Not idly did the greater forces at work grant pity on one soul. Fewer still granted such condemning vengeance. This is the tale of how the forces beyond even the Greater Will would attempt penance upon Queen Marika. How foolish they were to send her to be her executioner.
Limgrave, not far beyond the gates of Castle Stormveil.
The shackles had grown strangely heavy when the queen had at last found consciousness once more. Time and memory were fleeting, and last she could recall was the painful shackles of the Greater Will and its rage at her rebellion against its nature. These were not the same shackles, nor the same prison at all. The air tastes slightly of pollen and mildew, and somewhere it reeked of even worse rubbish than she wished to consider at present. She felt so free, if beginning to feel sick, for what must have been the first day in millenia.
Perhaps that was what struck her more thunderously as the revelation struck her. That she could have a revelation at all. Her eyes slowly peeled themselves open, whining as her skin felt as if it was shedding layers of unwashed dead tissue that had grown encrusted together. Her body ached like only a freshly shed serpent could ache, yet she could ache at all. There was an almost reverent moment where the pain felt almost like bliss, for it was pain she felt at its fullest. It churned deep with feelings of identity she had once thought lost with her godhood's annointment. Feelings that instantly brought forth a second startling revelation. These were the pains of mortality.
Was she mortal, now...?
When at last, the soreness of new light kissing her eyes had begun to wear down enough to be tolerable, they caught her surroundings to be illuminated by dim firelight. A watery den with a single feathered cretin, a misbegotten, snarking over a scrap of food far too close for her liking. Their kind were such savages in their ways. Feasting and fighting as if birthed out of the shit of pigs. It disgusted her, and long had any touched by the crucible filled her belly with woe. She had not idly forgotten their horrific crimes. She was not, in whatever state had become or befallen her, likely to forget soon.
Yet she felt that ache she had momentarily indulged in now a burden on her. Her muscles weakly whined at any effort, and the iron of these shackles felt blessed by some lesser power that, were she healthy, would be barely a novelty to undo. Yet here and now, she was truly trapped. So, she would not yet show sign of her life. Silent and still, she watched. She waited. It may have been three hours or three weeks, but she had long forgotten much of her sense of time. She had plotted for a moment the beast strayed too close when there was noise coming from deeper within the cavern.
First, it was the sound of wolves being battled, then soon, metal against metal. Soon after came footsteps, metal lightly dragging against rock with slow and deliberate motions. A knight slowly entered with armor of black and blue, trailing across her hauberk and tasseled garb like whipping lashes in a meshed mixture of black fabric and blue dyed steel chainmail layered beneath. Her face bore no helmet, but instead, a blue scarfed hood that hid their lips but not the startling eyes that reminded one of glaciers, illuminated from behind. Her blade raised in her left hand as a small seal, reminding me of the crescent arc of the moon covering the sun, raised in her right, and those things should have quickened her heart by leaps more. Yet even as her feign of sleep faltered and she watched this young knight slice down the foul beast that had caged her in this strange second life, even as strange blasts of blue lightning that smelled of ice tore through flesh and hardstone blade, it was those eyes that quickened the pulse most.
What true terror those eyes would bring. Perhaps even more than godhood once had, if one were to tally the cost. Yet that day would remain my grandest memory. It was the day she met her and was unafraid.
A/n
My first attempt at enemies to lovers, I hope you enjoy! I am not a Vaati Vidya level lore keeper, though they do have my respect. This is just something that was brewing in a more forgiving mindset, as dark as it shall get.