Well here's my intro post... reading the others makes me feel significantly less confidant about it. It's for the Miner's Apprentice. 

[hider=Markous Lodio] 
I had only seen seven summers when my world was changed. It was only seven summers when I started to track my age by how many times I had to visit my mother’s grave. My mother who was killed. Murdered. Murdered by Gors. Murdered in front of me, while I just watched. There was nothing I could do.

The blade in my shoulder wasn’t what stopped me from doing something. It was my own weakness, my own fear, my own fault that caused my mother to die. I could have stopped them. I could have at least died as well, then maybe I would have some sort of honour. Instead, I sat there and stared as I watched them burn my mother.

Set a flame, her flesh melted away as she screamed from the pain. Her golden hair that I loved with all my heart turning black, as flames danced down them towards her head. Her cheeks went away first. They slipped off her face as if they were wet clay on a plate. The rest of her flesh followed, large swaths turning black. I sat there as they made me watch, made it so that I would forever remember exactly how my mother was killed. 

I lay there as they raided my home, took everything that I had ever known, and then watched them bandage my wound. Making sure that I couldn’t even die. I was given no mercy. I was left there in the wreckage of what was once my home, with nothing but the memory of my mother’s screams to keep company.

By the time my father had come back, I was blue from the cold. My father… My father blamed himself. His cries were what woke me from my stupor. His arms wrapped around me, as he begged for forgiveness. I didn’t understand. I still don’t. It was my fault, yet my father just looked at me with pity. He looked at his home with despair, and he looked at what was left of my mother with something I had never seen in him. Pure hatred. 

He swore to me that day, he made me swear to him, that we would avenge my mother. We would not let her death be forgotten. Those that had killed my mother would rue this day. They would die at our hands. We would burn them. We would turn them to ash.

When he tried to light a fire to warm me, I screamed. I could see my mother was in those flames. I could hear her screams once more. My mother was dying all over again. I couldn’t take it. I cracked, I broke. I leaped into the flames screaming, trying to grab for something that wasn’t there. Funny how seeing my mother burning didn’t brake me, but the memory of it did. 

It has been ten long trips to where my mother’s remains were buried. My father could not bear to be near where we were once a happy family, and our new home is nowhere near it. I spend the time that I do not work, training. I’m training for the day that I will finally be able to crush the Gor that killed my mother, the Gor that destroyed my world and shattered my father.

My father who even with all his bravado and his speeches, turns from a proud lion into a meek mouse at the very idea of leaving our home. My father who is no longer the man made that oath with me all those years ago. He is a broken shell of a man, unable to see that we must leave, we must go and hunt those Gor and that if we cannot find the one that killed my mother, than we must simply kill every single last filthy Gor that stalks this planet. 

It is because of my father’s meekness that I am leaving. We will be visiting my mother’s grave for the eleventh time soon; it is during that journey that I will leave. It is during that journey that I will start my life once more. It is then, that I will avenge my mother, or die trying.
[/hider]