My name is Rikiah Freeroamer, although I do not deserve to bear that name. I am a mute. Twas not always so, until the winter of my 17th year I was your average youth. Just living for the day. Always ready for adventure, or mischief. Whichever came first.

   Then one  autumn day I came home later than usual. As I neared my boyhood cottage I heard strange sounds, almost like a battle. I thought it was the wind or some such thing playing tricks on my ears. I have never been more wrong in my life. The scene that I came upon was so strange and surreal that I stood dumbfounded.

   My father, mother, and dear sister were in a pitched battle, fighting for their very lives against creatures such as I had never seen. There were bodies strewn everywhere. Dripping blood covered my family, who's I could not tell. As I stood on the knoll watching in horror my sister fell to the brutal attack of 3 of the demons. My mother tried to save her. But she too was swept under by the wave of nightmarish horror that surrounded my home. My father fought on gallantly and with such savageness as to give even the creatures attacking him pause.

   I wanted to rush to his side and help him defend against this horror, but instead I ran. As only a coward can, to the safety of the woods. I was scared, of the monsters, and of my own reactions.

   The next morning I returned to what was left of our home. I searched the burnt remains of our cottage and yard but could not find the bodies of my sister or mother. I shudder to think of what might have hapened to them. As for my father, his torn and broken form lay in the middle of 20 dead...THINGS. I started screaming as I realized he died facing exactly where I had stood the night before. In his death he knew me for what I was.
  
  I do not know how long I raged there. Only that when I could think again, I could nae speak. The elders from the nearby village do not know all that happened but feel I should recover my voice when my throat heals. They are wrong! I know that if I become what I should have been that fateful day, then I will talk again.

   I must become a fighter who fears nothing, not even death. That is what I must be.

   I am a ranger, at one with the forest I fled to so very long ago.
   This is my story. I hope now that those who have known me can better understand my silence....