It came in the form of a violent expulsion.
There was a moment when oxygen still clung to the elf's lungs like a familiar friend; then the next thing she knew, she had slammed down into the earth with the force of a collapsing mountain. Paradonia gasped, but no air filled her chest - only a thick, choking plume of sulphur, ash, and ancient dust that coated her tongue in copper and rot.
She lay there flat on her back. Pinned to the ground that felt less like stone and more like a cooling scab over a vast, open wound. The earth beneath her was bruised red and blackened by soot, vibrating with a subterranean thrum as if the very planet she had been cast upon was dying, yet refusing to rest.
Breathe, she tried to tell herself, but her ribs felt cracked, grinding against each other with every sluggish pulse of her heart. Slowly, agonizingly, she forced her eyelids to part.
Above her, the horizon was a mockery of a sky. Spiralling vortices of crimson, orange, and black churned endlessly, bleeding into one another like oil on water. Then, at the centre of it all, was an unforgiving eye that glared down with a searing, malignant intensity, burning away any remainder of hope left in her marrow. And cutting through that blinding glare was a silhouette. A figure looked over her, blotting out the cruel sun, casting long shadows that swallowed her whole.
Brymthos.
He stood motionless. An undead carved from malice and old bone. His posture was rigid with an unnerving air of a master surveying his newest asset. Paradonia's vision swam, focusing and then refocusing until the sharp angles of his face cut through the visual haze. She could feel his gaze before she could fully process his features - dead, hollow, and utterly devoid of warmth. It was the gaze that looked at a living soul and saw only raw material. A tool to be forged. A weapon to be wielded. A pawn to be moved across a chessboard of ash and bone.
And beneath that emptiness lay something infinitely worse. A profound hunger, terrible hunger. It was not the hunger of a beast driven by mere flesh; it was something grander and so much more depraved - the timeless, ravenous lust for dominion. A desire to strip away every shred of autonomy, to reshape her mind and spirit until nothing was left of the nature-loving elf. Just another instrument of his will. The weight of it pressed down on her chest - heavier than the warm, soot-covered earth beneath her. She tried to twitch a finger, to scuttle backwards, to scream - anything to break the spell of that suffocating shadow. But her limbs felt like lead. And the air burned her lungs from the inside with each inhale.
And as Brymthos slowly stepped closer, the shadow deepened, sealing her chthonically-defined fate.
For a long moment, the only sound was the low, grinding groan of the scorched earth and the hiss of superheated air tearing through the vermillion sky. Paradonia lay frozen beneath him. Every instinct was screaming at her to flee from this abomination, but her limbs felt utterly paralyzed. She couldn't move, no matter how much she tried to will herself to fight the paralysis.
Then the shadow shifted.
Brythmos tilted his head, the dry, brittle sound of snapping cartilage echoing in the dense air. When he spoke, his voice neither boomed nor was it the jagged, vocalised scrape of the dead. It was smooth, conversational, almost articulated with a leisurely pace - like a collector admiring a rare curiosity he had finally managed to acquire at an auction.
"Oh, don't look at me like that, little one," he murmured, his tone dripping with an easy, sickening false display of warmth. "There's no need to tremble. Not yet, at least."
He crouched down, bringing his skeletal face closer to hers. Up close, the lack of his eyes was overwhelming, as they swirled with an intense, calculated appraisal. He could smell it on her - the latent power humming beneath her skin, the ancient, potent heritage of her bloodline whispering through her veins. He knew what she was. He knew what she was capable of. And more importantly, he knew how brilliantly she would burn when he pointed her straight at the throats of his current opposition - the demon royal family.
"Such magnificent potential," Brymthos mused, reaching out with a long, pale, rotten finger to lightly trace the edge of her jaw. His touch was ice cold. Freezing like a sliver of glacier ice against fevered skin.
"All that strength, all that heavy, ancestral defiance...just sitting here, waiting to be utilised. You know, I've been waiting for a long time for someone of your lineage. Someone who can help me crack open the obsidian gates and take the crown. "'
He smiled, a wide, razor-thin expression, one that never reached his hollow orbital canals.
"You are going to be my favorite. I just know it. We are going to do so many wonderful things together. Sounds fun, don't you agree?"
Paradonia stared at his necrotic hand, her chest heaving as the phantom warmth of her husband's betrayal still burned in her veins. But as she looked into those empty eye sockets, she noticed a flicker of something else - a dark, sardonic mirth, like a predator savoring a joke that the prey didn't understand yet.
Brymthos chuckled - a dry, rattling sound reverberating through the bones of his ribcage.
"Oh, wipe that tragic look off your face, elf," he purred, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper as he leaned an inch closer. "Besides, you shouldn't grieve for him too much. After all, you wouldn't want to spoil his surprise."
Paradonia blinked, her breath barely catching, sweat pouring off her forehead.
"What...what are you talking about?"
Brymthos's smile stretched wider - splitting his countenance with malicious glee.
"Your dear, clever husband. He came to me begging for eternity, didn't he? He wanted to live forever, untouched by age or decay - to be king until the end of time." The lich said, shaking his head with mocking pity.
A cold dread, sharper than the searing sun above, pierced straight through Paradonia's numbness.
"Immortality..." She murmured to herself in realisation.
Then the lich laughed outright, a harsh ringing sound that cut through the howling winds of the abyss. Brymthos straightened up, towering over her once more, his shadow swallowing her completely.
"He sold you for a crown of rot and ash. So, in return, I crowned him the king of the crypts." His hand then hovers above her head, urging her upwards. "Come along. Let him enjoy his end of the bargain while we go and claim ours."
Paradonia frowns, puzzled by his words when he referred to her traitorous husband as the king of crypts. Just what was he implying exactly? For a fraction of a second, the universe seemed to hold its breath, instead of taking his outstretched, skeletal hand. Paradonia pushed herself up from the scorched earth. Her muscles protested, screaming every fibre of her being, but she ignored the pain. Gathering every ounce of moisture left in her parched mouth, she lurched forward and spat a blotch of blood straight into Brymthos's gaunt cheekbone.
The lich froze, and the mocking, playful amusement vanished from his features in a single heartbeat. Slowly, he reached up with his long, necrotic, pale finger and wiped the spatter from his face, then looked at it.
Then, his hollow sockets snapped back to meet her gaze.
"Ah," Brymthos whispered, his voice losing all its airy warmth. Dropping into an icy, cavernous rumble. "You are very spirited today. How disappointing that you still think you have a choice."
Before she could strike or scramble backwards, his hand shot out and ensnared her throat in a vice-like grip, hoisting her off the ground with an effortless, crushing strength.
The air vanished from her lungs entirely. The world spun into a blurred, swirling scope of crimson and white as he dragged her struggling form across the protruding rocks, towards the spire of his citadel.
He had no interest in an equal partnership. He didn't want a willing ally; he wanted something malleable. He wanted to force her to open her eyes and witness the grand, horrific empire he aspired to bring into reality - to fulfill his vision by using her own raw power. To become his executioner.
Hours later - or perhaps days, for a time bled toegther in this wretched place - the heavy iron doors of the citadel slammed shut with a loud, staggering groan. High up in the upper levels of the blackened central tower of soot-layered stone, far removed from the ominous howls of the infernal wasteland, a heavy lash of leather and iron came down.
Crack.
Paradonia hung suspended by her wrists from the rusted shackles bolted up into the stone ceiling, her bare feet barely skimming the freezing floor. Her back burned, torn open by the lash. Blood dripped in slow rivulets, trickling onto the dark stone below.
Brymthos stood a few paces away, watching with a clinical, detached curiosity as if observing a mere specimen. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't lose his temper. He simply wanted the defiance beaten out of her one way or another. Stroke by stroke, until nothing was left but utter obedience.
"Look out of the window, elf." The undead commanded softly, nodding toward the arched opening that overlooked the sprawling, nightmareish hellscape of his soon-to-be domain on the horizon. "Look at what we are going to conquer together. Look what you are going to burn."
Paradonia kept her chin down, her breath coming in ragged, bloody gasps, refusing to give him the satisfaction. But as the lash came down again, tearing through flesh and bone, the dark walls of the tower closed in, feeling a sudden sense of claustrophobia.
The second lash did not fall immediately. Instead, the heavy silence of the tower stretched thin, broken down by the rhythmic drip, drip, drip of her own blood pooling on the floor. Her head hung low, her matted hair clinging to the sweat and grime of her face. Every nerve ending in her back felt alive with a white-hot fire, a relentless burning that threatened to pull her consciousness under into the dark, sweet relief of unconsciousness. But Brymthos would not allow her such a mercy.
A cold, skeletal hand reached out, gripping her chin with enough force to almost snap bone, violently yanking her head upward.
"I told you to look," Brymthos murmured, his voice soft, an abrasive scrape right against her ear. There was no anger in it now - only a methodical persistence.
"Do not waste my time with stubbornness, little one. Look at your new home."
With her vision swimming through a haze of anguish and sweat, Paradonia was forced to turn her gaze toward the high arched window.
Spread out below and adjacent to the base of the tower were hordes moving in clusters, spread out for miles. From this height, the true scale of his ambition revealed itself. Great pits of molten iron bubbled like open sores across the grey, black plains, casting sickly orange against the bruised, red, circulating firmament. Legions of restless dead - former knights, fallen kings, and tortured souls marched in rigid, endless synchronisation, their armor clanking in a morbid, deafening cadence.
It was a city born of spite. A monolith of pure malice designed to tear down the heavens and grind the demon royal family into powder.
"They sit in their palace of obsidian and gold," Brymthos continued, his grip tightening on her jaw as her pointed his index finger at the unforgiving yonder, where the faint, glittering spires of the capital pierced the sulphurous clouds.
"They have no idea what's coming to them."
His hand dropped, and he released her chin, letting her head drop back down with a dull ache. He stepped back, pacing slowly across the stone floor, his charcoaled boots clinking like dry bones.
"Your precious King Solomon wanted immorality, and I gave him a tomb." He said cryptically. His tone turned reflective and almost conversational again.
"You wanted love. You wanted loyalty. And then your sweet husband sold you to the highest bidder as though you were nothing more than cattle. The world you knew, Paradonia, was built on a foundation of lies. Where every oath is hollow. Every crown is forged from deceit. "
He stopped pacing and turned to face her, his lifeless eye sockets boring straight into her soul. "So why cling to it? Why hold onto the shattered remnants of mortal expectations? Why cling to a mortal man who abandoned you and treated you as an expendable inconvenience? Let it go. Let the old Paradonia bleed out on these stones."
He stepped closer, his voice dropping to a low, seductive whisper that promised a terrible kind of freedom. His hands touched the top of her head where her antlers had been sawn off during the ritual. Just before her arrival. He stared at the crusted old blood and weeping tenderness from the sawn display of bone, letting his fingers dance around the base, not touching it, but producing a fluttering sensation upon her bloody, decimated crown.
"Surrender your will to me. Stop fighting the inevitability of your own power. When you finally embrace what you are meant to be, I won't just let you survive this abyss - I will promise you glorious destruction. And once you have served your role exceptionally, I will only then permit you to return to the surface. But first, you need to decide whether you want to be a weapon that strikes or the dust beneath my feet."
Paradonai's eyes slowly flutter open. Her chest heaved, a wet, rattling breath escaping her cracked lips. The pain in her back was screaming, blinding and excruciating, but beneath it, deep beyond the far reaches of her wavering consciousness, something shifted. A fracture within her mind appeared. The grief was still there, acute and bleeding. The betrayal was still open and weeping like a gaping wound cut by a serrated knife. But as she stared out at the dark empire underneath the haunting glare of the sun, the fire of her bloodline didn't extinguish. It warped. Twisted into something calculative - into something cruel.
She didn't answer him with words. She couldn't.
Instead, through the swollen, bloodied lips, a wet, broken sound escaped her throat - a dark, humourless rasp that could have been taken as a laugh if everything hadn't hurt so much. Brymthos tilted his head, watching her closely. Then a slow, approving smirk graced his hollow, pale face. He felt the shift in her. He knew the resistance was cracking under the weight of darkness.
"There you are," he whispered, stepping back into the shadows as the heavy iron doors of the tower creaked open. "Let the wounds settle. Feel them." He said with a delicious, purring sneer. "We will speak tomorrow."
The door slammed shut, with the bolt sliding into place with a loud, conclusive bang. Left alone in the sweltering penumbra, hanging by her wrists in the heart of the spire, Paradonia peered out of the window, taking in the view of hell's skies. But as the blood continued to drip from her back, she realised something profound.
She was no longer just a pawn. Not yet.
And if she was going to survive this purgatory, she needed to learn how to play the game better than the creature who bought her soul.