It wasn't enough for the Scales to simply kill the members of the village. They took everything. Wave after wave of them came through the town like swarms of locusts, searching houses for food as if to pick any meat they could out of the carcasses of the homes of the families they had already slaughtered.
Athena lost track of how many Scales walked just over her head. She watched them through the cracks as they shuffled across the wooden floors above her, talking and laughing amongst themselves as if this was an everyday event.
Too afraid to fall asleep and too tired to make a noise, she sank into a ball and hid her face in her knees, wondering what the stars outside looked like, and wondering if her mother may have seen those same stars that she was now picturing.
Eventually the Scales stopped coming in. Even when they did, she could not be sure. But the drumming of boots against the floors turned into the soft rumble of a storm outside, and she eventually fell asleep.
When she awoke in the morning, she had a creak in her neck. It was hard to think that a day ago this would have been a tragedy. This would've ruined her day. But now, this was the least of her worries.
She eventually gathered up the courage to open up the trap door and crawl out.
The Scales were gone. Her people were not. Their bodies crowded the town, their blood cleaned from the streets only by the rain in the night.
A heavy sob emerged from the deepest part of her gut and found itself stuck in her throat, unable to escape yet at the same time suffocating her. She ran as fast as she could away from the campfire where she knew she would find her dad. She couldn't take any more of this.
On the other side of town she saw what appeared to be torches still lit on the walls of the town pavilion. Long tables were crowded with half-eaten food. Her people's food.
It enraged her, but no amount of rage or sadness or any other emotion was going to fill her growling stomach. She found a table facing all of the others so that she would be able to see if anyone returned, and she sat at it and ate as much as she could.
She eventually stumbled onto a nearby farm, where she was taken in and given a new home without questions. She lived with the farmer until he died 48 years later. She was grown enough to leave on her own, and so she set off to keep her promise. The years turned to decades and the decades turned to centuries, waiting on the Chosen One, training herself in the sword so that she would be ready to train them when the time came.