Through Crimson Eyes

She was always drawn to storms the same way lightning was drawn to the sky. Even at a young age, little Azura stood beneath the thunderclouds that often came to the Sky'Lands during their journey across the Crystallin Sea, singing in a dead tongue. There was solace in their chaotic beauty, a stark contrast to the suffocating control of her makeshift family. Despite what had been promised, Azura couldn’t help shake a certain coldness each time a storm moved on without her. A coldness that only grew stronger and more present with each passing season, leaving her heart ensnared between the safety of familiarity and a longing for what lay beyond the open sea. Change had always stolen something from her, bringing only fear and loss of what had once been familiar. Change is often a terrifying thing to face alone, especially from the eyes of a gifted girl who's been isolated all her life. From the moment he was born, Damien's life had never been his own. Orphaned amidst the serf class and deemed property of the Crown, it seemed his future had been set in stone. To work laboriously with his head held low and his tongue discreet until the day death should come for him. A death he so gravely wished would hurry up. Scares cover his body, some done to him by the hands of the upper class, others he did to himself, for there is no such thing as a free slave in the Kingdom of Dunstan as long as the Royals live. However, a storm would seal their fate on the night following the Summer Solstice only to bind them to a kindred need. One born from desperation and estrangement. Call it destiny, or daresay a bloody curse. Now chained by the threads of fate, a young healer and a slave boy find themselves captured on the mainland by the King of the Dark Coniferous himself, only to be thrown into a sacrificial ritual meant to bring something unspeakable back. Something frightening enough to unnerve even the High Lords of the seven courts. There is a sense of wrongness brewing within Stone Henge, where the late Royal Families of Venijnig lay in their tombs. A wicked presence waiting to be called home. Those who remember him never speak his name aloud but know of him as the uncrowned prince, a butcherer of women, and an abomination amongst the Royal bloodlines. Yet he was a prince once. The youngest son of the Crimson Crowned King Theseus, but a bastard born to a pleasureserf who tainted the young prince's blood, turning it a glistening black silver. They say his gluttonous appetite for power is what killed the late King along with his heirs before the prince himself was entombed and warded deep beneath the mire surrounding Stone Henge. For the slave boy, it wasn't just a myth that led him to leap into the sea, but a terror that came to him in his dreams. One that he could not escape from. And as for the young healer, she has no idea how deep such a nightmare can go. _________________________________________ Update: 4/26/24