A cold fire tore at the girl's bones, snow crunching under her boots. The aching cold, oddly enough, reminded her of the burning heat that had left its mark on her body. She held her arms close to her chest under the heavy patchwork of furs draped around her shoulders, still bandaged despite having mostly healed in the past months. Her knees shook, wanting desperately to give out, to surrender to the cold, to fall where she was on this perilous path and let the snow cover her corpse. But to do so would mean facing her family in the beyond as a failure.<br/><br/>Great warriors would speak of honor, of debts owed. Revenge as a tool to prove one's might and warrior spirit. But she was a peasant, and all she had was the fire of vengeance. There was no lofty philosophy. Only a wound that needed to be sutured. Her assailant was before her, beyond a maze of rocky passages, behind ranks of cutthroats, bandits, rapists and murderers. Behind walls of stone and wood, blades and many many bows.<br/><br/>The snow crunched under her feet as she laboriously continued to put one in front of the other, clenching her fists and feeling the fire licking her skin as if it were yesterday. Her house had burned, her sisters screaming for her help. Her mother had been taken, her father was dead. She could hear her mother's screams as the bandits defiled her, begged them to spare her children. And then she was no longer begging. Or maybe she was but Khunbijin couldn't hear it because the fire was roaring all around her and the cries for help from her sisters had been replaced by screams of pain.<br/><br/>The piece of collapsed roof that trapped them was too heavy and Khunbijin added her own screams to the cacophony as the fire licked up her arms, burning her sleeves and the pale skin underneath. Her sisters stopped screaming and her tears stung her eyes. Or maybe it was the smoke...<br/><br/>Khunbijin gritted her teeth, returning to the memory over and over as if the flames that had engulfed her village all those months ago were warming her now in the cold of the mountain pass.<br/><br/><br/>The men were just what she expected. They reeked of alcohol, sweat, and murder. She didn't resist as they accosted her at the perimeter of the camp. She endured their verbal abuse, their groping and... other things. She didn't even wince as one of them licked up her neck, up her cheek, his breath stinking, before he whispered in her ear all the horrible things he planned to do to her once their leader, Banguai, had released her to them for their amusement. But not once did she waver, her expression blank, eyes cold. She didn't speak as they bound her. She didn't resist.<br/><br/>She was taken to Banguai's tent, feeling a swell of dread and excitement and rage swirling in her all the way. Finally. Finally. All the hardships, all the perils she'd faced to make this journey... It was all about to pay off. Finally she would look upon the demon. She felt her heart pounding in her ears, focusing as they drew closer and she spotted the man himself, sitting, sharpening his sword.<br/><br/>Khunbish Temujin had been named to confuse evil spirits like those that had taken her older brother as an infant. Khunbish meant "not a human". It was meant to confuse the spirits, to make them underestimate her. What better person was there to kill a devil?<br/><br/>The coldness in her eyes was replaced with hatred as the men presented her to their leader and she met his gaze, unafraid of the consequences of making such a rude gesture as they took her into the tent and made her kneel. She grunted as they kicked the back of her legs, making the first sound since her arrival. But she never broke eye contact with Banguai as he came closer. He certainly looked to be a devil. She stared long and hard at the face of the man who ordered the destruction of her village, the man she planned to kill... one day.<br/><br/>She gritted her teeth again as he touched her, turning her head this way and that by the chin to get a look at her. Her black hair shifted, showing the red burn that marred the left side of her face and traveled down her neck. He drew back, cutting open her shirt. Her skin was pale and smooth... Or it had been. Now it was marred by more burns, mostly relegated to the left side of her torso and predominantly on her side and back. Another pitted her hip. But her breasts, while small, were still mostly unblemished, thick brown nipples drawing the eyes of the men who held her shoulders.<br/><br/>She was tiny compared to the men in the tent and she showed some early signs of undernourishment. She was completely at their mercy with neither the size nor skills to overpower even one of them. And yet, she exuded a determination and intense hatred that even the dumbest among Banguai's toughs could see. Her eyes blazed from behind her tangle of hair which had come loose from its ties when they'd abused her at the gate.<br/><br/>"Demons need not be pretty," she responded, speaking for the first time since her arrival, making no move to hide her nudity. "I stopped being just a girl when you and your men murdered my father, raped my mother and burned my sisters alive. The fire took me too and Od Ana, Goddess of Fire, turned me into a demon so that I could find vengeance. I am Khunbish Temujin and I am here to kill you."