When I was a young child, soldiers raided our part of the forest. My parents were taken and executed, but my older sister Lila and I were hidden down in a huge tree that my parents had her hollow out just in case they came for us. Before they left us, my mother made us promise to fight to stay alive for a long long time, no matter if they ever came for us again. And then they were gone. Over the years Lila took as best care of me as she could and even got a job as an artificer for one of the few wizards still left. She became one of the best artificers around and I admired and idolized her, and learned as much as I could in hopes to one day be just like her. Sometimes she'd even have me shift into different creatures to collect materials from various places, and would reward me with personal engineering lessons to enhance my skills. If I got something extra special she would reward me with a special tool to add to my collection. My sister was near perfect, but she struggled with one thing. She had developed an illness that degraded her body over the years. Bits and pieces of her flesh would die and there was nothing we could do. She would just lose parts of herself, and one day she herself would die in entirety. Healing potions and spells never worked, and we had begun to give up hope. Until one day when I was working on my own projects and built a flexible mechanical glove that moved with the movement of my own arm. That gave her an idea.
She told me I was helping her. She would always remind me; "Remember? Remember what mother said before she left? She made us promise Maize! She made us promise to stay alive for a long long time!" Lila couldn't stay alive if this disease consumed her completely, and her skills were far too important to risk something going wrong. If something went wrong with me though I'd still live. I'd just be built a little wrong. And I couldn't bear the thought of something happening to the one and only person that I had left. And so I let her continue every time. Through all the cutting of her knife and scratching of the gears and the loss of my perfectly good body. And the blood, oh the blood. The scent of it still puts me off to this day. Her mechanics worked, of course they worked. I had no doubt of her skill. Sometimes I wonder if she even doubted it herself, or if she just wanted someone to share in her suffering.
One day the soldiers came back. They had discovered the wizard had been working with a fae, and they captured her. She was executed later that day, I never even had a chance to save her. All I had to remember her by was my tools, and the silvery scars on my skin all across my body, where hidden underneath was an expertly constructed combination of organic flesh and organs, and metal plates and gears. I am thankful to that metal. It had kept my sister alive for the past two years. If the goddess hadn't taken her from me, who knows how much longer I could have helped Lila live. I miss her. I would have given her every single piece of my flesh if it meant I could've seen her live the rest of the life she should have had. I left that part of the forest the next day. I couldn't stand to see it anymore. I lived many miles away in a tree I had hollowed out myself. I hid there on the day I heard the familiar sound of soldiers, this time discovering the opening where I was. I had wished my sister had still been with me that day. She would have done much better than I had at hollowing the tree.
