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When an older Viera, it was impossible to say how much older, found them he did try to be comforting.
But his words were spoken to soothe the wrong fears.

Staring up at the far darker skinned man, with his white hair clipped short to prevent anyone using it 
against him in a fight, Rael saw only the pain of a future wished for utterly denied. They tried to fight, 
but at all of twelve it was child’s play for the trained warrior to pluck them from their hiding place. 
They kicked and yelled to be let go, that their place was village, but it fell on ears as deaf to the reason 
as the women had been. And the time of comforting words didn’t last.

They were hoisted up by the older male that had found them and carried to the edge of the village 
where the males who had come of age had been assembled. After a small ceremony, the details of 
which Rael had never bothered to learn, certain of their role in life being elsewhere, their elders led 
them away into the jungle. Rael could stop themselves, looking back with tears in their eyes as their 
home vanished into the trees.

One of their escorts, the same male who’d found them hiding, tried to cheer them up. They’d be back in
a year, he said, to help with the mating. Rael’s reply was a flood of silent tears, the pain they felt too 
deep to give words. They had tried to explain, and no one had listened, no one had even tried to 
understand. 

The small caravan’s arrival at the training camp went all but unnoticed to the distraught Ravan, and 
they barely heard their assignment to a squad. They just stood in place in the small drill area, tears still 
streaming down their cheeks, until a sympathetic soul took them by a hand and guided them to the little
nest that would be theirs to sleep in. 

They tried to imagine the future ahead of them now, growing older in a body that wasn’t right. No 
happiness found them in that place. Yet creeping into their dreams at the end of their tears, there came 
different visions. Ones where their body changed to grow into what they had always imagined for 
themselves, where they could be known as what they knew they were. Where they could be a mother.

Their training began at dawn. Rael was taken out of the camp with their squad and set to learning patrol
routes, but they couldn’t focus on it at all. Despite the skill of their trainers, and the scolding that soon 
began to be heaped upon them for their distraction, none of it could penetrate the wish for their 
desperate dream to come true.

It didn’t take long for those dreams to overcome fear. If there was to be even a shred of happiness to 
their life, Rael decided, it couldn’t be here. Less than a moon after being brought to the camp, they 
slipped away in the night. Once out of the camp and past the obvious watchers, they put the 
conditioning the camp had forced upon them to good use. Voices called out in pursuit, but they didn’t 
care. Not even that running away like this would cause them to be banished forever from the village. 
All they wanted was the chance to be happy.

Perhaps they were faster than the guards. Perhaps those guards could not stray too far from their posts