"I don't think I belong here. I'm not... the girl you think I am."
It was a conversation Dayn had been dreading, the frightened expression on his mother's face almost enough to make him back down and forget about it. But he'd felt like something was wrong since his teens, never quite fitting in and feeling like a puppet in somebody else's fingers. The ladies of the Frostbark were his family - aunts tougher than week-old cloud banana skins and cousins intimidating enough to force even his father into submission - but he wasn't one of them. His reflection was telling him a different story to the one he was reading, and Dayn was desperate for the day he could make everything feel right again. Desperate for a life free of the sleepless nights and hours spent crying in a huddle of blankets so he didn't have to look at himself.
They'd taught him how to wield blades, how to slice in just the right ways to bring anything to a standstill, and looked after him when he was ill and weary from training too much. It was their wisdom and guidance that gave Dayn enough courage to make his decision — the Hthrana's child was a daughter no more.
"I want to leave... I want to find somewhere I fit in."
She was a little taken aback, of course, but she understood; accepted Dayn's choice without much protest, and made him promise to write home every once in a while. As he trudged through the thick snow, bound for Kugane with a satchel that his mother packed for him, he could feel the tethers begin to fray, the hushed voices of the leaves and trees growing ever fainter with each step. Nobody needed to know that he cried on the boat to Hingashi.
Within a few suns of arriving in Kugane, Dayn had himself the lease on an apartment and a hunting license to pay for it. Contracts spanning near and far caught his eye, each target another notch in his daggers and more coins in his pocket. For almost two decades, he was happy to bury himself in work and make a new name for himself as a renowned bounty hunter. In that time, he was invited to learn the secretive ways of the ninja due to his high aptitude with a pair of daggers — from there, his skills only blossomed further.
On the cusp of his forty-third summer, one such bounty found Dayn skirting the edges of his home, joining an expedition to cull a dangerously active population of fauna in The Burn. The whispers of the forest tickled the back of his mind as he fought, a phantom of his past that hooked his attention a little too hard — one particularly agile gigaworm broke from the pack and made a beeline for him. Within seconds the beast had Dayn trapped in its giant maw, teeth easily rending through flesh, muscle and bone as the rest of the adventuring party fought to subdue it. With some difficulty, he was pried free of the worm's tusks and pumped full of healing potions until they could safely withdraw him for proper medical attention.
The incident left him with a loss of sight in his right eye and a ring of puncture scars along his right hand side — he hated looking at them in the mirror every morning as he wrapped bandages tightly around his chest to hide his shape, but at least they were his. It was a shaky return to hunting after a couple of moons of bedrest, but Dayn wasn't about to let a lack of depth perception stop him from doing what he loved.