Slowburn | Enemies to lovers | dark romance | false prophets | Space Opera | triangle | strong femme characters | eventual Romance | Eventual smut |
A desperate Baron.
A yearning Duke.
A woman who weaves destruction with an army of fire.
In the m...
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When Sempir was a child he dreamed of a woman in white. The visions came in fluid, strong and tangible. So much so, that occasionally he felt as if he could reach through the veil of waking and pluck her like a berry from a vine. She would be a frail thing, a thin and wavering creature with fingers so long they could grasp his thick wrists in complete hold.
Childhood for the Alica lasted centuries, and thus, the dreams took such heavy stock. It was not until he rounded into what would have typically been noted as teenagehood that the dreams ceased. One night, he slept while she crawled over the peaks with soot and blood coating her pale skin. The next, she disappeared forever.
She would be an omen, a guiding light, a nightmare that bordered on perfection. Her return would harken the end of times, a death of unwritten proportions, and a beginning so bright he would have to shield his eyes from burns.
Collette, had been the likely candidate. Sempir recalled her kneeled before the Alica, chest heaving and blood on her dress. She had offered a deceased child in exchange for a living one. A bridge between two worlds.
Sempir straightened his back atop the horse. Smoke wafted from the palace grounds with a stench so thick he had to cover his nose with the shroud sleeve. Fires burned to ember, gutting the innards of the edifice and leaving only rubble.
Eidan screamed for his men to rally, to pile atop a Corrino leader and drag him into a circle. Sempir could hardly make out the orders, the deafness in his ear drums ringing as if the bombs had more recently detonated. It seemed that sound would never properly come back, that he would live out the next millennia lacking the ability to hear the wind or turning waters.
The woman that sulked through the masses of bodies with her shroud held tight was far from being Collette. She did not look like a mother, a witch or a fighter. Human, like Hawk, but lacking the snake eyes that drilled into his skull and made it difficult to focus.
This creature was easy to bask before, her widened gaze and tremored hands. The way she held her chin to the ground as if she expected a sword to sink through her sternum at any moment. He felt the immediate urge to protect her, to carve a path between the corpses and rivers of blood.
Whoops and hollers broke through the night, the call of a won battle, still hardly discernable from the accustomed groans and guttural shrieks that had plagued them through the night.
Sempir turned his gaze from the woman in her soiled gown only long enough to understand that Caros was dead. He still sat in his plane, pike pierced through his chest as Eidan open mouth barked orders that did not reach across the crimson night.
She was near to his horse now, and as he took her in, the sight of blood seemed new. It dripped from her bare feet and coated each step a perfect print. He had taken plenty of it over the battle, had lost enough himself. Yet, on her it was more jarring.
