---[ POV: Amaryllis ]---

Amaryllis had been lost in a dark abyss for so long that she had difficulty remembering the light of day or the faces of those she loved. There were no walls, nor floors, nor ceiling, no shapes, and no forms. Nothing for the mind to cling on, only the void and tenuous whispers that disappeared the second she tried to listen to them. Some were soft, other menacing; most sounded as if they did not know she could hear them but some called her by name. The young girl was afraid. She wanted to cry, or at least to scream. She wanted to curl up on the ground with her hands on her ears to fend off the voices, but it was impossible. She was nowhere and had no throat to scream and no hands to hide. She was but a drifting mind, smoke in shadows, a lost consciousness at the mercy of the ghosts that roamed this infinite emptiness.

She had almost given up on her name and was ready to let her soul drift in the ocean of whispers when a light appeared in the dark. A single, distant star in the void. A beacon promising warmth and stability. It was a light that burned white and gold and through which she could discern a world beyond.

Willing every fiber of her being that still clung to life and reason, she threw herself toward the light. As it grew near, she could feel its burning warmth. It was painful, but any pain was better than the oblivion of the void. The shining star soon turned into an all-encompassing sun that enveloped her entirely and she found herself blinded by the white, immaculate, light of this sun. As she worried she would simply drown in light rather than darkness, the blinding flare receded and she realized she had an outstretched arm in front of her face to protect her from the sun.

An arm? From the sun?

She looked around her, surprised. She was sitting in a large chair - no, a throne - of gold and white marble that dominated a large room made of equally white marble. The wall that faced the throne had a large, wide-opened double-door flanked and surmounted by a number of impressive stained-glass windows in the shape of a blooming flower. Despite growing up in the royal castle of Osgarath, Amaryllis could not refrain from being impressed. This room, albeit smaller than the throne room of her father, was cleaner and more elegant. It had a pure and noble aesthetic that the grey stones of Osgarath lacked. Maybe it's because of the light? There are so many windows. And they are so large.

A handful of proud and noble-looking people was gathered in the room, all dressed in foreign attires. The floppy feathered hats that were so popular in the courts of Osgarath were nowhere to be seen but the colorful robe and toge of those people were embellished by equally beautiful sashes, scarfs, and belts. Amaryllis remembered her mother had a couple of similar garments in her wardrobe. One of the men presents approached with a pile of paper in his hand and raised his voice to address her, but she could not understand what he said. His voice appeared smeared, with strange echoes and whispers dancing in the air all around him. The scene itself blurred slightly at each syllable.

Amaryllis tried to ask him to stop but she soon realized she was nothing more than a spectator stuck in an unknown body. She was able to see through its eyes, hear through its ears, feel through its skin, but had no real agenda of her own. According to her stature and the hairs on her arms, she guessed she was probably a middle-aged man. The man was evidently an important noble given the ongoing scene and the way the others addressed him. It looked like the proceeding of a regular court session. The man - Amaryllis - was listening to his advisers and ministers and sometimes, the guards at the entrance would announce outsiders such as an artisan or family of farmers in need of lordly justice or arbitrage. The scene proceeded for some time, but time was not uniform here. Sometimes it ran fast, sometimes it ran slow. Amaryllis was lost and confused by this distortion in her perspective and by her inability to understand anything that was said. At some point, the guards at the doors announced something and everyone in the room stopped their actions to turn toward the entrance.

At first, Amaryllis could not see who was coming because of the light from outside, but then she could make out the silhouettes of tall and graceful people approaching, dressed in red lustered silk robes and holding billowy white banners adorned with half a sun beneath which an intricate pattern of flowing glyphs created a spiraling mandala. They had light brown skin tanned by the sun, vivacious and colorful eyes, long ears, and simple but elegant hairdos. They were elves. More specifically, the sun elves of the Isles of Dawns and the Shimmering Sea.

The procession advanced toward the throne and when they were close enough, the elves leading the march parted way and placed themselves on both sides of the central walkway, revealing an ornate gold palanquin held by a dozen of muscular male elves. The porters put their burden down and pulled the veils of crimson silk that had until now protected the palanquin occupant from the heat of the sun and curious eyes. With the help of the outstretched hand of one of the porter, a magnificent female elf got up from a bed of cushion. She was lightly dressed, as all the sun elves were, in a way that was barely fitting for a court of Men. As she rose, the porters got on one knee and the other accompanying elves bowed respectfully.

The elven woman spoke and Amaryllis stood up.

The woman approached until she was at the very bottom of the flight of stairs leading to the thrones and Amaryllis was soon at her height, grabbing the offered hand and depositing a kiss on it. The woman smiled. It was a bright and happy smile. She caressed Amaryllis cheek lovingly, then pressed her hand against her chest and said something, but the sound of her voice was lost as all the others were before. Amaryllis - or rather the man to whom this whole scene belonged - said something, mixing the discordant sound of his voice to that of the woman to a point it became almost unbearable. Amaryllis could hear the whispers from beyond this reality. They came from the shadows behind the thrones, from the cracks in the grounds, from the mouth of everyone present, be they opened or closed. They called her name, tried to tell her something, but in their attempts to make themselves heard, they only succeeded in creating an infernal and incomprehensible cacophony.

Amaryllis was wrenched away from the throne room and cast back into the blinding light that had brought her there in the first place. She tried to find some bearing in this expanse that numbed the senses but could find none other than her two burning hands. Burning hands? She looked at her hands. They were in flames. The pain was excruciating. She wanted to scream but as soon as she opened her mouth to do so, she found herself in a damp and dimly lit room. Her hands were no longer in fire and she no longer had control of her own body.

The person she was possessing was leaning over a table, perusing the pages of an ancient tome. She could not read what was written on those pages, but the sinister drawings and diagrams depicting dissected animals inspired her nothing good. There were traces of dried blood on the person's hands. As if to confirm her apprehension, the person got up from their chair and turned around. On a stone altar on the other side of the room was the body of a man. His throat and abdomen had been sliced and gutted so that all of his blood would fall on the altar, and from there, follow the carved channels in the stone surface up to a bowl placed on the ground in front of the altar.

Despite her every instinct, Amaryllis started to approach the macabre scene. The man on the altar had evidently suffered from malnutrition for a long time before he died. He missed two fingers on his left hand, a sign that he had probably been a thief. Not a really good one since he had got caught and punished. Amaryllis crouched down to take the bowl of blood and started to chant. Once again, the voice was distorted and mixed with strange and sinister whispers. She could not understand what was said, but the language seemed more familiar than in the previous scene. Despite the familiarity, the incantation gave her goosebumps. The light itself seemed to fade away from the room. After a while, Amaryllis raised the bowl above her head and doused herself with lukewarm blood. She wanted to scream but couldn't. She didn't even close her eyes. Her vision was tinged red and she turned toward a corner of the room where a standing mirror of polished silver awaited her. As she continued her incantation, the forms in the mirror started to shift and move, replacing the reflection of the room with a scene from another place and another time, but not before she could, with horror, recognize her own reflection. The somber and gaunt figure standing in the mirror, smeared in red blood, was none other than her uncle Orvellas.

Once again, the world dissolved around her. She spent a mere moment in the bright light before being tossed in yet another unfamiliar scene.

This time she was running in a rocky canyon. In front of her, her fleeing prey raised a cloud of dust as its hooves hit the ground. Amaryllis had never seen such a beast but the person through which she observed the world had. They knew exactly what to do to catch it. They took a strange contraption composed of ropes and stones from their belt, swung it around for a bit, then tossed it toward the fleeing animal. The contraption hit its target in the legs and wrapped itself around it. The beast brailed and fell to the ground.

Amaryllis grabbed a stone mallet from her leather belt and with a feral cry, jumped on the animal to break its skull before it could free itself. The giant goat-looking animal struggled for a time but stopped to move after the third hit. Amaryllis put her weapon back in her belt and produced a long bone knife instead. With a satisfied grunt, she got on her knee and started to carve her prey. She realized she had gigantic, muscular, grey-blue arms, with hands as large as a man's head and long dark nails. Her skin was covered with scarifications and barbarian paints. She was well into her task when the wind shifted and an unpleasant and unsettling odor assailed her developed sense of smell. She frowned and got back up. Abandoning her half chopped-up prey, she raised her knife in a guard position and continued her way along the canyon in the direction of the wind until she arrived at a large caldera.

There was stagnant water at the bottom of the caldera, but it was not the origin of the odor. All around the water source was a giant herd of the same species as the animal she had just hunted, the only exception being that they had all been butchered. Their carved-out bodies were strewn all around the place. It was a massacre. Violence for the sake of violence. The attacker - or attackers - hadn't eaten or carved its prey for sustenance or resource, they had simply butchered them and left them there to rot.

Amarillis started to go down the caldera with caution, her weapon raised. She approached multiple corpses and observed them, sometimes poking them with the knife or turning them around with her feet. At some point, she could hear a faint rattling behind her, but before she could turn around, a sharp pain pierced her back and something burned he neck. She started to fall down until she met the ground and could observe her own feet. There was a blurred silhouette behind her, but her vision and consciousness faded before she could distinguish anything. The voices from behind screamed, sending her back to the light.

Her spirit whirled in the blinding light as it had before. Her entire arms were now burning. Flamming snakes had wrapped themselves around them and were slowly slithering their way toward her heart. The pain was unbearable but she felt herself fall down toward a new foreign scene once again.

No. No! Not again! Please stop it! Someone, make it stop!

But her pleas were to no avail. She witnessed scene after scene, moment after moment. Some were of some significance or related to her in some way but most were as mundane as a farmer eating with his family or a scribe brushing up a contract for his master, and some made absolutely no sense at all.

She found herself missing the empty and dark void. She was forgetting herself in this rapid succession of visions in an entirely different way than she had when she was adrift in oblivion. The burning snakes were now tormenting her even during the visions. She could not see them, but she could feel them.

She was now standing atop a high cliff in an unknown landscape. Beneath her, an army marched to meet a crawling mass of hostile shadows lurking beneath dark and ominous clouds. Amaryllis had never seen such an army. They were marching with one unified pace and in a perfectly ordered fashion despite their incredible number. She doubted anyone in the Inheritor Realms could muster such an army. Even if her father was to raise all the knights and levies of the Second Realm, he would come short. The army below must have been comprised of at least a hundred thousand men. Probably a lot more. Not only had they uncanny coordination, but they also did not seem to have any generals or officers. There were no lords or knights leading them. They each knew their place and acted as one would have expected from the perfect soldier. There was a satisfying beauty in this spectacle, a sense of union and cohesion that made her feel proud for some reason.

Amaryllis could not observe the army for much longer, however. Her eyes brushed over the horizon and locked with those of a distant figure. Despite the many leagues between them, she found herself in front of the figure, a dark and bonny silhouette with a pair of large black eyes. The humanoid tilted its head and clacked its teeth as if it was curious. Amaryllis fell in its eyes, got swallowed by the darkness.

The young princess found herself in the abyss once again, but this time she was not alone. There was another person with her; a woman - or what looked like it - seated on a throne of bones and dark steel. It was impossible to make her feature because of the shadows. She was wrapped in them as if it was a dress. The only thing Amaryllis could see clearly were inhuman, terrifying yellow eyes that glowed in the dark. The unknown figure spoke but Amaryllis could not understand it. She was surprised, however. The tone was soft. It was inviting, comforting, almost longing. The shadowy silhouette got up and started to slowly approach her. With each step, she spoke and Amaryllis felt her soul pulled toward her.

The young girl was about to lose her mind. Despite the soft-spoken voice that tried to lull her, she was absolutely terrified of the entity standing in front of her. She knew she was no longer spectating from someone's else point of view and that this woman was addressing her directly. Every nerve in her body was burning as if red hot needles had been driven in every pore of her skin. The fire snakes that constricted her arms had now invaded her chest and were closing in on her heart. The dark woman was now so close that Amaryllis could hear her respiration. She raised a long and bonny hand toward the princess and Amaryllis could not prevent herself from screaming. This time she could. She was herself. She screamed and tried to back up but fell backward. As she was falling toward the ground, the snakes finally got a hold of her heart. Or so she thought. They reached something else instead, something she didn't even know she had. Her mind was overcome by a searing pain and her surroundings burned away in an explosion of light.

She opened her eyes, screaming, only to be faced by the stupefied and anxious face of Gwenvar right above her. Her Warden remained silent for a couple of seconds, then she started crying from relief. Her head fell on Amaryllis' chest to sobs, revealing three unfamiliar faces behind. An old man with white pulled-back hair and a large, bushy mustache, a blue-skinned young girl about the same age as her wearing a strange-looking helmet way too large for her, and a red-haired man with kind green eyes. They all looked as surprised as Gwenvar but rather than losing control of themselves, they smiled and welcomed her back.