feeling of intensity, but even those had changed. The light that had once resonated off of them was gone. It had been replaced by deep desires unfulfilled, dark fear not calmed. Finally, when Pip was fourteen years of age, Haval gave up on ever retrieving the child she had once had. She had taken her daughter away to save her, but instead had only hurt her. As Pip slept with troubled dreams, Haval would sit next to her daughter stroking her long blood red mane and breathe pleasant thoughts into her daughter's ears in an attempt to rectify her mistake. She would then return to her own bed where her husband would give Haval the same mock-comfort that she gave her daughter.

Pip's mind wandered whenever her mother would come in and try to help. She knew that it was only a matter of time before Haval, too, would be one of the ones below her window at night, before she would leave Pip alone to be the sacrifice for Nihlom's survival. Pip had heard the villagers speaking, and there was no question now in her mind that the village was at risk. She was edging on sixteen, the year that they became full adults, and what that meant. She had no elders telling her what she was becoming, nor did she have other children to watch and learn from, so she had no way of knowing what was going to happen when she grew up. The hoard of people outside her window gleaning from her spirit began to whisper softer and softer until all she could hear about the downfall was a few words: Pip's sixteenth birthday... Complete destruction...

And so Pip began to plan her escape. She knew that as long as she was in Nihlom there would be no peace, no rest. She could not be safe from her dreams of screaming burning villagers until she was out of her chamber and somewhere else. Over the course of almost two years Pip saved wood that her mother brought for fires. She began to be excited about her flight. Light reflected from her lavender eyes again, and slowly, slowly, the highlights returned to her hair - orange flames on blood, though. The sunrise would never return. Haval could not contain her pleasure. She knew that it was the firewood that brought back her daughter. As Pip grew towards her sixteenth birthday she had a reef of wood hidden in the floorboards beneath her bed waiting for the right moment, and when it came - four days before she would become an adult - she lit a fire beneath her window burning through the wooden walls giving her a way to leave her room. She sailed down to the ground and ran as quickly as she could out of Nihlom, through the forest, and on her way to what she thought would be another village much like hers where she could live until she became an elder.

What she found only horrified her more.

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