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I. The Princess
*
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who didn’t have to dream of being a princess — for she was one.
Sheltered behind palace walls, she ate the finest dishes, wore the most expensive fabrics, and was taught by the best tutors in the kingdom.
Her passion was the piano. Every note she played in solitude spun dreams of a glorious future: One day, she’d climb the throne her parents kept bejeweled and polished for her. The kingdom would flourish under her rule.
It was meant to be — royalty was in her blood, after all.
*
The older she grew, the more angry the princess became.
The future that had seemed so promising when she was a child took twists and turns that left her with whiplash and bruises all over.
First, she was blessed with a brother. She loved him dearly, but it stung that her parents praised him for being a future king before he could even walk. It hurt that they discarded her from there on, as if they hadn't prepared her for the throne ever since she was born.
Then, the quiet resentment she'd sensed from her father turned out to be well-founded when she turned fourteen: Along with her period came the nights she howled as a beast under the full moon.
Her first transformation was a fever dream: her skin stretched, her nails splintered and extended into fearsome claws. Something inside her demanded to be let out — not with the grace of a princess, but with the snarling urgency of a monster.
When it was over, she lay in the dirt, panting, a deep ache thrumming through every fiber of her body.
No one else in her family was a werewolf. It was easy to put two and two together.
She spent less and less time at home, sneaking out whenever she could to roam among the commoners. Mischief followed wherever she went, and she found solace in the company of new friends, a group of streer kids. No one knew her true identity, for she had rarely been presented to the common public, and for a while, she thrived.
If her family didn’t have her back, at least her friends did.
One day, the young princess met the son of an elven healer. He kindly tended to her wounds after she tripped while running from the city guard, and they made plans to meet up again. He took her to a beautiful lake amidst the forest. They walked for hours, lost in conversation, until their connection drew them close enough together for their arms to touch as they leaned over the glimmering water. When he kissed her, his lips were softer than she’d expected — gentle, uncertain, like he was asking rather than taking.
When the sun set, he conjured a bouquet of starlight flowers for her letting her in on a family secret: That the elven healer family didn’t just heal; they possessed another kind of magic, too. A smile so wide it made her cheeks hurt lingered on her face all the way home.
The princess kept seeing the elven boy, thinking she'd run away with him if her parents kept spiting her. Maybe this was supposed to be her ever after — maybe she’d been looking in the wrong place.
But shortly after her sixteenth birthday, her parents announced her engagement. They'd chosen the prince of the Southern Kingdom. He was a childhood friend, and yet, to think that her family would marry her off into the role of a silent queen infuriated the princess.
She strayed further from her family, avoiding what she'd once called home at all costs, for the streets treated her more kindly than her royal surroundings. She planned to run off into the uncertain sunset — a future of her own making.
Everything changed when her elven boy was found dead. His head had been severed; the life she'd imagined by his side was snuffed out at once.
The princess poured her mourning into piano keys, and often wandered the woods where he'd once held her hand.
As she wept her grief, a feeling began to gnaw at her. There was no proof for her terrible suspicion at first, but her heart urged her to question things, and soon, she was convinced: This had not been a random act of violence.
She kept prying and searching until she learned that her fiancé had alerted her parents to her secret relationship before her elven boy found his gruesome end.
Livid, she stormed her parents’ bedroom. She hurled her accusations at them. Her mother's eyes widened, her step-father's lips pressed into a tight line.
The room fell silent until her mother whispered into the uneasy quiet: “It was for your own good, my dear.”
The princess had once dreamed of a fairy tale ever after. But nobody had told her that the villains were not dragons; in reality, the villains lived in a castle and held all the power they could ever dream of.
*
II. The Monster
*
Merely weeks later, the princess no longer existed. She’d gone up in the flames that burned the bridges to her past. What remained was a monstrous girl built from ashes and wrath.
The girl was aimless, wandering the kingdom in search of something, anything, to give her purpose again. Once a spoiled lady, she now survived off of scavenged scraps and stolen supplies — which soon landed her in trouble.
Prison was not a good place for a delinquent without a name to end up. The guards were merciless in their control and cruelty, and, ignorant as humans were, they didn't listen when she warned them not to lock her up.
The wolf inside of her took care of the situation in its own way. When a guard entered her cell at night, the beast tore free. Her mind slipped away, her body far beyond her control. It sunk its teeth into the guard's throat, clenched its jaw shut until he went limp.
When the girl came to again, she didn’t remember lunging, only the spray of blood, hot and disgusting on her skin.
To her surprise, she found herself relieved instead of regretful.
More on instinct than thought, she patted the lifeless guard down, fumbling for his keys. She had to get out of there before someone discovered what she had done.
She ran. Ran until her legs gave out. Finally, she collapsed, and found herself in the middle of a clearing, soft light streaming through the canopy of trees.
At its edge, half hidden behind a towering oak, stood a stranger.
When he inched closer, the girl's muscles tensed. She was expecting another deadly fight — but he made her an offer instead.
“I know you’re on the run,” he said. “I followed your trail from the prison.”
“I don’t know what you're talking about,” the girl huffed, heart pounding in her chest.
But the stranger just smiled.
“What if I told you I could make it all go away? That you don’t have to stay a fugitive forever?”
*
III. The Assassin
*
Only something as organized and sinister as a secret brotherhood could turn a lost girl with big dreams into a vicious assassin.
We'll keep you safe, they'd promised. We can give you something to channel your rage into.
The Daenoxa was an alliance for the rights of creatures like them, and far from home with no one else to turn to, she couldn’t afford the luxury of hesitance.
She trained rigorously, pouring her heart into her lessons. She learned to love the cold fire that rose in her veins every time she faced danger, and to tolerate the metallic tang of blood in her mouth.
She worked alongside demons, witches, vampires — beings she had never knowingly encountered before. The werewolf in her felt less alone; killing those who stood in the way of their freedom and well-being as creatures deemed supernatural by society was a small price to pay for a home and a community.
The first few times, she still wondered where this path would lead her. If she would run again some day.
After the successful assassination of a cruel marquis who had kept vampires as indentured servants, though, she stopped waiting for the moment she wanted to escape. She recognized that her power lay here — that what she doing was valuable and, in its own twisted way, noble.
Feared by their enemies, respected among her peers, she finally had a life to settle into.
And yet, the assassin craved more.
Working her profession, she traveled far and wide, but nothing filled that aching space her past had torn into her entirely.
*
IV. The Revolutionary
*
Years later, the assassin returned to the city she'd once called home.
Bittersweet nostalgia set her bones ablaze every step through those cursed streets. She didn’t know what to do with herself here — how to unite what she was now with what she'd been when she'd left — until she met an old acquaintance: Once an abandoned boy roaming the streets, the unjust suffering he'd endured had made a fighter with vengeance in his heart.
Her resentment for her family merged with the violence she’d learned to embrace. So, she offered her insights — her knowledge of the palace and its routines.
In return, the young revolutionary introduced her to his co-conspirators — people who had enough of living in poverty while the ruling class ignored them. Even though she’d grown up among the nobles, the assassin had gotten to know misery intimately in the meantime. She remembered the loss that ate her up. The sleepless nights on cold streets. The hunger clawing at her from within.
Together, they hatched an impeccable plan, and the longer it stewed in her mind, the clearer she saw what she had to do.
Finally, she offered her services, too. She dealt in death nowadays, and this kingdom needed it desperately.
*
At last, there was a woman who slayed a king, a queen, and a bloodline — all in one night. A revolutionary who betrayed her movement to save the one person she couldn't let suffer for the mistakes of their family.
The nervosity that had made her tremble before turned into a series of solemn sobs when she lunged toward her sleeping mother. The shock etched into those eyes that resembled her own so closely as soon as they opened cut deep—
She cried, but didn’t flinch when she drove her dagger through her mother's heart. It sank in too easily. The blood felt sickeningly warm on her hands, like one macabre last embrace.
Despite her anger and bitterness, she remembered the good days, too. Laughter filling the dining room. Her mother's tender hands fixing her hair. Holiday celebrations with thoughtful gifts awaiting her.
Her step-father's murmur rattled the silence, pulling her back into the present. She couldn’t let him wake. Heart thundering, she struck before her resolve could falter.
She twisted the blade between his ribs. It weighed heavier than ever before; even when she let it clatter to the floor, its drag wouldn’t lift.
The newborn revolutionary wandered, as aimless as she’d been as a fugitive. Her eyes skimmed her surroundings, half there, half gone — a ghost of herself — until she stopped in front of her old piano.
She blinked.
Memories came rushing back: Her earliest lessons. The days spent playing music to suit her grandiose childhood dreams. The mourning she'd poured into those keys.
The former princess let out a primal scream, throwing herself at the instrument that had carried her through the ups and downs for so long. She barely noticed that the wolf in her took over. Wood burst with a deafening crunch. Strings snapped, slicing her arms as they recoiled. The pain didn’t reach her. Ivory splintered under her claws.
Dissonant notes wrung from it, the piano howled with her. It was the only thing that had ever truly listened; it knew all her secrets. She couldn’t bear to let it live.
Only when it lay in ruin did she turn human again, breathing heavily.
She’d killed family tonight.
She was supposed to kill them all.
She couldn’t.
A few years younger than her, just freshly turned man instead of boy, her brother was innocent.
She’d had to recruit help, of course — a monumental risk, considering any indiscretion could ruin both her plan and the entire revolution.
First, she’d ambushed her old tutor. Scared and confused at first, the man had agreed to get the prince out of the city after she’d explained the situation — a question of decency, he'd called it.
Then, heart heavy with regret and grief, she’d sought out her dear elven boy’s parents. Hostile as they’d been, she’d argued and begged — until they agreed to assist in her sly plan.
The severed head she showed her comrades was not that of the royal heir they’d hoped to eliminate. It was not a head at all, but a cabbage the elves had enchanted to resemble the trophy the assassin had to produce.
The kingdom she once thought she'd rule fell by her hand. She erased her bloodline herself. No one else would have been fit to do the job.
And, more importantly, no one else would have protected her brother from the cruel fate the vengeful movement had planned for him.
*
V. The Protector
*
The sly protector returned to her new life, and waited. She went to the arranged meeting point every day. No one showed.
The days dragged on, and she begun to fear that all her efforts had been in vain. That her former comrades had seen through her scheme too early and sent someone else after her brother. That he'd encountered trouble during his travels.
He could have died by a blade like hers. He could have drowned in the wreck of the same ship that had carried her to the shore safely.
One foggy morning, though, her brother stepped off of the ferry her eyes clung to in deep despair and fervent hope. Their old tutor had kept his promise.
Though she still had nightmares about the night she’d killed their parents, her brother's embrace eased her shoulders like nothing else had since she had last been with her elven boy all those years ago. The dissonant piano notes that had been haunting her quieted at last. The melodies from her childhood, too. The former prince who’d been a kid when she'd left had grown into a fine young man, as kind and just as she’d expected.
He could never know what she had done to protect him, but she found peace in knowing that he'd have his happily ever after one day. He had survived, and unlike her, he would know a lifetime of love and support; she would make sure of that.
She would be the protector she herself had needed. The hero who had never come to her rescue.
Finally, the monstrous assassin princess had found something that felt right — and enough.