Legends of Belariath
Erin Tarcata
A woman who’s lived for 547 years (born in 1469), Erin Tarcata was born on a farm in the middle of nowhere as the youngest of five children, all girls, born to Yento and Kira Tarcata of the Verlosi Tribe. The family was dirt-poor, and realistically Yento and Kira knew they wouldn’t be able to raise their children without an influx of money.
When Erin was five years old, a human named Gregory Johnson met with Yento privately, offering to pay the family 1000 mhl a month for the next fifteen years—in exchange for being able to take one of their daughters as a slave at the end of that period. Yento consulted with his wife, and they agreed to the proposal, which literally kept food on the family’s table when nothing else would have.
Without her knowledge, Erin’s personality was gradually and deliberately molded by her parents to make her an ideal house servant.
When Erin and her sisters were eight years old, Erin's oldest sister Karen became deathly ill with the flu. Unbeknownst to Erin at the time, her future master Gregory arranged for a world-renowned doctor to come to the farm and look after Karen, helping her recover from the disease. In fact, in addition to the guaranteed 1,000 mhl a month, Gregory spared no expense in assuring that the family stayed healthy and whole during those 15 years.
On her eighteenth birthday, her parents told her the agreement they’d made, and as they’d hoped, Erin found the agreement acceptable. She was relieved by it, in fact—she’d been a rather flighty child who had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, and was vaguely insecure that she’d be a horrible mate for anyone unfortunate enough to have her.
When Erin turned 20, her spiritual and physical forms merged, as they do with nearly all vulpines. And Erin’s spirit tended towards arts and sciences. She became fascinated by the stars for the first time in her life, and began charting them in her spare time, and learning the legends behind the creation of the constellations. Vulpine lore was full of such legends, after all.
Two months or so after Erin’s 20th birthday, she legally became the property of Gregory Johnson, her family’s mysterious benefactor who was literally the main reason that she, her parents and her sisters had been able to survive so long on such an otherwise-meager living. Erin was filled with gratitude, and happily did anything and everything Gregory asked of her. The first night she belonged to him, she lost her virginity to him.
Over the next five hundred years, Erin was passed along through the Johnson family from generation to generation. Some treated her with love, some treated her harshly. (One of them in particular, Master Lamont, literally tortured her frequently when he was her master from 1745–47). Some wanted her to wait on them hand-and-foot; some of them granted her a modicum of independence. A couple hundred years ago, one of her masters wanted her to learn a trade, and she eventually became an excellent sculptor, in addition to her work in astronomy. But none freed her.
In 2005, while Erin was in Nanthalion on an errand given to her by her master James Whitaker, a grease fire set Whitaker’s log cabin on fire, killing him and his immediate family. This had the effect of freeing Erin, which made her extremely uncomfortable, having spent over five centuries as a slave.
Since then, she’s done the occasional odd job to survive, but she’s missed the feeling of being a slave. It's only been in her recent few years of freedom that she's had any sort of real free-time to pursue her interests in astronomy and sculpting. But it's difficult to make money sculpting unless one is extremely talented, and it's darn near impossible to make money in astronomy-- so she's had to spend a lot of her time on more practical pursuits. In short, her needs far exceed her bankable skills. So she came to Nanthalion, hoping to find a master who will take care of her.
Soon after arriving in Nanthalion, Erin met a moriel named Div`Olin Ouss`Ett, to whom she expressed her desire to become a slave again. Div`Olin offered himself as a master to her, and after a month-long probationary period, during which both of them became very comfortable around one another, Div officially collared her.
After Div disappeared for a few months, however, Erin asked the ISA for her unconditional release from him, and soon thereafter became the property of her fox-kin, Tuva Sarachi.
Erin was collared by Tuva on 12/19/2010; she got herself de-collared from her on 2/22/2012 due to Tuva disappearing from the empire for several months. To this day, Erin doesn't know if her former mistress is alive or dead.
The very brief experiences with Div`Olin and Tuva have started to give Erin an abandonment complex, and given the terrible way in which her association with Master Gregory's descendants ended, she's also beginning to wonder if she's cursed.
Erin freely offered herself to Raeycor to become his new slave in mid-2012. He disappeared from the realm as well, and she requested and received a release from his custody in November 2012.
She was collared to Oberon on 2/26/13, and he stayed with her for a long time. Eventually, though, Oberon too disappeared from the empire. Erin spent some time at the Sugar and Spice getting to know and slowly fall in love with a Drak Sen named Nairun Moon, and ultimately he convinced her to take steps to decollar herself from the missing Oberon. She did so on 7/30/16.
Erin lived with Nairun for a few months, but after meeting Traael, who has many slaves, Erin decided she wanted to be part of that family. She has asked Traael to take her as her slave.