The night before battle is a strange place to live.
Time doesn't flow—it folds in on itself. Each breath feels too loud. Each heartbeat echoes like a war drum. You move your hands just to prove they still belong to you, because everything around you feels borrowed. Stolen.
I stood alone near the edge of the camp, watching the fires burn low. The army of Delyra stretched behind me—rows of tents, weapons, sharpened blades glinting beneath the stars. Hundreds of warriors had come to fight. To bleed. To win. Yet they did not know who I was.
Only that I was chosen.
They didn't speak to me.
I didn't blame them.
No one knew what to say to a ghost wearing flesh.
---
General Crane had arrived before sunset to brief me. His words were short. As always.
"Your orders are clear. Break Sevila's wall. Take the stronghold. Burn nothing unless commanded."
He handed me a crimson seal bearing my father's crest—a flaming wolf skull surrounded by spears. The mark of a royal commander.
A token, nothing more. A symbol meant to silence doubt.
But no symbol could silence the truth: I was not sent here to win.
I was sent here to die.
Crane didn't say it. He didn't have to.
The troops had been assembled in haste. Barely trained. Poorly armored. My second-in-command was a nobleman's forgotten son who couldn't tell the edge of a blade from its hilt. It was all a game to my father—a bloody performance on the edge of war. If Sevila fell, he'd gain a foothold in Talaria. If I fell… well, the gods love irony, don't they?
A cursed daughter sent to war. How poetic.
How clean.
But I did not come to die.
I came to be remembered.
---
I returned to my tent to ready my armor.
It wasn't gifted to me by any royal hand. I had forged it piece by piece under Crane's eyes—beaten steel with my own blood soaked into the leather. Red plates over black cloth, fastened tight across my ribs and spine. A weight I'd grown into.
Each piece clicked into place like memory. Like ritual.
My sword lay across the table. Still nameless. Still mine.
I stared at it for a long time.
Not out of fear.
Out of hunger.
---
A scout came just before dawn. Breathless. Pale.
"They're lining up," he stammered. "Sevila's forces. They're ready."
I stood.
The cold hadn't touched me all night, but now I felt it seep into my bones. Not from the air. From what was coming.
I stepped out into the dark just as the first blush of morning kissed the horizon. A muted red. Faint. Like the world was holding its breath.
Hundreds of warriors waited on the hilltop. Some sat. Some sharpened blades. Others stared into the distance, mouthing silent prayers to gods who rarely answered.
I walked through them. Slowly. Letting them see me.
My cloak dragged behind me, black as night. My hair—loose, silver-white—danced in the wind like smoke from a sacred fire. My sword rode my back like a promise.
They turned to look.
Not because they knew me.
But because something ancient inside them did.
I climbed the ridge until the valley opened before me.
Sevila.
The fortress glimmered in morning frost, high walls of ironwood and stone, banners whipping with the golden falcon of Talaria. Their archers lined the walls already. Their cavalry waited beyond the gate. Organized. Sharp. Prepared.
They expected chaos on our side. Weakness.
Instead, they saw me.
I stood at the ridge, wind tearing through my cloak, sword in hand.
And I raised it.
The wind stopped.
The camp behind me silenced.
I didn't shout. I didn't need to.
My voice carried like thunder cracking through a frozen lake.
"Let the gods bear witness."
"Let the cursed child of Delyra rise."
"Let history kneel."
And then I charged.
---
The horse beneath me was fire given legs. It thundered down the slope like the world split open beneath us. My sword gleamed, black and red, a flash of judgement.
And behind me—finally—they roared.
My army.
My storm.
Steel clashed like the heavens collapsing. Arrows screamed through the air. Shields shattered. Men cried out—some in fear, others in rage.
But I didn't hear them.
I only heard the blood in my veins. The heartbeat in my throat. The scream building in my lungs.
The first Sevilan knight raised his blade.
I split him down the center before he could blink.
Another lunged.
I ducked low, slid beneath his strike, and severed his tendons with a twist of my wrist. He fell screaming, and I left him to choke on his own blood.
They came faster.
I moved faster.
It wasn't a dance. It was slaughter. Controlled. Precise. Beautiful in the way wildfires are beautiful—terrible and unstoppable.
I caught the glint of arrows. Raised my sword. Spun it in a tight arc—and the blade caught two of them in midair.
I didn't stop.
I couldn't stop.
Every movement was a memory of pain. Every strike, a lesson etched into me by Crane's staff, by the silence of my mother's breathless years, by the eyes that looked at me like I didn't belong in this world.
And maybe I didn't.
But I would leave a mark on it anyway.
---
By the time the Sevilan lines broke, I was soaked in blood—mine, theirs, I couldn't tell. My white hair clung to my cheeks, streaked with crimson. My eyes—those cursed, pupil-less eyes—were glowing faintly now, veins of red sparking like fire through marble.
Some called it magic.
I called it fury.
They ran.
The Sevilans fled, broken and screaming. They dropped their swords. Their shields. Their pride. They ran from a woman they didn't even know the name of.
But they would.
They all would.
---
When the dust settled, I stood alone in the middle of the field.
My army stared at me.
No one spoke.
And then… one by one, they knelt.
Not because I ordered them.
But because they understood.
I wasn't here to die.
I was here to rise.
I was Delbeyrah, the ghost of Delyra.
The daughter of silence.
The warrior god in red.