It was not until the end of Saza's fourteenth arc that he finally learned the truth about his mother.
Aris Moshe was born and raised in Nashaki, and never went anywhere else in her life. She was kind, strong-willed, and determined. She spent her youth on the outskirts of the city, sharing a small, weathered tent with two parents, an uncle, and three siblings. Her parents and her uncle were travelers, but the wandering trio of biqaj set up camp outside of Nashaki when her mother gave birth to her, their final child. Life was always hard for the family. They struggled to settle in, they struggled to afford a more permanent home (and never did), they struggled with everything and more - and none struggled more than Aris.
She was a troublemaker of sorts, an unruly young girl with no love for the city around her. Frequently was she caught and punished for petty crimes, most of them committed in the hope of somehow improving her family's chances of success. Her siblings warned her often of the dangers of her methods, but Aris was determined. She would bring home food. She would find them coin. She would clothe them, and shelter them, and give them the life they deserved in a nice stone house near the Towers. She had not been alive for twenty arcs before she was sold to the Tower of Flesh.
Seventeen arcs passed after she was sold off to a new master, and Aris grew weak. She considered herself unfortunate, every arc, not to have died in the Cylus cold like so many of her fellow slaves. During her thirty-sixth arc, her weakness overwhelmed, and a terrible sickness rendered her virtually useless to her master. She was sold back to the Tower of Flesh, but knew that this time around, the cold would take her too. Four children were born to her during her time as a slave, all to different fathers with faces long forgotten (or perhaps never seen), and though she waited for the end of her life... it was then that her firstborn found her.
Her first held a special place in her heart, callused though it was after fourteen arcs without him. Saza Moshe had grown into a handsome (if slightly awkward) young man, the only survivor of Aris' difficult births, and had been told of his mother's life only after overhearing his friend's mother speak of her. Using all of the coin he had managed to collect and store away for his dreams of one day owning a store, he bought his sickly mother from the Tower, and cared for her for only two weeks before she died.
Saza was left with nothing but the will to start again. With no money, no home, and no one to rely on (for by this time, many of the kindly mothers and fathers he'd known had died in the harsh elements or were sold for false crimes), he had no other choice. Again, he took whatever work he found. Again, he saved every coin he could, without even the exception of food. His friends took to calling him Kalba, likening his dietary habits to those of the canine scavengers that prowled the hotlands at night, and he did not have the pride to refute it. He could sell whatever fresh foods were given to him, but the scraps and rotten foods he found, he could not - so the choice was an easy one for him.
He was seventeen when he finally broke down. Out of the desire for shelter, and protection from the Tower of Flesh, he accepted an invitation into the Tower of Arms. Poorly trained and less than passionate, Saza was an infantry soldier that fortunately never saw combat. He was simply grateful to have a roof over his head, and spent most of his time breaking up fights rather than participating in them.
Near the end of his eighteenth arc, Saza was injured. After failing to calm a petty dispute between friends, the situation was soured further, and though the youth had never been one for violence, he attacked one of them for a particularly harsh comment about his late mother. It was his first and last fight, and besides the good chunk taken from the top of his ear, his right leg was broken, cementing his distaste for violence. He would have been of little use after that should the need for war arise, and he was removed from the Tower of Arms - but by then, Saza hardly cared.
![[Approved by Strange]](.//images/icons/cs_ok.png "[Approved by Strange]"){kind=icon}
