Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there lived a young woman by the name of Ana. She didn't have a last name, because her people simply had not ever felt the need for last names. So her name was just Ana.

She was from a small village where everyone knew everyone else by name. Her mother had died giving birth to her. She was her mother's first, and only child, but her father had married another woman while she was still young, so she had quite a few younger brothers and sisters. Her stepmother was a kind and gentle woman, and so she grew up calling her mother instead of stepmother. All in all they were a very close family.

Ana was a fairly pretty girl, though none would call her truly beautiful. She had long brown hair that was almost exactly the same color as the chestnuts in the tree outside of her house. Her eyes were also brown, though they were a much darker shade, almost black. She was slender from running around all the time, helping her father out until her younger stepsiblings were old enough to help as well, and so many of the young men in the village were rather attracted to her, though they would never admit it because she was very much a tomboy.

There was one boy though, a young man of the same age as Ana by the name of Mik, who was daring enough to ruin his image with the other boys to go after her. He had lived in the village all his life and was an old friend of Ana's, but as they had gotten older her had realized that he wanted to be more than friends. And so he risked criticism from his friends and went after her.

He was not all that bad looking himself too. His family was of a more scholarly bent than most of the village's, so he was not a very muscular man. But, he had a good body despite that. He had black hair that he wore grown to shoulder length and pulled back in a tail at the nape of his neck. His eyes were bright blue, and when he was happy they sparkled.

Ana, having grown up with him, had not realized how handsome he had become. In fact, it took her until he confessed his own love for her to realize it. It was then that she stepped back and took a good look at him. She liked what she saw when she did so.

And so that day she went back to her family's too small house for dinner in the best of moods. She had accepted him, and she was riding high on infatuation, though she thought of it as love. Unfortunately, her stepmother didn't seem too pleased.

Her stepmother was an oracle of sorts. She had a wildly unpredictable talent for telling the future. Visions would come to her in both her sleep and the middle of the day. She knew that anything she saw in the daytime was a vision, but at night she dreamed normal dreams and oracular dreams, so nighttime visions were never certain with her. But they were more certain than other people's dreams, so when she had a dream that seemed to be oracular, people listened, though they didn't always take heed.

The night before she had had a dream that she was almost certain was oracular in nature. She had dreamed of Ana and Mik, and of their future together. What she had seen was horrible, and it ended with Ana a broken woman, but that did not worry anyone too much. They had all learned years ago that the oracular dreams were not always right in specifics, though the idea behind the dream would be correct. And so, they took the dream, if it was oracular, to mean that Mik would cause Ana trouble.

Ana didn't care about that though, and she told everyone flatly that she wasn't going to sacrifice her own happiness because her stepmother had a bad dream about them. And so she and Mik became a couple, though they were only around fourteen years old at the time. After a while they all forgot about the dream because nothing bad had happened.

Then, when Ana and Mik were almost sixteen years old, after not even two years for them, Mik's parents announced that they had to leave the village and move elsewhere. His parents were scholars, but they also dabbled in certain magics. A few years before Mik's birth they had gotten caught up with a black sorcerer and they had ended up fleeing to get away from him. They had forgotten about him until he had found them in the tiny village. And so they were fleeing, taking their son with them.

Ana and Mik were both devastated. The infatuation between them had not lessened over the almost two years that they had been together. They claimed they were in love, though it was obvious to most of the villagers that it was not quite what they thought it was, even if it was close. Still, no matter how much they protested, his parents would not change their minds.

Ana was with him up to the moment that he left though. She had offered to go with them, but her father and stepmother had shot that down the instant it came up. They knew why Mik's parents were fleeing, and they didn't want Ana getting caught up in it. So instead, she watched as they rode away from the village, tears streaming down her face.

"Ana, it will be all right," her stepmother said when she came up to Ana, still standing there, hours after they had left. "There will be other men for you. Perhaps even better ones."

"Shut up," Ana said bitterly. "How would you know? You got the man that you wanted."

"Your father wasn't my first love," she said. "And I know for a fact that I wasn't his first love either. If I had been, you wouldn't be here."

Ana, not wanting to talk to anyone and not in the mood to listen to adults, glanced at her stepmother briefly. Then she turned away, tears forming at the edges of her eyes again, and she ran for the forest that bordered the village to the west. Her stepmother was about to follow when her husband caught up to her.

"Don't," he said softly. "I know you only want to help her, but I think she needs to be alone right now."

"Yes, I guess you're right," she said, and they turned back to return to their house.

A few hours later night started to fall upon that part of the land. It found Ana still in the forest, sitting on a dead stump and staring down at the ground moodily. She had stopped crying not too long after entering the forest and had fallen to silence. She was considering going back home, but then she heard footsteps approaching her.

She looked up to find a young man that she didn't know walking purposefully towards her. The fact that she didn't know him meant that he was a stranger in the region, but he seemed to be fairly familiar with the woods from the way he moved around in them. He took one look at Ana, noticing the puffy eyes, dried tears, and overall redness of her face that indicated that she had been crying, and he grinned a wolfish grin.

He was not an ugly man, though he wasn't all that handsome either. He had a muscular build, and the sword that hung at his side marked him as a soldier. He had very light blonde hair, which was not a common trait in that region, and he wore it fairly long. His eyes were ice blue, and they glinted dangerously as he stared at Ana.

"What's wrong sweetheart?" he asked. "You know, crying is one of the worst things you can do for your looks."

"Is it?" Ana asked bitterly. "Well, I really don't care. If you must know, the man I love just moved away."

"You must be a fool if you could love any of the little boys who live around here," he said, grinning again. "Let me show you what a real man is like."

"No thank you," she said, but he wasn't listening.

Before she knew it he was unbuckling his sword belt and laying it carefully on the ground. She got up to run away when she realized what he was doing, but he was faster than she was and he had grabbed her hand before she could get away. He roughly pushed her to the ground and started to rip off her clothing while trying to hold her down. She was kicking and struggling to get away, but he was a strong man and wouldn't let her go.

She took a deep breath to scream, but he covered her mouth with his hand before she could do so. She thought about biting his hand, but before she could do that he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, wadded it up, and stuffed it in her mouth. By then he had given up with holding her down and had just straddled her, using his own weight to pin her to the ground.

He finished ripping her clothing off and proceeded to rape her. Her struggling made it difficult for him, and before long he hit her over the head and knocked her out. Then, when he was done, he left her there in the woods, unconscious and half naked.