Iava hails from a spiritual people who'd settled along the southwestern coast of India. Iava was born as a twin, her brother being named Kusa. her and her twin's souls were connected at birth. her people called this a soul tie - and sure enough, Iava would always be met with a red string wrapped around the base of her finger. and whenever she would follow it, it always lead her back to her brother. through this tie, her and her brother shared everything. every sense, every thought, and not just their active minds but down to their memories. in her household the shelves were full of ancient texts and manuscripts. She remembers the colorful rangolis, carefully placed throughout the rooms of her stomping grounds when it was time for festivals. She remembers the personal altar which laid in her parents' room, the heartwarming light of the diya, and the tikka it housed - it'd been passed through her mother's family for more generations than she could've counted.

She was five, she remembers, when the bandit camp attacked her village. they pillaged senselessly, running into homes to take what they want and kill anyone who resisted, yet they spared her and her brother. as to why? it's simple; children are easy to control. it was part of the camp's practice to take the children and raise them as part of the camp. as part of the camp, the children were required to participate in an indoctrination ritual. an introduction to the rules of life.

The first rule? "The weak die, and the strong survive."

Each "batch," as she remembers them putting it, faces off in a series of one on one battles to the death. a pair is chosen. The winner lives, and is graced with the ability to live among the camp. Then they pick another pair at random.

She and her brother were lucky - the girls fought the girls, and the boys fought the boys. Their survival was due in part to their unique abilities. While fighting, Iava had an outside perspective giving her knowledge about her opponent and the situation that she didn't have to think about. The two had also been the most resilient of the batch. When they made it through the culling with but a few scratches, it didn't take long for them to be put to work.

Her and her brother would be raised with the express purpose of killing, to be the camp's strongest warriors. They soon provided an alternate source of income for the camp. while the bandits would always migrate from camp to camp (most often setting up shop in the remains of their latest & greatest triumph), they would send certain people out to the largest cities nearby to procure information on their general surroundings. what caught the eyes of their leaders had been bounties set on criminals, pirates, and the like. The twins were eighteen when they were sent on their first bounty mission of many, and there were few who put up resistance once found - if the two couldn't find their target in time, they would just steal from some settlement on the way back. It was for the family, so it were as easy as breathing.

What little their parents were able to teach them became the foundation of their magic. Her mother taught Iava spells to protect her brother, while her father taught Kusa spells to protect Iava from anyone else. Their specializations developed, bouncing off eachother in a way that made them nigh unstoppable in combat.

When power becomes so great it brings fear along with it. Iava and Kusa would never have rebelled. The rules the bandits bestowed upon them were their lifeline, the reason they could exist despite the atrocities they committed. Without them the two couldn't function. But their leaders were still scared - the twins could take control whenever they wanted in their eyes, with the strength they had. And so just as quickly as they had created their problem, the bandits set out to destroy it.

She still wonders how she never saw it coming.

They were out on a mission too far from the camp for comfort, apparently scouting out the area for a raid. They didn't even know what they were really looking for out here. Something about the rivers. To look at the rivers. Which inevitably looked like rivers, and there'd been no settlements in direct proximity of the rivers - only ones far off, which the two had found in part due to Iava's refusal that they'd come all the way out here just to come back with nothing. They'd not gotten far on their way back to the camp before it found them.

Her training betrayed her; she'd been caught off-guard, only catching wind of the danger through the sound of something whistling in the air towards her. She dodged on pure instinct, and it saved her life. Some appendage, perhaps some kind of tentacle, grotesque in nature, ripped through the tree trunk that she had been about to step around.

She'd seen monsters before, sure. But this one froze her. The top half looks somewhat human, but it's arms quickly betray it with their length; long, dragging across the leaves blanketing the forest's floor. The bottom half is that of a horse, quadrupedal, the front legs ending in talons. And it's skull...

Iava dives to the side at the sound of an arm lashing through the air. The claws caught at her leg, lingering, and she knew it'd have cut deep had Kusa not been at her side. She hisses out pain through her teeth, stumbles, and keeps running.

Running when she'd never wanted to fight more in her life. But whenever she so much as thought about putting a halt in her step, it was blown away by a shot of panic and the intense desire - no, the need - to run. Each time she looked back, every time she saw him, standing strong, waiting for her help, it was thrown away. Why?

Please, just listen to me. Run.

She ducked through the bushes and went westward, towards the rivers and the village which stayed across from it. She crossed, leaping for her life, and landed in time to fall to a slash at her leg. Running deep, slow, purposeful. She'd looked to see a deep cut running along her knee, though her body dropping and mind flaring no sensations but pain told her otherwise.

Run.

There was a flash along her throat that lead to an explosion, a brief roar in agony. Waves of grief and power collected, images of people and places she hadn't seen in years shone brighter than the sun. And then came a burst of colors - a sensation that spread from her fingertips to the depths of her soul. It tingled at first, then evolved into a tidal wave of energy crashing through her body, filling it through with a pulsating warmth.

And then there was nothing.

For the first time in her life, Iava felt true silence. For the first time in her life, she thought and it went nowhere. Her words reverberated endlessly in her own mind, what now was only a void. She laid there along the forest bed, feeling talons and hooves whoop the ground in tandem with her own heart. Soon enough it'd been just her own heart which she felt.

Run, she heard, yet it was but a mere imitation. It echoed in on itself and then it were nothing.

She'd kept moving, found the villages, and kept moving after that. Family came first - she was to fulfill her brother's dying wish, or die herself. There was no other option. With her true family dead there'd been no reason for her to try going back to the life she once lived. The least she could do was honor her brother and run from it.

When she found her next settlement she was welcomed, for once, as a humble traveler rather than a violent invader. She asked them for directions to the nearest city and they humbly obliged. After getting to the nearest city, she made moves to find the fastest way off the continent. This lead to her first foray in piracy at the age of twenty.

Though she was not as much of a pirate as she was a mercenary, she'd been treated as a member of the crew all the same. It was on this ship where she was taught how to down a full calabash in less than a breath, where she'd been taught to speak English, to carefully stow away provisions, to lower the sails. Though those she were with held no emphasis on it, she'd never felt more like part of a family.

It was also on this ship where she learned what happened to her magic after her brother's passing. The red string which tied her to her brother had remained on her finger, yet it strayed for but a few inches before meeting its end. She came to the ship's captain one night for a drink, and approached him with a question. A hypothesis. He'd been wary at first, though his cooperation was out of respect for the dedication she'd shown towards the crew.

Iava held his hand and felt the energy from deep within her. It surged up and out, and she could see it - the red string, suddenly glowing before growing in length and moving towards her captain's finger. It wrapped around it several times and pulled, squeezing the bloodflow from it, yet his hand did not move. His eyes were bright and gaze steadfastly focused on Iava's own. There was trust.

After the tie had been made, Iava truly felt free. It was as if her mana reserves had suddenly unlocked themselves, even more mana than she'd ever known had flowed effortlessly through her body. She let go of her captain's hand and saw it. The red string. Tied to another, once more, as it had been for so long before. She learned then that, although her birth tie was no more, she could create (and sever) the same sort of tie with other people.

When their voyage came to an end in England, she was on the edge of twenty-two. The crew offered to let her stay and she rejected it. It'd been several factors behind her decision, but them returning to Asia was the one true dealbreaker. Family first; she was to run and never look back. Her years until now have been spent strong-arming her way into various odd jobs that require her muscle, mostly in the form of security for wealthy merchants. It's resulted in her floating around the cities of the country, no true aim or goal coming to her except survival.

On this night, she's floated her way back into the comforting arms of grog and mead, with no telling where her path leads her to next.