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Amidst the scarlet blaze of the dying sun, I watched her ascend the hill, bare of feet and nubile of leg, long, languid steps as graceful and light as the fall of night. Grass bowed beneath her passing, springing up as sprightly and unruffled as if her touch were made of mist. Her dress, a great windswept veil of star-studded darkness, swaddled her hips and thighs, but left all else bare as birth. Auburn were her locks, stunningly long, waving at her back like a banner calling the great lords to war.
Auburn were her locks, but it was the auburn of both birth and slaughter and a jewelsmith’s beloved gilding. Gold and sunflower yellow, carmine and pink rose, all blended together in dizzying allure. Looking upon her made the eyes ache and the black flames shudder.
Her hips canted and swayed, until at last, her ascent completed, the crown of the hill conquered, she tipped her chin up, baring the lithe length of her throat and the startling broadness of her shoulders. Enchanting was the flawless expanse of her skin, pale and pure, as immaculately smooth as her muscles were wondrously sculpted. No wilting flower was she.
No, the openness of her stance, the sureness of her straightened back and the composed rise and fall of her bosom, all indicated this woman was a maiden, not of hearth and home, but of battle and blood. Clad her in armor, press sharpened steel into her fist, and she’d send the gravest of deathbirds cowering like newborn chicks.
Her eyes scoured the crowded battlements, their color as indiscernible as their intensity was unbearable.
The gathered lords and their retinues of knights, the Omen blessed and their stalwart defenders, the city guards and the flayers of gods, all looked down upon her in varying shades of hostility and horror.
She lifted a hand, the golden bangle winding around her wrist hurling the last rays of light like spears. The train of her dress rippled and snapped like an agitated serpent, finally falling still around her legs as the world itself seemed to hold its breath.
There, in the center of her palm, gleaming like lovingly polished ivory, rested a ring of a silver so pale it made the face of the full moon appear the delusion of a drug addled mind.
For the first time since her name had been spoken aloud by the mad prophet, the first inkling of fear crept up the column of my spine.
“Hear me, ye faithful bonded and embraced by Death. The dawn of a new epoch distorts the horizon. Power beyond imagining awaits to be claimed. Thy queen and her Gloaming Eyes are without consort and intimate protection. Fear not, for salvation has come.” She flung wide her arms and let fly her voice, battering the great walls with a gale that stripped mortar from stone. “I am Marika, and in my breast beats the heart of a five-headed dragon.”