A slow humming music plays in the background while a wind is hollowing in your right ear. Thunder is heard from your left as the clouds roll past the screen, tempting itself to release a layer of thick rain upon a village that pans into view from the bottom of your gaze. There also stands a woman in wet grayish clothing which the wind is brushing to the west. “Empty and alone” says the title fading into the dark clouds as lighting strikes it. “Sad and frightened” appears ending at the woman’s waist and is washed away by the thin pouring of rain down from those dark clouds.
Down in the village below upon the hillside to the east there appears a horseman. The camera targets and rotates around to face him as it does you focus your gaze upon him getting closer as if you were flying toward him. A tall barbaric man dressed in animal furs, not dyed nor skillfully cut, but haphazardly crafted and adorned. Twenty men at least form up behind him also on horseback. The man who came first raises a heavy spiked club; the spikes appear as crude metal. Swinging this club and moving his horse about, no reins or even a saddle, bare assed and steering with his legs. Kicking his mount and swing the club you hear naught but the rain, the wind, and the slow growing thudding from the horses as twenty, then thirty more, then another fifty riders, all charge down the hill. You follow them from behind then skip ahead to the front and watch as they break glass and light torches to throw up onto thatched roofs drawing out those asleep or comfortable within their homes.
You get closer to a group of riding horsemen and come to follow behind them as they swing their clubs and thrust their spears, finding their way into the villagers who run aimlessly in confusion. A woman steps out of her thatched hut looking strangely familiar she glances in both directions a couple children following behind her as she crosses the street. You see a spear fly and you watch the men bear down on the children and hear the echoing scream of a woman under the rain and the hollowing wind.
Your view fades and “In the night they came!” appears on screen and then quickly fades, a replay of the charging of the barbarians and then a pan around the carnage in the village, with no sound and displayed at a faster speed. “Ambushed us in our own homes!” pictures of houses burning and people franticly trying to grab weapons. “They showed no mercy!” replays the bearing down on the children.
Now you are back on the hillside watching the burning village as the riders make off into the west. You see the woman standing to the right and overlooking the village, you see a scarf from one of her children in her left hand as she squeezes it the sentences fade in at her waist. “They shall pay! And no mercy shall I show THEM- Shai” She turns and walks off screen the background fades and you hear a horse neighing in the background underneath the wind and rain and trotting off the words fade and the story begins.
The story of how a ruthless hoard of barbarians created the greatest woman warrior to ever live or will she just be left as a mourning bitter woman whose life was extinguished with the lose of her children. This story has yet no ending. You now are the story writer, what path will you direct Shai's feet to take and where will she end up?