![[Cara.png]] Cara doesn’t remember much about the night **Alexandria fell.** She remembers **fire.** Screams. The way the ground shook as buildings collapsed. She remembers **reaching for her mother’s hand—** and missing. She remembers **running.** She doesn’t know how long she hid in the rubble, clutching **Bibby**, her worn, stitched-up teddy bear, so tightly that the fabric almost tore. **She doesn’t know when she lost her arm.** Maybe it happened in the collapse. Maybe when she tried to crawl free. All she knows is that by the time the fires died and the sky went silent, **she was alone.** #### **Surviving the Ashes** Cara should not have survived. A small girl, wounded and hungry, with nothing but a teddy bear and a will that refused to break—**no one should have made it through the ruins like that.** But she did. She learned to hide, to listen, to move quietly through the wreckage of a city that had once been her home. She learned which scavengers were kind and which would take what little she had. She learned that **people will steal from a child if they are desperate enough.** But she never let go of Bibby. **Never.** Because **Bibby remembered.** Bibby had been there when her family was still whole, when the world had made sense. Bibby was all she had left. And then, **Sordia Vignti found her.** #### **The Broken Girl They Refused to Leave Behind** She doesn’t remember **who spotted her first.** Maybe it was **Big Guy, his massive form blocking out the sun as he crouched beside her hiding place.** Maybe it was **Ellette, her golden eyes filled with something unreadable.** All she knows is that when they reached for her, **she didn’t run.** For the first time since Alexandria burned, **someone reached for her—and didn’t let go.** They took her in. Not as a warrior, not as an apprentice, not as anything but **a girl who needed a home.** And slowly, **she let them be her family.**