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Dame Aylin is watching.
Dame Aylin can do nothing but watch.
For many endless, restless months, Dame Aylin has stood in the same spot, chained to hardened rock by shackles unbreakable even to her might. In the earliest days, she’d made the constant effort to tear free of these bindings, break the links tethering her to the wretched prison that dared contain her, follow the ideal of vengeance and retribution stoking radiant flames in her chest.
She would not be broken. She is Dame Aylin: daughter of Selune, right hand of her mother’s divine intent, resplendent and fair and indomitable among mortals and celestials alike.
And yet the jagged scars of gold streaking across her face say otherwise.
Now, Dame Aylin waits. Waits for darkened, deadened eyes to fall upon her and twist to vile resolve. Waits for that next strike of hatred and contempt to rake across her flesh or split through cloth and bone. Waits for the fragments of what she once had been — of what she once prided herself so greatly on — to stitch the wounds over and set her standing for the next strike. And the next. And the next. Torment to make the Nightsinger grin with deplorable glee, were her infinite solemnity a shroud for whatever joy she might garner from Dame Aylin’s imprisonment.
The Shadowfell is her domain. A blighted monument of shadow and loss, a lifeless expanse so far removed from everything her mother had taught her to adore and protect. She watches the winds sail past her prison, buffeted by dust and debris lifted from the floating pedestals of stone and marble before tumbling into the abyss below her. It yawns and wails its terrible dirge, and Aylin can only wonder what might await her should she follow the enticement of that song—
No. She catches herself just in time, shrugs away the allure of grief and loss, pervasive as it may be in these grim months.
She knows the weight of its torment, the pain of its presence. Grief had crept into her heart the moment she learned of her dear Isobel’s passing, and it festers still even as she tugs against it. She is resplendent and she is mighty and she is fair and she will not become like him!
Ketheric Thorm.
The monster himself, who lured her into this foul plane. Who so easily fell to the Nightsinger’s allure, offered himself to her to rid himself of the grief tearing at his throat with every restless sob and cry for justice. Who set upon Dame Aylin a glare not wrought with malice nor contempt, but pity and shame. How, then, could he wallow in his shame and not be cleansed by the comfort of Selune’s presence? By the memory of his beloved daughter, living still in the heart of the one who held her most dear?
No. It is not grief and loss that clenches her chest and coils in her gut. It is pain, and it is vengeance .
And, above all else and where her mother’s radiance cannot reach her, it is the memory of darling Isobel that stays the poison of her grief.
Dame Aylin is watching, and behind her eyes, she dreams.
She dreams of those first few days of knowing Isobel, of getting caught in the blissful gleam of her adoration. The memory of that first meeting sets a fluttering warmth in her chest, prickling faintly past the misery she fights every day. She’d been welcomed into the hallowed halls of Moonrise, from an age where such consecration could never be toppled, and adored as the daughter of Selune, resplendent as she’s always been.
Golden luminescence had washed over the stone and brick, shone between the lines of aged wood making up the pews ahead of the altar to her mother, and a face now glum and worn and tired had bristled with glee and serenity. She’s always known the effect of her presence, especially for the hearts of mortal men with the aspirations of gods. She’d known it from the first time she set eyes on Ketheric, just as she’d known the decision of her heart as her eyes shifted to Isobel.
She’d stood beside her father, the smile spread across her face beaming with wonder and amazement. And yet, even then, Aylin had recognized the hints of attraction in that gaze, and before long she’d begun to explore that attraction herself, striding towards Isobel with a swagger normally unbecoming of an aasimar but feeling right nevertheless. All the gravity of heavens, all the time offered before her and ahead of her, and she’d followed the steps to Isobel, an armoured hand offered and delightfully reciprocated.
“Your daughter, I presume?” she’d remarked to Ketheric, never daring to peel her attention from that which held her interest.
“Yes,” he’d said, somewhere between a warning grumble and careful respect as his entire affect soured, “my daughter, Isobel Thorm.”
Isobel . And Dame Aylin had decided that no prayer could ever be as sweet.
There was no warning in the back of her mind, no reprimand from the voice of her mother as she devoted herself to this pursuit. The certainty which drove her to seek out Isobel, preen for her attention, was unlike anything she had succumbed to in her many immortal years. Adoration had always been hoisted upon her, and while she had greeted each case warmly and triumphantly, it had been different to seek the attention of Isobel, to grasp for a moment of her time just to make her own skin prickle with heated desire. It was to love herself, seeing Isobel, and as sure as the moon blessed the night with its glow, so too did Isobel bless these moments together with her sweetness and her beauty.
Even now, that sweetness and beauty wards off the endless, smothering night of the Nightsinger’s blighted domain. She’s spent years clinging to the sensation of Isobel’s hands caressing her skin, drawing soothing shapes upon wounded skin that would soon close over, with Aylin cherishing every second as though it were only Isobel’s hand that could mend her. It had always felt like loving herself, to have Isobel touch her, and in this bleak darkness, Aylin reminds herself to seek that love and hide it jealously beneath her breast, not for the taking of any unholy crusader seeking power and pride from her endless life.
If there is anything in her immortal life she can stay true to as grief overrides reason, as passion curdles towards hatred, as the light of her mother’s embrace wanes beneath the shroud of Shar’s vigil, it’s those quiet moments that she can recall Isobel’s love and treasure it. Breaths between blades, blinks between bellows of shadowy beasts around and below, and a glimmering hope that waylays the gripping pain of all that’s come to her since Isobel’s death and her own capture.
The shine of a red apple, delicately balanced within Isobel’s palms, portends that next memory, and she watches hungrily as she offers it to her after a short adventure into the mountain pass splitting Reithwin from Elturgard. Blushing and pink, Aylin had graciously accepted the offer, admiring the fruit and the woman who gifted it to her as she turned it in her palm.
“It’s perfect,” Aylin had praised before her gaze dipped above the stem towards Isobel’s smile, “as I’m sure all things you handle are.”
Isobel’s laugh had always been a gentle sound, a pristine and soft din to surround her with a splendour greater than an aasimar’s divinity.
Her lips had turned up into a humble smirk, drawing her eyes away from Aylin’s for a brief, bashful breath as she’d said, “This town is blessed, Aylin, by the gifts Selune grants us–”
And Aylin had shaken her head, moving the apple away from between them. “There is much my mother can offer,” she’d spoken, both triumphant and delicate, “but there are some miracles she is only so fortunate to be blessed by.”
“And what might those miracles be, Dame Aylin?”
The words had disarmed her, caught the breath in her throat and gripped the beating of her heart for the faintest moment. Isobel had appeared so resplendent before her, far beyond the mortal coil she’d been contained by, and for what she promised herself couldn’t have been the first time, Aylin was struck by the divinity in her form.
“I…I cannot speak for her,” she’d whispered, taking slow steps to appreciate the miracle before her that had managed to humble the great celestial knight herself, “but I see one before me that’s never been matched by all the blessings my mother could grant.”
Breathless, Isobel had allowed Aylin to coil an arm around her waist, peering wondrously into her eyes with a hunger Aylin was so desperate to sate. “Would you not think it blasphemous?”
“How could this be blasphemy when I feel it so true?”
The whispered words are lost to the wailing tempest of the Shadowfell, the gilded grace of each syllable turned to ash. A tear streaks down Aylin’s fair skin, tracking the line of a golden scar down to her chin as hope at last drifts from her lips.
Isobel is gone. Every cherished memory is just that, and for once it is not time’s endless march that’s taken what she always longs for. She grasps, reaches, hopes that she can bring the words back, taste them sweet on her tongue as Isobel’s lips had been so many countless times. Had these chains not shackled her to the stone beneath her, she’d have leapt to capture them again, wring her fingers around such dreams and suffer their warmth as her second fall, into the oblivion she’s been left with without this love to propel her.
She had never been mortal. Dame Aylin can hardly understand the concept of death, even when flames had overtaken her righteous form and burnt her to a crisp, or when she’d been set beneath heavy stone that would grind fragile mortals into the same red paste she’d make of them.
Her first night with Isobel, though, she dared to understand it. Gasping for breath, choking out small whimpers entirely unbecoming of the radiant daughter of a goddess, she’d been reduced beneath Isobel’s touch to less than a shell, hollowed out from chest to throat and made weaker than she might have ever wanted, and then sought it more beyond reason. She’d teased that release, then humoured it, and finally succumbed to it as Isobel brought her through this mortal rapture, a gracious smile playing on her lips as Aylin flitted from one life to the next.
Dame Aylin had never feared death; that is, she had never feared it until being laid beneath Isobel, feeling the gentle trace of delicate fingers upon her bare skin, the touch betraying a deeper adoration than prayer could ever muster. When she’d caught sight of the bliss staring back at her, drowning in the glazed ecstasy of Isobel’s love, that fear had strangled her. Only for a moment, mind, but it had been the closest to death that she’d ever been brought, and for the first time in infinity, she’d feared its inevitable darkness.
Maybe, for the first time since that bliss had made itself known to her, fear has been felt again.
This is not the fear of death, not as her body breaks and bends and splits for the senseless hatred and misguided drive of her tormentors, each aiming to ascend to even a fraction of her majesty for a goddess feasting on their absence. She stands through the cycle as it warns of destroying her, but each time she meets it with defiance of their goals and courage in her veins.
No, nor is this the fear that the face of her captor – the wretched Ketheric Thorm – might deliver unto her should she finally come to claim his ultimate victory, his features twisted in disgust by the influence of Shar herself over his splintered soul. She had not loved him then, even when his worship had turned to her mother and not the Nightsinger. His eyes hardly veiled the contempt that festered beneath the veneer of a holy man, so desperate to protect his family that he could not see the seeds he was laying for his own corruption.
Should Dame Aylin meet him again, fear will not be her response, but indignance, and pity, and the scorching desire to cast upon him his own treachery and shame lest he forget the face of the woman he scorned it all for, the face of the lover Aylin had hoped would bring them finally together in the face of such darkness.
She shudders as she watches and dreams, standing chained in this shadow of a world as a testament to the fragility of memory, the finite mystery of life, the solemn truth that in the end all she can do is watch. Isobel lays dead beneath mounds of dirt that has surely claimed her flesh as hungrily as Dame Aylin had once done. The light of her soul has ascended, resting peacefully in the embrace of a mother Aylin is kept so distant from, serenity the eternal dream and the impossible destination.
Dame Aylin is watching as it all passes her by, suffering the injustice of her lover’s death without so much as a shred of dignity nor divinity in her dreams to waylay the crushing circumstance of her imprisonment.
As the injustice burns away her hope, only one desire remains, and Dame Aylin watches for the end of infinity when she can finally stoke that retributive flame. Where love once blossomed, rage singes and bellows. A sickness far beyond the comprehension of any mortal coils in her gut, that loss and that grief turning to resolution where none should ever find it. She feels her muscles tense, her teeth grit, watches as the gold splitting her form shines in piercing rays across the black expanse surrounding her, giving colour to that which has always been formless, colourless, nameless.
And she hopes that Shar is watching now, just as she has been set to watch for time immemorial, and understands the danger of her folly. She seeks to split the shadow with all that has been taken from her, feeding her vitriol with every last fleck of warmth granted to her in the most blissful years of her infinity.
And she hopes that that damned emptiness weighing down the souls of those thoughtless and senseless and reckless enough to lay themselves before the Nightsinger knows no equal in her fury, that the darkness they seek can never snuff the tempest that is her divinity, cut up and curdled and created in the image of retribution the likes of which they could never dream to obtain from their sullen master.
And she hopes, beyond all that fire and all that vigour, that she can call upon all that she’s given, all that she’s fed her anger with, all that she once was and holds true never to be again, and drive her final strike into Ketheric’s skull with it, and that he understands that – after all this time – Dame Aylin is watching. She has always been watching.
And if he knows what’s best for him, he will keep the same vigil as she, lest he meet his own daughter’s grisly fate.