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Daphne does not survive her eighteenth year.
She has only been a Fairy of the Dragon Flame for a year, has only just organized the Nymphs into a true force to be reckoned with mere months ago, and has not yet seen the pitch of true battle against living foes.
She is storied and decorated, of course - but her battles have been that of magic on magic, force on force, nature against nature. She has wrested and shaped and formed the power that has been corrupting magic on other worlds, the remnants left behind by the Coven and the age-old curses layered atop the line of Nymphs and their greater transformations. Centuries upon centuries in the future, history will know her and her kin as ethereal warriors and guardians, as a force great enough to be eternal. The truth of it is that they are all new, wings barely dry and while their minds are keen they do not yet have the wisdom that comes with experience. They form their alliance out of idealism and hope and need, and cling to it with bloodied fangs and claws - but they are all still strangers to each other, or near it.
On what would be her nineteenth birthday, the Company succeeds in tracking down the last of her kin and murders him above his planet, sprays Linphea with his heartsblood when he refuses to bend knee to their reign. He does not forgive them for her death, or the deaths of their near-siblings; strangers, perhaps, but the depth of their love and loyalty for each other transcends even the end. He takes Politea and Hagen down with him, and Daphne venerates him for it from her prison.
But she is not yet dead - she still breathes and Domino still lives and she is holding Bloom in her arms and laughing while her baby sister claws at the air and roars like the sparkling flames Daphne has summoned for her entertainment; dragon in soul even without wings, squeaky and young and bright.
The two stand before the Wall of Names. Bloom is too young to appreciate it for its beauty or for the kinship bound up in it - but Daphne is a child and her name still pale on her own scale and she wants to share it with her baby sister; wants to whisper that one day, Bloom’s name will appear on it too.
The Wall is both a memorial and an honor for those who risk the Trials of the Great Dragon and earn their wings with Her blessing. There is a scale for each of them, carved with their chosen names and the date of their ascension in their own penmanship. The scales shrink and grow and shift as needed, disappearing with the passing of a fairy and appearing once ascended, glistening metallic in every shade imaginable. There is no rhyme or reason to the color or placement - but everyone still hopes for their favorite color, or to be put near their loved ones.
Daphne has fond memories of giggling into her mother’s shoulder, and declaring that her name will be right next to daddy’s! Oritel and Miriam are too busy with the Company of Light to waste what precious time they have with Bloom on something so silly - but Daphne finally has a moment, and she wants Bloom to grow up with those same happy, brilliant memories. She cannot wait to tease her sister over it, to endure the eye-rolls and the giggling and the joy.
Daphne puts a finger on her own name, her scale mint-green and writing unadorned - the script won’t turn gold until she has attended her first Moot as a fully fledged Fairy of the Dragon Flame, and exercised the political power granted to any proven adult of Domino. Daphne cannot wait.
( The Moot will reconvene in a month’s time, seven days and seven nights of politics and debate and mediation. It is a coming together of community on Domino, a bringing together of concerns and support capable of bringing change on a planet-wide scale. )
( Daphne will not live to see it. )
( She is still a child. )
They are standing there, before the Wall, when Oritel’s scale slides out of place. She does not feel her father’s death, not as she will feel every death to come after. There are still so many Fairies of the Flame at that point - the shift of the Great Dragon’s power is hardly noticeable.
Daphne never learns what happened - there is no one left alive to tell her, by the end of it. She stands frozen, Bloom’s baby roars growing softer as an unnatural stillness descends on Domino’s royal palace, as her construct winks out of existence. Stares as her father’s name disappears.
And then the names of fifteen of her fellow Fairies of the Flame vanish, and the whiplash catches her like a goddamn bolt of lightning.
( Later - so much later - her sister will learn enough to sketch out the chain of events here. Their father dies first. Mother dies second, but she is a witch of Earth, not a fairy of the Flame, and so the only soul to feel her end is Aunt Nebula clear across the dimension and even she in her great power can do nothing to prevent what comes next. It is a slaughter. Massacre. Later, so, so much later, Bloom will call it a genocide. She will be right, twice over. They kill the fairies first, and the people second. )
( The bloodshed hits Domino’s surface like a meteor. Daphne has no way of knowing, but the Coven and their pet wizard touch ground in the midst of Domino’s capital - far enough to not devastate the palace on impact, but close enough that they have breached most of the capital’s defenses. They land in a market square, and it is from there that the cursed ice begins to spread. The Coven does not leave anyone alive to be consumed by it. Those who do not know what happens there will call this a mercy. They do not know what the Coven does to Domino’s citizens before leaving their still-warm corpses to the cold. They would be wrong. )
Daphne is screaming when she forces herself to her feet. The world is shaking; the Great Dragon thrashes and screams as She slip-slides out of Her hosts as they are culled and into the rest of them. In a literal sense, the Fairies of the Dragon Flame are stronger for their siblings’ deaths - they hold more of Her, more to call upon and more to cast with. But She is All, and there is no mortal body that can host Her in Her entirety without burning up. It is too much, overstimulation to the point of coma, catatonia.
( Most of her siblings-in-arms are unable to put up a fight. It is the witches and warriors of Domino who strike back in their stead, and they are forces unto themselves. Witches and wizards and those in-between, warriors and killers and hunters and healers alike. The Coven may be powerful, but they are still living mortal bodies, and with their favored son off elsewhere on the planet the middle sister falls to the bite of a medic’s scalpel and the burn of a wizard’s rage. None of Domino’s people survive the retaliation, but only two of the Coven reach the palace, and the violence of their wake is still victory to the dead. )
There is screaming - servants and attendants and soldiers fleeing towards and from the battle. Daphne pushes away the pain and power and chaos of the moment, and centers herself as only a Nymph can. She is not of Domino, despite her ties. She is of the dimension. She is Greater, she is More - and so she scatters her conscious out of her body and acts.
It does not save her, but it buys her time.
She is young, but her parents have never believed in sheltering her. She’s been with them every step of the way in the formation of the Company of Light, in the treaties and alliances Oritel and Miriam have bled and sweat for. She knows of the Coven, and knows only they would be strong enough to wreak this kind of havoc on the Great Dragon’s home.
Something warm and wet and soft presses against her throat as the palace shudders. Bloom is silent, eyes large and dark and pale with fright, and one warm little hand presses against Daphne’s cheek as she stares down at her little sister. Her baby sister, her own flesh and blood, her entire world.
So Daphne flees. Down, deep into the depths of the palace where even the Coven will have to work to reach. She casts as she flies, wings beating so hard they ache at her back and magic activating every ward and trap she can remember as bodies dart to-and-fro and the air temperature drops. Fairies fall as she does, each death and each outpouring of power striking her like a blow to the back; she drops and nearly skins herself on the palace floor under the near-physical weight of the pain. The Great Dragon’s screams are crescendo; she cannot hear if Bloom is crying or not over Her wailing.
If the Coven is here, they have come for the Dragon Flame. They do not know that Domino does not just house the Flame. They cannot find Her here, cannot be given a chance to twist Her to their will.
But more than that -
Her sister is not yet a year old. It is for her sake that Daphne has pushed herself through her transformations, has altered herself into something beyond a Fairy, has built an alliance to span the dimension itself rather than a single planet. Daphne loves her, more than she can even put into words, and as frost begins crackling across the walls alongside her, as the last of her siblings-in-arms fall and Daphne’s magical core begins to burn at the weight of All resting in it -
She is a child. She is desperate, and afraid, and so fiercely stubborn -
At the time, Daphne thinks it makes her a poor Fairy of the Flame, because she is not half so concerned over the fate of the Great Dragon as she is Bloom’s.
Save her, she thinks. Pleads, begs, orders. Her feet are freezing to the stone, as she stumbles into a poor landing. Skin and blood trails behind her, steaming even as another layer of cursed cold traps it in place. She reaches out with all the power writhing inside her, to the very fabric of the universe itself, and roars.
It wouldn’t have worked. It shouldn’t have. But Daphne is alone in that moment; there are no other Fairies of the Dragon Flame to share her burden and she bears the weight of creation itself in her soul. She reaches out, Bloom wailing and reaching for her with those little hands, and something tears itself open in front of her.
A shrieking, piercing laugh echoes down the hall - Daphne’s few seconds are up. And while she may be sister first, she is still Guardian, and perhaps - perhaps she can be both, in this moment.
She does not think or plot or plan out her actions. She is a child. It is pure desperation that sends her scrabbling inside of herself and tearing her own being asunder, it is pure panic that has her screaming out words to break a sacred oath, and it is pure rage that keeps her tears at bay as the Great Dragon leaves her. Bloom screams at the heat, the too-much, the All. And Daphne lets go of her sister, and she disappears.
She’s cold, now. Skin turning blue, frost crackling up her legs and blossoming on her arms. Empty, bereft. She turns to face her enemies as the two surviving Coven sisters round the far corner. Her wings are gone, their absence agony and her body shaking. She’ll not survive long, even without the cursed cold or her foes at her throat.
She doesn’t need to, though.
Daphne was a witch before she was a fairy, and like the best of the Dragon’s proven, she has never forgotten how to be cruel. The Coven are high on their victory and reeling from their loss; they see a girl without even wings to fight with, a girl whom they know to have traveled the dimension pleading peace and unity. They recall how easily Oritel had fallen, and think the girl has taken after her father - but Daphne has always been her mother’s daughter. Domino may be her home but her mother is Earth through-and-through, and Earth does not play games.
She doesn’t call to the elements to aide her. She doesn’t reach for the fear and pain and agony in the air, the betrayal or the grief. She doesn’t call on the magic of her people, or the power poured into the palace around her.
She reaches out for the hundreds of thousands of deaths coating her home. She reaches for the blood and bone of her foes, for the liquid so like saltwater and the mineral so like driftwood. She reaches for her own end, already numbing her extremities, and does not exchange so much as a word with the women that have murdered her planet before she tears them asunder with her fingers, even as it tears her to pieces too.
( The ice - holds. It does not let go. Her people’s bodies will never rest, and her siblings-in-arms are trapped forevermore in ice that will never melt, as the cold gorges itself on her home. Death cannot take, and death cannot give - and in a last act of fury at the evils done to them, the dead come willingly to their sisters’ call. The Coven is annihilated - there are no bodies, and no souls, left. Domino’s dead cannot rest, will never rest, but they suffer eternity a bit easier nonetheless. )
( It’s a quick end. A violent end, the kind of end others will call purely and wholly evil. The two sisters who thought to slay the Crown Princess of Domino are not simply dead - they no longer exist. And perhaps it would be evil, if She were not calling for more. )
The magnitude of the last few heartbeats is too much for Daphne. Singularly brave and courageous she may be, singularly powerful and determined, but she is mortal and she’s born the deaths of her entire planet, the torment of her baby sister, and her own murder. The universe still shakes at her fingertips, and the closest thing to a coherent thought she has is the need to warn her allies, and so she finds herself falling -
( She leaves something of herself behind. More than what makes it to her prison; less than necessary to save herself. )
She lands on Magix, atop a table laden for a feast - a celebration - surrounded by the Company of Light. Or - most of its members. She is not capable of processing the absences beyond recognizing the empty seats, beyond registering none of her family and only Politea of her Nymphs are present. If she were even a fraction less damaged, she would have fled immediately. If she were still coherent, she would not have come here at all.
The Company had been watching the Coven, after all. Tracking their movements and predicting their next attack - and last Daphne had known, the Coven had withdrawn to Obsidian, so far in the outer reaches of the dimension that they could not possibly launch an attack on any homeworld without being spotted well in advance. And the only route to Domino passed first through Eraklyon - and Domino should not have fallen alone.
( In the end - it didn’t. )
Someone, somewhere, should have come to their aide. Someone should have been there. But she is dying, and desperate, and she is a child.
( She is afraid. )
She tries to warn them, blood frozen in her throat and at her lips. Does not resist when those she calls aunt and uncle and cousin lift her gently from the table and usher her away, cannot conceive that she has been carried too long and that the stone around her is not the white tile of the medical wing. She cannot comprehend the drawn blade above her. She is too far gone to register the agony of the resulting wound.
Daphne is not alive when her betrayers reach the room that will become her prison. Her death hardly stops them; they know that Domino cremates its fairies and they know her to be one. They think she is the last, and she is dead before she can tell them otherwise.
( The Coven had not been the only group out there with eyes on the Flame. )
( Her death is all that saves her sister. )
Daphne misses the rest of the war. She misses Valtor’s defeat and capture, she misses the murder of Earth, she misses the slaughter of her Nymphs. But she is there to witness the sins of the Company in the after, and that is worse. Evil during wartime is to be expected - she was not so naive as to think otherwise even before her murder - but evil committed during peace time is a wholly different beast, all the more terrible for its shiny veneer and abject ruthlessness. It is also, in ways Daphne cannot allow herself to linger on lest she succumb to the madness that lurks in the dark of her mind, personal.
Daphne had severed her mind from her body before her death; she has no opportunity to restore it before her body becomes a corpse. When she wakes coherent for the first time since her death, she understands and comprehends the reality of Domino’s fall in a way she was unable to during her murder, and her rage is Her rage, though she no longer has a connection to Her.
It would be wise to let her be, but the Company is greedy and hungry and stupid. They approach her, and she slays them. They cast on her, and their spells sluice off of her like water. They shore up her prison in response, but they cannot take what she does not have to give and they cannot make her speak. They think to trick the power she no longer holds, and use the words host and vessel and her fury boils hotter than even the Flame itself. When she kills those they present before her body, it is a mercy killing.
Eventually they learn to stop coming.
( It never stops their scheming. But that is alright. Daphne never stops hers, either. )
( After all - they never found Bloom. )
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NOTE (cont. below in the actual note, I just wrote too fucking much)
Daphne is the fairy of the ocean - saltwater. Trapping her under a lake of freshwater was just another fuck you from the Company, + an attempt to keep her weak enough to contain. She didn’t lose her affinity when she gave up the Flame. Her proper title would still be Nymph/witch of the ocean. Without a body she has a hard time gathering enough magic to be active - hence how weak she was in Lady of the Lake. As a witch she can reach to the magic around her, but she’s got nothing to store it in/channel it through - what’s available at that moment is all she’s got.