(100 p.n.) Orpheia Allegiance Folklore - Unten Den Kirsten

The Story of Unten Den Kirsten  or  "The Sad Girl Kirsten"  was brought over by the original settlers of what is now the Orpheia Allegiance  The story starts with a family of three, a wife, a husband, and their daughter Kirsten. The Husband is called to fight in the wars, but refuses to answer the call. After the war the militias come to the families home to exact vengeance on what they see as a coward,  as they drag the father from the home and move to cut the wife's throat. The girl Kirsten offers herself to the militia in the stead of her parents and the militia take the crying girl away from her family.  Rather than killing Kirsten the militia leader is so inspired by the little girl that he adopts her for his own and raises her in the honor of a son. She grows to much glory in her kingdom, but every victory comes with an aura of sadness and listlessness for Kirsten.  The story will at times end there,  other renditions will continue with Kirsten either being reunited with her parents, slain by her enslaved father in a far off battlefield in a quirk of fate,  and even sometimes bringing a sense of happiness and closure to the girl-warrior's story as she becomes an arch-duchess and forms her own family. The ending will usually change from region to region and teller to teller. With the modern re-telling's often omitting the adoption and simply killing Kirsten.  In any sense the main idea of the folk tale is to stress the importance of heeding the call-to-arms and taking responsibility for ones own actions. While a usually dark tale, the veiled message of unity of arms and adherence to a system of crime and punishment, although a barbaric one, is a leading cause to the cultural identity of the Orpheia Allegiance which helps to form the glue that holds the often at odds states that make it up in a suspension of mutual cultural unity that keeps them from constant civil war,  in addition of course to political and economic concerns.
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A note on "Classica Orpheian Linguistics"

The basic linguistic form of Orpheian uses a base of simple root words that are usually 3 to 4 letters in length and a series of prefixes that are added to form more complex words, with a small section of conjunctions, such as "Den"  which, depending on their distance on a written page,  or time passed since the base word-prefix was uttered,  is either a verb or  the word "the".

so for instance in the phrase  "Unten Den Kirsten"

"Un"  is the prefix, meaning  the opposite of in this instance

"ten"  is the base word, which means literally in common tounge  "excited feminine child"

therefore the combination of Un and ten means "sad girl"  or the "Not Happy feminine child"  and "Den" placed as it is approximately 1cm away from the original phrase means "the"

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