The Princess of Wrath

Prologue - The Curse of the Old Gods

Year 3578 after the Vanishing of the Shadow Army

3rd Day of the 4th Month

When Princess Asura woke up from her slumber screaming in excruciating pain, none of the fifteen servants scattered through the Silent Keep could hear her. The seasonal storms that were ravaging the land nonstop and were going to continue doing it for another month prevented them from hearing the cries of the young woman that barely resonated through the cold-dark stone hallways. She fell from her almost totally sweat-covered bed on purpose, tearing the fabric of her damp nightgown in the process and puked a moderate amount of blood into an empty silver basin. Lightning illuminated the room intermittently, followed by the unavoidable thundering sound that made the windows vibrate violently, but Asura did not even react to that; her gaze was fixed in the new content of the basin: there was a pitch-black pigmentation that contrasted in the blood by the way that it was slowly creeping within it. It was moving in a harmonic way, as if there was an inherent relationship of equilibrium between it and the blood.

"No...no, no... Please, no," she begged with difficulty because of the generalized pain that was crossing through her body, and breaking in tears as the weight of the significance of that dark substance in her blood felt over her shoulders. "NO! ANYTHING BUT THIS!"

Her screams temporary won over the sound of the rain and the thunderstorm. Frida, the maid that was supposed to take care of Asura and was sleeping in the room next to hers, finally became aware of it.

"My lady?!" In almost no time, Asura heard the voice of Frida behind the double door of her room. "My lady? Are you awake?"

The young woman stared at the blood-covered basin with panic and acted without even thinking by swallowing the pigmented blood. After leaving the empty but stained basin half-hidden under the bed, she jumped into the bed and covered herself with the blankets up to her head.

A couple of seconds later and tingling of keys, the heavy door slowly opened, partially illuminating the room with the soft light of a radiance crystal-based lantern. 

"Please, go. Just go...," Asura thought as she waited, pretending to be asleep and biting the bed sheets to mute the sobs that wanted to escape from her mouth.

Frida closed the door after a while. Once Asura was sure that her maid had returned to her room, she got up and probed in the dark for the switch of the lamp over the bedside table. The crystal behind the glass lampshade began to glow once she found it, expelling the darkness around.

Asura's room was quite fit for a princess: unnecessary big, with four drawers next to the walls, three armchairs in the center, several mannequins with dresses that she was needed to use by protocol, a personal bathroom and a doubled-windowed door that led to a balcony. Her ornate bed was king-sized, which was also unnecessary since no lover would spend the night with her with the risk of being discovered and tortured to death in the dungeons of the Keep by order of her mother.

Sighing and wiping the tears in vain, Asura saw in the silver pocket watch that rested over the table that it was three hours before dawn. The blood-stained basin had little but evident remains of black pigment that completely broke her illusion about a bad dream. With the object in hands, she walked into the bathroom and turned on the lights: the bathtub was waiting for her to the right side, near the heating machine and opposite to the sink.

She wasted no time in taking off her gown, threw it aside and stopped dead on her tracks when she saw her reflection in the mirror: for a young woman that was about to turn twenty, her broken and tired gaze belonged to someone far older than it seemed. The dark circles under her auburn eyes and greasy skin testified the existence of previous nights of insomnia just like that one; perhaps the only relative aspects that she kept of what one could interpret as beauty was the symmetry of her round face, tiny nose and teeth that by some unknown miracle they still did not turn to a rotting yellow color. Her long, dirty blonde hair was loose and smelled horrible, just like the rest of her body.