"This family will no longer give need to someone who cannot contribute. Sonna, leave and never return."
She was eighty years old, still young by the standards of warriors, and she was on her knees. The throne room of the old Voss Palace was cold that day. Frost clung to the tall windows even though spring had come. Her father's voice carried no anger, only finality. Her mother didn't even look at her.
The girl who had spent eight decades filling every corridor with laughter, who braided flowers into the guards' spears just to see them smile, who sang lullabies to the palace cats long after everyone else had gone to bed .... that girl shattered like dropped crystal.
Sonna rose slowly. Her legs shook, but she didn't let them see. She bowed the perfect bow they had drilled into her since childhood and walked out without a word.
At the gates, Yonna was waiting.
At 76 years old, black hair already tied back for battle training, tears carving clean tracks through the dust on her cheeks. Sonna's heart broke a second time.
She approached her with teary eyes that threatened to spill out, cupped those wet cheeks, and forced the warmest smile she had left.
And even though they both were women in they own right, she still saw the young girl who followed her around all day throughout their childhood.
"It'll be fine, Little Storm," she whispered, voice cracking only once. "Big sister promises." Then she hugged her so tight that Yonna's training swords dug into her ribs, and she walked away before the sob in her throat could escape.
For years she refused to cross the border. She slept in border villages, took lowly jobs, sent letters through sympathetic guards with the slightest hope.... Every week she and Yonna met in hidden groves, trading stories like oxygen. Sonna clung to the hope that one day the clan would call her home.
Hope died on the night she turned one hundred.
They met at the kingdom's edge beneath a full silver moon.
Sonna wore a dress the color of dawn ... soft violet linen, tiny white daisies hand-embroidered along every hem and sleeve by her own shaking fingers over many lonely nights. A thin silver circlet rested in her loose black hair, catching moonlight like a promise she no longer believed in.
She looked exactly like the warm fairy every child in Voss once begged for bedtime stories about.
Yonna stood opposite her in full battle gear: midnight-black leather etched with the Voss crest, raven-feather cloak clasped at one shoulder, twin short swords crossed at her back, black hair braided tight for war.
The hope of the clan had already become its last blade.
"Little Storm," Sonna said, and her smile was so bright it hurt to look at, bright enough to reflect the moon twice over. "It's time I found my own path in this wretched world."
They crashed together. Yonna's armored arms wrapped around her back, Sonna's fingers tangled in black hair, and they cried like the children they never got to finish being.
"Big sister… do you truly have to go?"
"Yes..." Sonna whispered against her temple. "Everyone has to walk the road fate wrote for them.... and tonight, I stop waiting for permission."
She pulled back, wiped Yonna's tears with her thumbs, then her own.
"Who knows?" she laughed through the tears, voice soft and musical even now. "Maybe one day I'll become a queen after all."
She turned before her legs gave out, dress fluttering behind her like the last gentle thing in the world and walked into the dark.
That night, at one hundred years old, the warm fairy began to wither.
Ash watched two centuries unspool in silence.
He watched her try everything all while her final warmth froze over....
He saw her in armies where she cried at the first blood she ever drew, merchant houses where she couldn't lie well enough to sell water in a desert, holy orders where smiling priests sold children behind velvet curtains...
Then he saw the person who truly cursed for the second time in her life.
He watched Zack Overreach chase the last embers of warmth back into her with stories and soft touches and promises whispered under starlight.
He watched the night those promises turned into fists and violation, watched her stumble bleeding into the rain, one hand already cradling the life she hadn't asked for. He watched her crawl home, belly swelling, only to find half the kingdom ash and her little sister standing in the ruins wearing grief like armor.
He watched the Lotus slowly take root beside Kale in her womb. However, the moment its growth began he noticed something peculiar.
Ash's gaze narrowed the moment the pregnancy reached its first month. In his sight he saw lust as clearly as people saw light... and he knew off the bat that something was wrong.
Inside Sonna's womb, twin 'seeds' grew: one human, one… not.
A tiny black lotus, no larger than a fingernail, floated in the amniotic haze beside the forming embryo. With every beat of Kale's tiny heart, a thread of pink-black essence bled from the flower and sank into Sonna's blood. Ash watched it happen in real time: the moment that foreign craving touched her veins, her own natural desire twisted, amplified, weaponised.
Week by week the lotus grew, petals unfurling in perfect synchrony with Kale's limbs.
Month by Month the pink-black essence thickened, spreading through her like spilled ink.
To everyone else, Sonna simply seemed a little flushed, a little restless.
To Ash, it looked like someone was pouring liquid lust straight into her soul. He watched the first time she locked her bedroom door and tried to satisfy the new ache alone... Her hands shaking, tears already falling, because even then she knew this wasn't natural.
He watched the hunger double every month, watched her body learn to crave things her heart recoiled from.
He watched the night before Kale's birth when the lotus finally bloomed fully inside her womb: a perfect, obscene flower of black and crimson that pulsed in time with her contractions, drinking in the pain of labor and exhaling raw, insatiable lust back into her blood.
And in her soul space that same night of labor, he saw in her dreams the blurred female figure whose voice rang clear as bells in his and Sonna's ears.
"Oh, you poor, sweet mortal… I've seen your pain. Your child is destined for the sky beyond. This Lotus will make you the anchor to his ascent. Your path, Sonna Voss, is to pave your son's road.... This is my gift to you."
He watched the flame in her eyes ignite for one heartbreaking second
"A-a boy? a-and My son will be special?"
Only to watch it gutter out forever when the curse revealed its true face...
He watched her learn to seduce in silence, watched tears soak every pillow while her body moved like a marionette, watched her build an invisible empire of broken men who thought they owned her when she had already stopped owning herself.
Every single time whether king or guard or minister, she never kissed them, never looked them in the eyes, never made a sound except the quiet sob she muffled into silk.
Ash sat motionless through all of it, face unreadable, fists slowly clenching on the armrests. When the memories finally released him and time unfroze, Sonna was still standing there, lips trembling from the bond-sealing kiss, eyes wide and suddenly, terrifyingly young.
Ash stepped back, conflict storming behind golden-pink eyes.
"We have a deal, yes?" he asked, voice quieter than before.
She nodded, handed him the list of twenty kingdoms (Overreach's name scratched out so hard the parchment tore), and walked out on legs that hadn't felt this light in two hundred and fifty years.
....Real light, fragile, frightened, but all real....
A small fire had returned to her eyes for the first time since she was one hundred years old and still believed the world could be kind.
Ash sank back onto the throne, stared at the notifications, and didn't move for a very long time.
[Talents Acquired: Mist Step, Veiled Cascade, Siren's Droplet, Craving Mist]
[MP Gained: 19 million]
[Bloodline Acquired: Bloodline of Voss]
[Choose three for enhancement.]
He selected them blindly, closed the screens, and sat in the sudden hush of a throne room that had just witnessed the slow withering of a fairy.