✭ Pallantia ✭
Pallantia was forged in the dirt and iron of Aquilonia, far from its marble temples and high towers. She was the daughter of Tarmek the Boar, a mercenary whose coin never lasted and whose scars told more stories than his words. Her mother, Sileia, was a shadow of something once graceful—a woman whose eyes never met your own, and whose voice rarely passed her lips. Whatever life had done to her, it had left her hollowed out, a walking ghost who told her daughter only one thing worth remembering: “No one saves you. Ever.” Pallantia learned early what that meant.
She had her father's frame—broad in the shoulders, hard in the jaw—and her mother’s silence. But she was neither brute nor wraith. She grew into something else. Something dangerous. By the time she was fifteen, she could wrestle a grown man to the mud, and by seventeen, she could gut a boar with a spear and not spill a drop on her boots. Men laughed at her in taverns—once. Then they learned. She had no patience for false flattery, least of all from the kind of men who thought a strong woman was a challenge to conquer. Her fists taught lessons her tongue had no interest in speaking.
And it was during one hard, short summer, in the lowlands near the river Argos, that Pallantia found real affection—not in a man’s boast, but in a woman’s smile. Her name was Lysa, a traveling harpist with clever hands and secrets in her laughter. With Lysa, Pallantia learned a different kind of strength: the strength it took to be gentle. For a moment, she believed peace might be possible. For a moment, she believed in soft things.
But soft things do not last in Aquilonia. When a noble magistrate, thick with wine and arrogance, cornered Lysa behind the tent of a feast, Pallantia found her just in time to see fear in her eyes. The kind of fear her mother had worn for years. She didn’t think. She only acted.
The chair she lifted was old pine, stained with wine and age. It shattered clean across the noble’s skull with a sound like wet stone cracking. He died before he hit the ground. She was tried in silence, sentenced in whispers. The magistrate had no shortage of allies, and a mercenary’s bastard daughter—even one born on Aquilonian soil—was not worth the scandal. So they gave her one mercy: Exile.
Art by Howett
