A strangled gasp ripped itself from the girls throat. She had happened upon the scene as the cat pounced, turning her head from one side of the open stretch grass to another, but there the frosty morning was not tranquil as it had seemed. In the tender pre-dawn light, Asavvi saw death for the first time. Or, an almost death… Though the rabbit’s throat was in the cat’s jaws, it still kicked feebly. Perhaps that was worse than anything, perhaps later she would look back at this day and think less of the animal's end and more it’s slow painful march towards it. Not pain, never pain.

Asavvi had thought she had known what violence was, had seen warriors in their training and heard of battles fought for a cause and thought she knew what she had set herself up to hate. Her captors had talked of war, mad her think of war in a strange set of terms. Right and wrong to them had been black and white with the sharpest line of contrast in between. All violence was wrong to them but in the way they had altered her thoughts she had come to think of all violence as equal, that a single strike was the equal in severity as a killing blow. As her wide eye watched the cat and the rabbit, Asavvi knew that she had been tricked, lied too. She understood that this moment held a bleak severity that she had never know before. Sadly, someday she would learn that this wasn’t the worst the world had to offer. There were evils that, if lucky, she would never see, never know. This was killing, yes, but it was done without malice, without joy; this was merely life as it was meant to ebb and flow. 

She had frozen, riveted to the cold ground but shock and terror. The bobcat had moved, she'd seen it out of the corner of her eye and by the time she had tuned her head it had had the rabbit clamped in it's jaws. She'd heard the rabbit's last desperate cry and that horrifying should had stabber her frightened heart just as surely as the cat's teeth stabbed into the creatures throat. No. No! NO! With a cry she let instinct take over; hot orbs of light blazed into life around her, lighten the dim meadow in a blazing starlight. The stars moved with the force of her unchecked will, speeding towards the little huntress. Whatever was happening needed to stop, that was all she knew, all she thought she understood. She knew nothing.