She was an avatar of destruction. An engine of war that scythed down the many lives who had stood in her path. That was how she had been made to be... so the elders of the Huns had said to her.That she, Altera, existed for battle.
That she had no father, no mother. That she had been "discovered" by the Huns, descendants of the Xiongnu people.
Yes, she had no memories of parents, nor of friends, nor of a family.
Instead, the world was filled with enemies.
As shown by the marks of war carved into her flesh from the beginning, she lived only to fight. It was her born nature and her role. It was her purpose to exercise her capabilities as intended, and she never held any doubt on the matter.
Becoming destruction itself, she fought like a raging tempest, king of the Huns yet not one of them.
It barely even registered to her that she had armies at her back as she swung her sword with single mind.
Destruction. Domination. Invasion.
She could not be sated, even as the lands of the Huns grew beyond their ability to control.
She merely swung the sword and continued the slaughter.
Even in the moment when death came to her, she recalled - as she laid in a pool of her own blood, she had thought only of ways to fell Rome.
However, having become a heroic spirit and taken form as a Servant, she began silently questioning herself.
Had she perhaps been too much of a warrior?
What if she had not become the embodiment of destrution itself?
What if she never gripped the sword of the war god?
She had been feared by Europe as the punishment brought down by their absolute deity, the very whip of God Himself.
She had been a fighting machine.
History had even forgotten that she was a woman.
What life could she have lived, if not as a warrior?
What would she have spent her time on?
Would she have been a traveller, freely circling the world on the back of her horse?
Would she have been a grower of life, tilling the earth as she had seen the people of Europe done?
Would she be baking bread in a smoldering oven? Hunting birds and beasts in the wild?
Would she be learning words and language, and writing it down in books?
Would she, with reddened cheeks and gentle smile, have pressed herself into the breast of another?
She did not know.
But she wondered...