It drew her, over and over again, to watch the Temple dancers as they sought to please the Gods with the offerings of their grace and beauty. And when she found time alone and unseen, she would mimic the movements, humming the music herself as she would twist and turn, dip and coil.

And the many sacred felines of the Temple would follow her, greeting her as they would each other, and this did not go unnoticed by one flashing eyed beauty named calla. A Dancer herself, and jealouse of her status, guarded and hard, it was Calla that engineered Ibon's next journey, seeing to it herself that the leggy slave was sent away from the temple, sold to a slave merchant bound for the Nubian lands.

Over the years she found herself passed from one place to the next, until she landed in Persia. It was there that several things happened that changed both the slave and the woman Ibon.
In the marketplace she found herself being chased, hunted by a strange man she had seen in dreams. In her fear and terror, she changed, shifted from a running woman, to a golden leopard. Wild and untamed, leaping and elluding, but she was too new to her form to know how to truely escape, and he cornored her against a rock wall, only to shift hisself.

His name was Jarrl, and he became her teacher..and in turn, she became his lover. He taught her to intigrate from her true form to her next and seemed surprised that she found herself shifting not to just her leopard form, but to others as well.

Between Jarrl and the dance Master in the kings court, Ibon the slave was soon known as Ibon, the Dancer. And it was there, in His court, that she first danced for the Gods.
There are tales, rumors and myths of what happened that day. But it has been whispered that the Gods walked the Kings court and laid their hands on the ebony skinned beauty. And from that day on, she was a slave no longer.

In the Kings court, she soon gained status and power, even to the point that His youngest daughter came to her and begged teaching in the dance. Thus Ibon the slave grew and reached out, learning how to make men of power see her not as a woman, but a prize worth paying any price to obtain, even if it were for a single night.

It was not a gift of pleasure that drew them, but the knowlage that this woman, this ebony skinned Dancer, was touched by the Gods themselves, and it was soon that they found her favor came with a price. And for the Moorish noble that owned the slave Murr..his greed and desire also brought an end to his holdings and that of his Kingdom.
Through sources only known to the Dancer, she had tracked her mothers life and her death at the hands of the greedy pig that owned her, strangled slowly in his bed as she fought to escape His attentions.

As he whiled away the night in the arms of the lithe Dancer, the Persian army invaded his holdings and raized them to the ground. As the morning rose, the saited Overlord awoke to find the dancers bed surrounded by hard eyed guards and before the noonday sun grew to full strength, he had been sold to a barge owner, reduced to sweat and strain at the oars of a lowly cattle barge.