I just turned Eight a month ago, and am waiting for the tax collector to come to the village with my family. I am the second daughter of the family, with two elder brothers and one elder sister as well as a younger brother and sister. Mama is pregnant again and has told Papa that this is the last one, she said that last time too.

The reason I’m so excited for the tax collector to come is so that I can be put into the registry. Mama and Papa act excited for me but I know that they aren't looking forward to his arrival. I know that by being officially being put in the registry will mean we have to do more work for the family, it also means I can finally become an assistant to a craft. I want to assist the towns fletcher so that I can help provide Papa with arrows for his hunts. But until I’m officially recorded Ranald refuses to take me on as his assistant to the craft.

So here I am doing my duties per usual. Gathering wood and herbs with my younger brother and sister, to cleaning, cooking, and mending clothing with my Mama and elder sister Elia. Elia and Mama do the tanning for the furs Papa brings home as well as turn the hides into clothing. My elder brothers Nell and Alien, Nell being the eldest, go with father on his hunts or work as assistants. Nell is working with the village guard and is receiving spear training after he was able to inform the captain of the guard of the laws of the land and the punishments that coincide with the rules put in place by Count Pawlin and the Kingdom of Vedal. Alien, on the other hand, was taken in by the blacksmith Hermen after he saved one of Herman's daughters from falling off a cliff and dying. Alien and the blacksmith's daughter Lillias are engaged and are waiting until Alien and Lillias turn fifteen to be wed. But whenever anyone doesn't have something to do they work on our little section of farm we own like every family does in the village.

The tax collector final came and apparently I’ve bothered master Ranald enough to take me on as his assistant as a fletcher. I’ve been working diligently under master Ranald and follow all of his rules, even the weird one about referring to him as master. But I still haven’t been able to make an acceptable arrow for master Ranald.

I asked master Ranald if I could take the bad arrows to my Father but was told that they would be useless on a hunt by master Ranald. I had asked why and so we went through each arrow I had made that day and talked about their defects and flaws and what they would do when shot out of a bow, some would not properly nock into the bowstring, others where to heavy and would fall short of the target, some would curve mid-flight, while others would shatter and break on impact. Many of my arrows had many of these problems and not just one and so I gave up on my request as I realized how these arrows would only hinder the ones who used the arrows.

The next day though when I went to work on my batch of arrows for the day master Ranald called me over and demonstrated how to properly craft and attach the fletchings of an arrow onto the arrow’s shaft. For weeks after that, all I did was craft fletchings and put them on both sides of an arrow shaft until master Ranald was satisfied with my results.

My job for the next year was installing all the fletchings onto every arrow crafted and learning about the different types of fletchings and what they would do for each arrow. By the end of the year, I even began learning how to put the fletchings onto crossbow bolts. At the end of that first year, I felt I had mastered the installation of fletchings until an adventurer came into town and requested fletchings to be made from the feathers of a monster that they had slain. I tried to shape these fletching but found that the techniques I knew were inadequate for the job. When I told master Ranald about this he brought me over to a section of the workshop that was seldom used.

Master Ranald pulled out a book from under the workbench that had detailed accounts of many different types of monsters and their uses in the creation of arrows. There was a book for each part of the arrow from the arrowhead to the nock. The different monsters had different uses and effects on the arrows and depending on the skill of the Fletcher these materials could either amplify the archer's abilities or hinder them drastically. Master Ranald made the rest of the arrows and had me watch each and every one of them be crafted. As we came close to finishing the request master Ranald made me recite the steps that this monsters feathers needed to go through to be properly attached to the arrow shaft. If I missed or skipped a step he would wait for me to go back from the start and recite them all again before finishing the arrow.

When I came in the next day master handed me some of the leftover feathers the adventurers brought me and told me to practice turning these into fletchings and applying them to an arrow shaft. After completing each arrow with the monsters feathers I presented it to master Ranald for evaluation. He would then direct me on how to improve and what mistakes I made. By the end of the week, I had fletched thirty arrows out of the monsters feathers and only had five acceptable from all that I had made.

This was a valuable lesson as I then learned that there are always more things to learn and no reason to become arrogant or truly believe you have mastered a portion of a craft after doing something for such a short time. Master Ranald explained to me how he once met an old Fletcher who had once been considered the best in the land. That Fletcher worked for fifty some years just making arrows and said that he could not consider himself a master of the craft as there were still materials that he could not use in his arrows. I was greatly humbled that day and strived to do even better from then on.

Time continued to pass and two years had passed and my elder brother Alien was to marry Lillias. They had a nice spring wedding and Alien was made the inheritor of the blacksmith. My younger brother Tolly was registered this year and decided to become fathers apprentice and learn all he could about hunting. Mother has begun to fret about Elia and the prospects of her marriage and pester eldest brother Nell about finding his own wife. There have been a few suitors but Elia is more focused on a boy named Lohn a childhood friend that used to go out and collect firewood and herbs with us.

After Elder brothers wedding Master began to teach me how to properly craft and shape an arrowhead. We usually order arrowheads from the blacksmith but Master told me that there might be a time where I am required to make them on my own. I studied and crafted arrowheads for the next two years learning how to form arrowheads from metal by forging. The next year was spent learning how to turn different rocks, gems, and glasses into arrowheads. We only went over the concepts for gems though as buying them and crafting them was seen as a luxury for nobles with too much money to spend. We then spent the next year going over how to use monster parts, mostly bones, scales, and horns, in the creation of the arrowhead. I learned how to make both serrated and straight-edged broadheads, to a bullet and blunt heads. I even learned what materials worked best for each type of arrowhead.

By the end of those four years, I felt like I could at least attempt to make any type of arrowhead requested of me and have passable results. But just as I became confident in those abilities I was once again moved to lean the next part in the creation of the arrow. For the next two years, I learned how to make the shafts and nocks of both arrows and bolts. I learned the pros and cons of using wood over metal or bone and how each part would work together with different fletchings and arrowheads. And at the end of these Master is now allowing me to create arrows completely on my own. For the first month I had to show him each and every arrow I made so that he could verify it’s quality to his standards but by the end of that month, I was making arrows of acceptable quality on a consistent basis.

After seven years of training, I was told my work was acceptable for use. But at the same time, Mother came to me about my own romantic situation. In the seven years that I worked both Nell and Elia were married. Elia to her sweetheart Lohn and Nell to a girl named Miriel. Mother was relentless about me finding a decent husband to spend the rest of my life with but I had neglected that for the majority of the time I was working with Master. Sure there were some boys that tried to court me and I can say I even found some of them to my fancy but none were appealing enough for me to feel the desire to marry any of them.

Mother wouldn’t have that and so she had me prepare for the harvest festival and prepped me in all the things that she believed a proper maiden had to know. And so I braided my hair with fresh flowers, put on the yellow dress that mother had prepared for me to wear just for this event. She even brought out some of the high-quality perfume that she got for as a gift from father after he had a good year of hunting. I felt ridiculous wearing the dress but I planned on humoring mother for letting me off the hook with relationships for so long. I usually wore a plain shirt and vest with pants or a skirt so that I could work efficiently in the fletchers workshop. I could hardly recall the last time I wore a dress by my own choice.

But alas here I am in the dress mother prepared for me, participating in a festival that I didn’t even want to attend. I felt ridiculous as I talked with the few friends that I had and went with them to do the various events that were hosted during the festival. I felt like I had danced like a headless chicken when we did the river dancing in the center of town. I didn’t go around and flirt with any of the single men around my age.

I only did what mother had required of me to do.

So how was it that he found me in the crowd of the other outstanding women.

Why did he choose to talk to me and change my world?