Laura de Angelis - 20 years old - Fiume, Republic of Venice
From Create Your Own Story
You mumble an incoherent complaint to nobody in particular as you deftly flick a bedbug off your forehead and bury your head under your rough, lumpy pillow. You try to get back to sleep, difficult since the lady downstairs is beating her husband again and shouting the same incomprehensible Slavic phrase, while her children are already outside in the narrow, twisting cobbled street, playing their favourite game, kick the cat.
No, you're not exactly a princess, and this isn't exactly a palace. Though Fiume is an important port for the wealthy Venetian Empire, and your family has been in the city as long as anyone can trace - possibly since Roman times - several generations ago your ancestors fell upon hard times, and by the time you were born, your family had been reduced to a miserable existence in a filthy slum. You have only one faint memory of your parents: they died, presumably of plague, when you were still a baby. After that, your sister Marina, six years your senior, managed to feed you several times a week and sometimes even find a roof to sleep under. Until one fateful Christmas Eve, while the two of you shivered, huddled behind a makeshift shelter against the blowing blizzard, a stranger in a dark cloak appeared and...
