A voice in the dark beckoned to her. “Kat,” it called, “I’m coming to get you.” Her eyes flew open. Lying on the bed with her sheets thrown to the side, she awoke with a jolt and sat upright, breathing heavily. The dreams like this one had been more and more frequent lately. She looked at her arm where a number was written. “Seven more days then?” she mused to herself, “I can handle seven more days, and then he said I’d never have to stay in this wretched tower again.” Katarina slid her legs off the side of her bed and pushed herself off the side. She wandered to the dresser and started thinking about what she would wear that day. “Always such a hard decision,” she thought jokingly to herself. In truth, the only thing she had to wear was a single blue dress. Years of wearing the same thing had bored her and she had taken to modifying the dress in various ways, but every morning it went back to being the same, plain, boring dress.  As she had grown, the dress had always changed to fit her, which seemed kind of mysterious to her, but then again a lot of her life was mysterious.
    Katarina looked around her ivory room. She was afforded several amenities; a bookshelf full of books, her bed, her dresser, and a desk where she wrote and fiddled around with the handful of toys that she had been able to request in previous years. The Magister always seemed generous when he came to visit; he was her "protector" and was the one who had her shut away in this room in what Katarina assumed was some kind of tower. She had never been allowed to leave the tower, but could vaguely remember a time before the tower and the stark white room when she had been outside. Any time she tried to really focus on the memory, it would slip away from her. She had spent countless hours trying every method she could think of to make her memories clearer and even kept a little dream journal next to her bed in case she ever woke up with a sudden realization. The Magister always deflected whenever she questioned him about what she was being protected from, up in this tower, cut off from the world. The only time he ever slipped up was when he told her that a darkness from her past wanted to drag her to The Pit. 

Of all the stories she had heard, those told of The Pit scared her the most. She had seldom had any contact with the world outside, but she had plenty of books and stories and even managed to get things out of the Magister and his lackeys, and inevitably The Pit always came up, along with an event that created The Pit called The Cataclysm. The Pit was a hellish breach in the earth and was a kind of manifestation of evil in this world. The world of Dis had always had a strange energy to it, and some few hundred years ago, people managed to harness this energy. Katarina had read about it in a worn and tattered tome that was older than anything she had ever seen in her life. The pages were practically falling out, and on the several occasions that she had dropped it, she had spent hours afterwards pasting them back in. But within these old pages, Katarina had learned the basics of the the mystical art that could be used to harness the energy in the world. It was known by different names at different time periods; alchemy, bending, even magic, but in this age, described as the "Golden Age of Dis" in some of her newer history books, it was called Melding.