Suraiya rode atop Valour with a subtle sense of unease pulling at her spirit. Her eyes roamed outward from where she sat atop her courser, observing the faces and gazes of thousands of peoples while Selucia led her and her companions through one of the main thoroughfares of Sanctuary. They moved six abreast, and it was all Suraiya could do not to be distracted by the riot of eclectic colours and artistic expressions rampant within the city. She was used to attention as the daughter of a King, and Princess-Royal of Stormharrow; but that was in her own home. A place of comfort, security, and inherent strength.
This… this was not Stormharrow. This was not a place she felt in control.
Everywhere she looked her eyes met those of people with discerning, weighing, and intelligent eyes. Every story she’d heard, every tale she’d been told, every single legend and myth had painted Elyseans as monsters that had nearly shattered the world. Tyrants that had driven the people of the Prime Material into an age of hedonistic overindulgence, apostasy, and dark magic.
Yet these people, no matter how often she searched or attempted to find traces of such horror, were utterly different from every tale she’d been told. They were calm, confident, well-nourished and — perhaps most shockingly of all — healthier-looking than all but the wealthiest of Stormharrow’s citizenry. The hardiness of the working class had always been something she’d simply taken for granted. A reality of their lot in life.
The lower classes toiled, and led lives of hard labour in return for grace and favour from the gods for their services. The aristocracy, anointed by the Nine, rewarded them with coin and patronage in return for proper work. It was a system of give and take. Effort and reward. It was a foundational aspect of the religion that governed the largest nation in the Prime Material.
In that moment, the once-evident merits of that very faith were shattering before her eyes.
The fundamental belief that anchored the class system in the Grand Ascendancy was that each person had a place, as ordained by the Divine, and that attempting to upend or upset that hierarchy was implicitly an act of chaos. It created division, strife, and ruined the peaceful efficiency of a stratified system. In Sanctuary, all of those points were rejected, torn apart, and somehow shown to be built on pillars of sand.
“You look troubled, Suraiya.” Selucia said from below her where she was holding Valour’s bridle.
“I am seeing the fabric of my belief system turned on its head.” The princess admitted. “The people here are so healthy, and clearly not lacking for funds or amenities. Certainly there is clear wealth disparity in the dress of some compared to others, but there is not a single hungry or sickly person, nor any individual that looks perpetually dirtied or attired in threadbare clothing. It is… wonderful and terrifying all at once.”
“Mm. You’re talking about the stratification edicts in the Ascendancy, I take it?”
“Yes.”
Selucia nodded in a way that showed a lack of surprise before speaking. “Elyseans do not hold to the ideas of aristocracy in the way that the Nine have demented it. We believe that a Patrician — that is a noble in your nomenclature — holds a responsibility of noblesse oblige to those below them. It is the privilege of the superior to defend and protect the safety and well-being of those weaker than them. The System is not forgiving, and adversity is its natural course, but that does not mean cruelty or deprivation.”
“It is not seen as cruelty to encourage hard work and the earning of rewards,” Suraiya said when Selucia finished, “and it is not that I do not think there is merit to the idea of placing adversity upon the common people in order to encourage their growth, but it strikes me that we have conflated adversity in the definition of the System with deprivation by our own hands. I can suddenly find no good argument as to why the lowest among my citizens must live in squalor. Two days prior I would have said that while harsh, it encouraged their spirits to overcome, and helped bring a coldly necessary order to society. Now though…”
Selucia merely nodded, her red hair gently tousled by the breeze in the valley. “It is the mark of a wise woman to be able to so quickly and insightfully pick up on the fallacies of the logic involved.” She gestured airily. “Poverty does not create drive, it merely perpetuates resentment and ferments more poverty and crime. We have always understood that adversity can be delivered absent the need for institutionalised marginalism. Challenge does not require deprivation of personal wellbeing, and in fact such can directly impede someone’s ability to properly rise to the occasion.”
Suraiya laughed mirthlessly. “You must think me an air-headed fool for never seeing this before,” she said with a quiet shame burning in her breast. “I feel so blind. So stupid. It is so reasonable, when confronted by it, to realise that a basic subsistence encourages the pursuit of greater accumulation of luxury. A small leg up encourages someone to take a larger one. Why is that so obvious now, and not before?”
“Because those with privilege rarely comprehend the lack thereof, and those without it cannot imagine the reality of having it.” She shook her head and glanced back to meet Suraiya’s eyes, her green ones intent and focused. “The gods have tied all of you into a neat little cycle of targeted repudiation, with each sector believing the other to be so far removed as to be in essence separate existences.” She smirked and looked back at the passing faces. “You have no more evident relation to the beggar in the street than a cutpurse has to your royal father. And yet…”
“...we are all fundamentally the same when given identical, or even similar circumstances. What truly sets me apart from a weaver’s daughter or tavern maid? Nothing.” She fought against slumping in self-recrimination in her saddle. Only her training and instinctive understanding of a need to project confidence and grace kept her back straight and expression somewhere between thoughtful and placid. “In what I wager would be many cases I am more plain, less learned, and far more naive to the truths of the world.”
“Oh I don’t know about that,” Selucia said with a mischievous smile evident in her tone. “You are plenty gorgeous, princess. Even I am not so callous as to rob you of that truth. No matter where you go, you would be considered a rare beauty.”
Suraiya felt a blush warm her cheeks. “You are teasing me.”
“A little.” Selucia admitted unapologetically. “But it’s also the truth.”
“Thank you for your kind words, Selucia. I will endeavour not to let it go to my head.”
“It’s not your head I’m worried about.” The redhead replied cryptically.
Suraiya could hear that laugh in the words, but they made no sense to her. She simply attributed it to some unknown element of Elysean humour and instead turned her gaze from the mildly discomforting and world-shattering appearance of the crowd toward the approaching gates of the valley’s citadel. Selucia had told her it was called Last Hope by the denizens of Sanctuary. A fitting name given the remnant’s dire situation.
They might have been thriving in their isolated pocket within the Desolation, but it was only by the measurement of a civilization that should have been dead. When compared to the Grand Ascendancy with whom Selucia had made it clear they considered themselves at war, there was no comparison. The denizens of Sanctuary were, in a word, doomed.
When they ascended the slow inclined from the main thoroughfare toward the first of the three main gates leading past the triplicate walls and into the citadel’s massive bailey, Suraiya found herself tracing her eyes over the walls themselves. They appeared to be seamless and solid, with no markings for joinings or worked stone.
In fact, and much to her hidden surprise, the citadel’s fortifications weren’t stone at all; they were metal. Reinforced, heavily layered, and massively high walls of pure alloy that ever-so-slightly shimmered with runic choirs spread like dancing sparks across its surface. The sheer scale of it made her feel faint. Such a construction would have had every noble house in the Ascendancy in an uproar. It defied everything they knew of construction methods.
The only thing like it, the only thing close to it, was the Lunar Gate and the walls of Holy Solarium itself, the capital city and seat of the Grand Ascendant. Only there could she imagine such mastery of craft being matched or even exceeded. This citadel was something out of legend. Something out of a time long lost. Her lessons had taught her that the Lunar Gate and Solarium were a work of the divine, yet this citadel was Elysean.
Lies. She realised with mounting uncertainty. My whole life has been based on lies.
She could feel the same unease spreading from those behind her like a wave, and crashing into their awareness of reality. It was one thing to refute words and ideas as heresy or madness, but it was wholly another to be confronted by evidence. Certainly she could have deluded herself into an argument that turned the entire scenario into some ostentatious tale of theft and skullduggery by the Elyseans, but she had never been one to wallow in denials.
She had to face a sudden and inviolable truth: the world was not as she had believed.
Which begged another question: how much of what she had been taught was a lie, and how much of what Selucia had said was truth?
The thought of how terribly the Nine might have fooled every soul in the Grand Ascendancy left a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. She had prayed to Solarius every week with duty and devotion, offered her faith to Him and granted Him her benediction and reverence. She had dreamed of becoming a Paladin one day, and riding at the head of a host of the Anointed.
Now the very idea of it left a cold fear at the base of her spine.
What if Selucia was right? What if the gods were immortal despots?
How many of her people were already irrevocably enslaved?
Suraiya let the chilling thought flow through her and pushed it aside a moment later, determined not to let the weight of that consideration distract her. Selucia had told her that they were to see the ‘Regent’, who was the apparent leader of the Sanctuary and the one that would decide the fate of Suraiya’s entire convoy.
It would be a disservice to those that had joined her on the expedition if she were too distracted to properly represent them in a negotiation with the mysterious Regent. Every attempt at prying any information out of Selucia about the Regent’s personality, capabilities, or even a name had proven unsuccessful. The grinning redhead had simply referred to them, again, as ‘Calamity’ and left it as such.
When asked what the name even meant, Selucia had just winked in a knowing way.
Sometimes for all that she was beautiful and clearly intelligent, the redhead had the recalcitrance and mischievous humour of a child.
Onward their journey took them through the first of the three gates and past guards attired in brilliant golden platemail, the ornamentation and decoration of which was a shocking blend of practicality and salutary extravagance. Suraiya had never seen such a seamless blend between ceremonial armour and practical wargear, and had almost stopped Valour mid-walk just to gawk at the elegance of the plate. When questioning Selucia, she had been told that they were part of the ‘Aegii’ and no more.
The word had no context to Selucia’s mind and when she had covertly attempted an Analyse, she had been met by a saturation of question marks and a shifting of the full-faced plumed helmet of the unidentified warrior she’d attempted to assess. The Princess had ducked her head in contrition at the guard’s gaze, and as if satisfied at the gesture, they had returned to their eyes-forward vigil without incident.
The blush of embarrassment when Selucia had chided her was almost worth the information.
Gorgeous and practical armour, information that cannot be Analysed, and a clear position of reverence among the Elyseans. There is a symbolic importance to these warriors. I’ll have to find out more.
She filed the thought away while being led further in through the layered gates and up the rising incline. When at last they reached the citadel’s bailey, Selucia looked up at her and nodded to the ground. “Here’s where you walk, princess. Having you on your horse so far was good for people to get a look at you, and that’s why I made you stay — but there’s no sense in traipsing a bunch of excrement emitters into the castle proper. The stablehands will take care of your mount, and those of your companions.”
Suraiya glanced back at her Knights, the adventurers, and the civilian support staff before nodding once to Selucia. “Alright. Where should we—?”
“They’re already coming to collect the horses. They will handle them as well as I do, worry not.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that actually,” Suraiya said while swinging her leg over Valour’s saddle and dropping to the ground, “since Valour is a trained warhorse, nobody but myself and his trusted handlers should be able to approach him.”
“It’s a thing of Soulforce.” Selucia replied without obfuscation. “An easy enough trick to learn that concerns Animal Empathy. I’ll teach it to you later, assuming…” She trailed off and smiled enigmatically. “Well let’s just say I’ll teach it to you later.”
Suraiya felt herself grow wary at the implied end of Selucia’s words — the several possible implied endings — but was committed to her path by that point. It was hardly as if the remnant were just going to let them all walk out after discovering the illicit Elysean hideout in the middle of the Desolation. Suraiya had realised upon entering Sanctuary, and with some trepidation; that she might be lost to her old life entirely.
She still hadn’t even begun to truly process that, but it might have been because having an existential crisis or panicked meltdown in the middle of what was essentially a diplomatic envoy by that point was outside her perception of ‘good life choices’.
The convoy was counting on her. Tempering had taken them as far as it could.
Now was the time for diplomacy, oratory, and leadership.
She’d been trained in all three since birth.
When the stablehands arrived to take their horses, Suraiya took a moment to speak quietly to Valour and stroke his nose irrelevant of what Selucia had said, pressing her forehead against the horse’s own and murmuring her love and farewell with soft intensity. The horse nickered at her as if to reassure her, nibbled at her golden hair, and then turned to follow the stablehand that took his bridle — and tempted him with a strange purple fruit dusted in white that the horse seemed to eagerly devour.
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“Sugar-dusted Kelpas fruit.” Selucia said by way of explanation. “It’s unique to the valley. It once grew all over Elysea, but only remains here now. It has a naturally mana-active makeup that enhances the strength of any creature, or any person, that eats it. The effect has a natural diminishment though, so you can only benefit from it a few times before your body grows beyond it.” She smiled brightly. “It is wonderful for mana recovery though.”
Suraiya smiled when, as if summoned by her explanation, a member of what she could only assume was the citadel’s staff approached with a tray of the self-same fruits, sprinkled with white powder. She immediately noticed the manner of dress for the woman in question; a shin-length black skirt, neck-high white top of some unknown silky-white material, that flowed down to her wrists, and a surprisingly stylish black jacket that hugged her figure generously.
“Thank you.” Suraiya said graciously while accepting one of the fruit and following Selucia when she took her own and set off across the massive bailey toward the distant stairs. One more climb, it seemed, and they would enter the colossal doors to the holdfast.
Selucia didn’t speak while they walked and so Suraiya instead took the time to look at their surroundings, all while nursing the firm-but-pliable Kelpas fruit in her right hand. The inner courtyard of Last Hope was filled with activity. What she assumed were servants in the same white and black attire bustling about with purpose and seeing to various cleaning or maintenance tasks, carrying parcels or supplies, or even — much to her shock — openly taking their leisure to drink tea from porcelain cups and enjoy the sunlight.
“Morning Tea.” Selucia had explained when questioned on the matter. “One of the Regent’s edicts. Everyone is entitled to a thirty minute abeyance during the hours between seven and eleven, a one hour break between noon and three, and another half an hour break for Afternoon Tea between three and seven.”
“That is…”
“Normal.” Selucia finished for her with a hint of firmness. “This is not the Grand Ascendancy, Suraiya. We don’t have slaves and call them servants. These people are paid a good wage, granted the protections and benefits of their overlord, and given immense freedom in the allocation of duties. So long as their supervisors and department heads ensure that all the required work is completed and equitably distributed, how they choose to take their granted leisure is up to them.”
“It’s hard to wrap my head around that sort of system.” Suraiya admitted after Selucia finished. “It seems so simple, and yet the idea of such privileges never even occurred to me.”
Selucia turned to her with an amused smile. “We don’t see them as privileges here, princess. We see them as entitlements.”
Suraiya was left to ruminate on that while they walked and, as much to give herself something to do as it was to try to distract from the increasing feeling of sick disillusionment growing in her gut, she brought up her right hand and bit down into the Kelpas fruit.
The moment the flesh of the fruit met her palate, and its juices spilled from the ripe seal, Suraiya let out a low moan of pleasure that she cut off the moment she realised she’d unleashed it. Her cheeks burned with heat at the realisation of what she’d done, and she very determinedly looked nowhere but at the fruit while chewing and refusing to acknowledge what had happened.
Regardless of her embarrassment however, she felt warm. The Kelpas fruit filled her with a vigour and vitality that was impossible to properly describe. It felt like System mana threading through her body, though on a smaller scale and in a more detoxifying manner. She could even subtly feel her mana channels growing slightly clearer, and track the way that the prismatic flow of unaspected power cleansed the small increments of Desolation-borne taint that had wormed their way into her body.
Condition: Kelpas Invigoration
+10% Mana Regeneration (6 Hour Duration)
Mild Purification of Mana Channels (3 Hour Duration)
Suraiya read the alert and noted the purple flashing icon showing the Kelpas silhouette to the right of her vision, and looked down at the fruit again in wonder. What an amazing find. The thought that it had grown wild at one point was staggering. The sheer amount of help even just one such fruit would be to those taking their first steps through the System after coming of age to use it…
That thought led her to another when she finally looked up, and distantly noted that nobody was paying attention to her following her embarrassing slip. The Kelpas fruit represented a potential upending of everything that was understood relating to power balance in the Grand Ascendancy. It was often said that the right of purification of one’s power was directly tied to the divine hierarchy; the social strata enforced by the Nine.
With fruit such as Kelpas and potentially others offering ways to purify one’s channels…
The cold pit in her stomach twisted further. The more she learned about the Elyseans, the more tenuous her grip on the solidity of her world view became. It became more and more difficult to justify the beliefs she had held since childhood. It was exhausting, in a way, to think about how incredibly wrong everything she’d been taught might have been.
It was more than just a culture shock. It was a realisation that undid the very foundation of her reality.
Were the gods… the enemy?
The thought was so terrifying she felt her Strong Will activate to bury it.
Suraiya instead focused on where she was going, and noticed belatedly that she’d already been ascending the stairs behind Selucia and with her convoy in tow while she’d been lost in thought. Her attention turned behind her, and she caught the thoughtful and, in several cases, equally haunted expressions of her Knights and the adventurers and civilians that had accompanied her.
Just like her they must have been rationalising what they were seeing, and making their own assumptions. Selucia’s insights must also have trickled down among them, for the woman rarely spoke quietly. It occurred to Suraiya that perhaps that was intentional. The spreading of unwelcome truths was rarely a subtle thing, and Selucia was likely not interested in needless obfuscation.
The worried looks on the faces of her people, Knights included, gave their own advocacy.
Her eyes returned to the front when she crested the final step in the staircase, and Suraiya let her eyes settle on the yawning doors to the citadel interior. Light lit the inside of the entrance hall brightly, and even here she saw the same golden-armoured warriors standing in silent vigil. The Aegii were like unmoving statues, bedecked in radiant gold and shining with the glory of their position.
It was both inspiring and intimidating. How they could be so utterly statuesque was bewildering. Everyone had subtle fidgets, tics, or movements. It was… unnaturally disciplined in a way that unsettled her and impressed her in equal measure.
Upon their entrance to the citadel, Selucia didn’t even glance back before leading them forward toward a pair of open doors at the far end of the hall, set upon a landing reached by a pair of curved staircases forming two semi-circular approaches from the ground level to the elevated doorway.
Suraiya glanced back to offer her people a warm and confident smile while continuing on. The silence had dragged, but she saw no need to break it. Not yet. Her eyes instead took in the decorations around them in silent appreciation. Large banners depicting different crests and symbols hung from high stone arches and carefully crafted mountings, each banner almost ten metres long and stitched with ornate and complex sigils that likely had some great and prominent meaning to the Elyseans.
She only recognised one, and her eyes faintly widened when she saw it.
An eagle in flight in gold, rampant on a field of red, which marked House Tollarius.
“Glory in Service…” She murmured while reading the filigreed text beneath the house’s sigil.
“At least that much stayed the same,” Selucia said from in front of her. “We may be cousins in name only, Suraiya, given the vast generations separating us from our common ancestors… but I am proud to say you would fit in well with the prime bloodline here in Sanctuary.”
“Prime bloodline?” Suraiya asked in something of a daze while reaching out to take hold of the marble bannister and ascend the left stairwell behind Selucia.
“That is what we call the true blooded Elysean houses. Those that were not assimilated and twisted by the godsworn after the Fall.”
“Then my House Tollarius is—?”
“More pure than most, in the way we’re talking about.” Selucia said almost as if reassuring her. “But tainted nonetheless, yes. Still, you can trace your lineage back directly to the last Imperator and Imperatrix if you try. We checked the genealogical records already. So, there’s something to be said for that. You’ve got Elysean in you, Suraiya. You just never knew it.”
The revelation wasn’t exactly shocking given what Selucia had said when first showing them all the entrance to Sanctuary, but it was strange to feel both excitement and revulsion at what she said — and yet for drastically different reasons than she might once have had them. Excitement that she had Elysean blood… and revulsion at what the Ascendancy had done to her lineage.
What is happening to me? She thought with a faint flare of despair before Strong Will smothered it.
It was no time to have a crisis of identity, after all.
That could come later. In private.
Selucia led their group of thirty-three survivors up the stairs and toward the smaller, but still large pair of inner doors leading deeper into the citadel. Here at last they were challenged. Massive greatspears crossed in their path and the two Aegii flanking the doors turned to face them with their full-face helmets, visors obfuscating any semblance of the features within. “What is your business here, Scion Tollarius?” Demanded the shorter of the two warriors on the right.
“I come with ordained guests to speak with the Regent, and seek the judgement of the High Justicar.”
“They stink of godstaint.” The left Aegii, a woman Suraiya realised with mild surprise, said coldly. She must have been massive to stand taller than her male counterpart. The armour was gender neutral, but the notable height difference was still a shock.
“As did many before they were Enlightened, Guardian.” Selucia said calmly.
“Hmph. You push your luck this time, Scion.”
“Be that as it may, I have the Right.”
“For now.” The woman replied ominously, before withdrawing her massive spear.
Selucia inclined her head in thanks and, without another word, stepped past the pair and into the chamber beyond. Suraiya followed after her quickly, offering a faltering smile for the pair that were seemingly studiously ignoring their entire group while it filed after Selucia like a convoy of chastised children.
“What did she—?”
“It is not important right now.” Selucia said quietly. “I will explain, if all goes well, later. For now we must hope that the High Justicar is in a good mood.”
“Is he often not?”
“She can be… mercurial.” Selucia said with a hint of amusement that Suraiya didn’t quite understand.
When her attention diverted from Selucia however, she stifled a gasp. They stood within a massive chamber that moved from a relatively short fifty-or-so metre jaunt down a straight path into a massive domed throne room, its upper levels tiered like an amphitheatre and filled with people. They bustled in the hundreds, seated and observing what to Suraiya suddenly felt like a pre-orchestrated show.
Then what of the Aegii? Was it all rehearsed? Her mind spun while she tried to take in what she saw. Marble statues commemorating grand and heroic figures lined the edges of the circular chamber, and Selucia led them down a tiered set of seven steps into the depressed centre of the chamber to face toward what appeared to be a large blackstone throne.
It was worked with platinum veins of metal and appeared to be carved with the likeness of two massive dragon’s wings — or at least what dragons had supposedly looked like prior to being expunged for their evil — arcing up from its back to fan out in embrace of whomever would sit upon it. A large black dragon’s head, inlaid with two topaz eyes and worked with more platinum in the shape of runes she could not fully discern or understand. The eyes seemed to bore into her, and she found it difficult to look at the throne without feeling uncomfortable.
When the last of her people joined them in milling around the large circular area before the throne, which itself sat on a dais three steps up from the main floor and thus ten steps up from them; a sudden ring of trumpets sounded within the chamber, and Suraiya turned to find the source at the same time as many others.
“Focus on the throne,” Selucia murmured.
Suraiya heeded her advice despite her nerves, and worked to stoke her Strong Will and Breath Control into helping her manage her stress while keeping her attention on the throne.
“Announcing His Excellency, the Regent Pro tem of Elysea, and Lord-Protector of Sanctuary; Charlemagne!”
Suraiya did a double take when, as suddenly as an eyeblink, a man stood before them in the most bizarre appearance she’d ever seen. His clothes looked like some strange, outlandish mix of materials that made no sense to her mind. A worked robe of red cloth rife with golden stitching, what looked like some sort of massive silver cross over his chest, and a phenomenal beard waxed and oiled to perfection that covered his face and fell in brown curls down to the middle of his chest. His hair fell down to his shoulders in meticulous curls, and there was a look of consideration and amusement on his wizened features.
He even wore some sort of rounded hat on his head, and his hands — folded before him idly — were covered in ostentatious and gaudy golden and silver rings of a design she couldn’t name.
“So!” He said in a voice that boomed throughout the chamber. “More poor fools caught under the thrall of the benighted gods and brought before Charlemagne for judgement, eh? Reminds me of dealing with Carloman every time. Trumped up jack-knave that he was. Hmph!”
Suraiya could only stare in stunned disbelief as the man, who couldn’t have been much taller than five and a half feet, stared out at them all with an air of total authority. “I was entrusted to hold this post by Lucius Tollarius himself, you know! It was a great honour. I was an Emperor, before I was summoned to this mad world. The greatest Emperor! Everyone claimed it was Alexander, or Augustus, or that overhyped fool Aurelian! But no! It was me! Charlemagne!”
Suraiya stared in nonplussed silence as the man moved between ranting and harrumphing without pause.
“Is that little Selucia I see? Are you the one responsible for bringing these poor souls here, girl? Bah! Your heart is too soft. Soft I say!”
“Perhaps your Excellency,” Selucia responded unphased, “but it is in keeping with the traditions you enforced us to maintain.”
“Hm. Hm! True! Very true! Smart girl. Too smart for your own good sometimes, but smart nonetheless. Why if you had been Frankish, I’d have married you to one of my sons! Ha!” He laughed jovially, and then abruptly cut off with a suddenness that was alarming. “Now. Enough games. Down to business.”
Suraiya watched while the Regent, who she was not entirely sure was fully sane, snapped the fingers on his ring-laden right hand. “Summon the High Justicar!”
“I am already here, you blowhard.” A scathing female voice said from nearby, and drew every eye. Immense Soulforce blanketed the room, of a power and prodigious might that eclipsed anything Suraiya had ever felt before.
“Announcing the defender of the innocent…” A herald began.
Suraiya turned to the new arrival, and felt herself freeze.
“...protector of the peace, champion of Sanctuary, Herald of the Calamity…”
The High Justicar entered with the gait of a woman of purpose, her blonde hair spilling in ringlets across her shoulders and down her back, her white armour polished to a shine in spite of the numerous scars and marks upon it, and a colossal greatsword sheathed on her back.
“...Patrician Paramount of House Tollarius, bearer of the scales of Justice…”
Her eyes were blue when she turned to them, and Suraiya felt as though she had lost all sense of reality.
“...her ever-victorious Ladyship, the High Justicar of Elysea.”
“Who have you brought here for judgement, Scion Tollarius?” The towering beauty, her lovely features torn by a triplicate of scars over her left eye, asked imperiously. “Who comes before the eyes of Justice?”
Suraiya’s ears heard none of what followed.
Her mouth had gone dry. Her vision had blurred with tears.
She was looking at a ghost. A dream. A childhood fantasy given life.
Her Mother.
Alive.