The Princess’s Bedchamber was an average-sized room that, for the most part, always felt cold and barren, as remarked by the staff that would come and go from it as part of their jobs. It was situated at the very back of the royal castle of Malachias. A castle that itself was also of diminutive size. Most citizens were unaware of this fact, however, as the majority of contemporary countries had long phased out the overbearing monolithic structures of old and had taken to adopting dazzling, palatial towers of modern design. Glass titans burning blindingly amid the center of light-polluted cities. There had no longer been many other castles to compare it to.

The reason for Malachias’s stifled progress was not something done in reverence to the country’s long history like most people had liked to assume. These decisions were, in fact, executed by the top dogs of the council of the Scarlet Church. Decisions that always came to a unanimous vote: that all economic and technological advancements go towards the betterment of the country’s religious facets.

In the corner of this average-sized room in this average-sized castle was a young woman, dressed in a very elegant nightgown adorned with golden lace and wrapped in a posh brocade robe. She was sitting almost lifelessly—like a doll, at a small vanity table of fanciful design. It was the only piece of furniture in the room distinctive from all the rest.

The doll-like girl removed the blindfold she had carried on her head and slowly opened her eyes that had been hidden in the dark all day. Milky, unfocused white pupils stared at the wall opposite her. On her desk laid dozens of indiscriminate knick-knacks: an assortment of expensive, hand-crafted jewelry, a few stuffed dolls, a large bottle of moisturizer and a half-empty teacup. And standing out from all the rest was a small, glowing cube of intricate design that floated curiously over a tiny pedestal. An expensive device that was playing the usual music she had grown so fond of in recent years. Not the classical kind, like most people would suspect a stuffy princess of an old storybook to be listening to, but rather one of those modern pop songs that was commonly sung by a group of handsome elfwin men. A genre of music popular with most teenage girls nowadays, or in June’s case, a girl in her mid-20’s. The young woman mouthed the words to the familiar tune of the latest Hitboys classic, The Girl at the End of My World. An impressive task for someone with almost no knowledge in the language it was being sung in.

June once struggled with the notion that “blind girls can’t find fun in the same things as normal girls,” a quote often propagated by her old nursemaid as to the reason why she wasn’t allowed to make friends. In her later years, however, and thanks in part to her discovery of technology, she came to scoff at such pessimistic ideas. June refused to let her blindness, a divine gift she deigned to call a disability, hold her back from living a normal life.

The divine gift.

A closely guarded royal secret known only to a select few, that every reigning princess must always do so blind. Most assumed the bloodline was cursed—a malison perhaps prompted by the work of a powerful witch of some sort, who had been aggrieved by some previous royal ancestor, or was hired to do so in order to turn the tide of some past war.

It was all hearsay of course, and most of it told in dreary bars to wretched drunks with vivid imaginations by drunks with even more vivid imaginations.

The unfortunate reality, however, was much harsher and more complicated than fiction.

Macha was not what one would call a sane god. Gods and their motives had always been an insoluble part of most faiths and weren’t generally meant to be understood. To the learned individual, Gods were an incomprehensible mix of belief and ideals used to set the standard of everyday living. To others, they were fanciful stories told in an effort to fleece the owners of burgeoning wallets. But to a certain few, they represented a very real and very serious dogma. That—packed alongside a god of incomprehensible madness—would obviously lead to a religion that raises a few of the eyebrows of any outsider looking in.

Macha was said to have been a creature of thought, come from the stars, who visited Sarracas in an effort to give man a better understanding of their role in the fabric of totality and the best method in which to arrive at it. The best way it proposed to do this was to inhabit the first intelligent lifeforms it came across and use them to spread its message. A task it deemed would be made easier if it was first camouflaged as a native. It began this mission by first possessing the bodies of two twin girls who had been bathing nearby. Reasoning that they were a single entity and that life on this world developed curiously in split bodies of two, it divided itself and inhabited them both at once. Unfortunately, this had been an error in its calculation and the twin minds of the sisters D'rrota and D'mona were utterly destroyed in the process. Their essences having been corrupted by this foreign invader, it did what best it could to salvage their core parts, having little understanding of their biology. It twisted their DNA and transfigured them into featureless individuals, with multiple extraneous limbs that would sometimes flail about uncontrollably and a single large mouth that formed at the base of their neck. No longer alive, yet not exactly dead; In forms not meant to exist in any capacity, communicating in strange sounds in what could only be described as sucking in wind through their large teeth.

The eldritch alien did not escape the situation unscathed, as the mere moment it took possession of the young women, it had also forced its own physiology to meld with theirs. The atmosphere of the planet was like an intensive drug that had poisoned its extraterrestrial mind, jumbling its thoughts and completely changing its understanding of itself and the universe. From its new corrupted perspective—and having believed it owed this degeneration to the planet and its lifeforms—it decided to use the two fresh women as tools, having garnered as much knowledge as it could from their deteriorating minds.

Steeped in a crude replica of manufactured flesh, Macha then began her holy crusade into educating the other native lifeforms in the nearby settlements.

The first of which was an unfortunate woman, later to be formally recognized as Malachias’s first ruler.

Macha, unaware of the extent of a human’s dimorphic biology, naturally assumed the whole of the species to be female, and imparted most of its incompatible wisdom into the poor soul.

The woman, not being able to fully understand what she was being shown, simply seized and collapsed. In order to rectify this, Macha decided to shut off the part of the woman’s brain that gave her the use of sight and instead fused the freshly vestigial lobe with the pineal gland and gave the newly-fashioned sense-organ an interestingly unique role: A function of understanding. A brain so thoroughly rewritten; it would be passed down from mother to daughter as a genetic mutation.

There was a knocking at her door. June fumbled around for the music player on her desk to shut it off. The room that was previously drowning in a mix of voices was now completely silent.

“Yes?” She answered.

“June?” replied the visitor. At the door was her older brother, Bartholomew. A living paragon of the sheltered man and a constant cut-up. Despite being naïve in his ways, he was fiercely protective of his younger sister.

“It’s week’s end. I believe you wanted me to finish reading you the final short story of the collection.” Bartholomew peeked his head in, book in hand.

“Oh yes! I’m always up for a story about man’s failure to cope with and understand the demons he’s wrought. Inner and outer.” June had been following her brother’s footsteps as he moved about the room. She turned her body towards where she had last tracked his movements. His breathing pattern was comfortably recognizable. She crossed her legs and relaxed.

“Ah, yes.” He smiled sheepishly. “I have to say, the last story you had me read haunted me for a couple of days after. I couldn’t help but look over at my closet every few minutes.”

Bartholomew cursed at himself for replanting that memory into his mind.

June chuckled. “Horror stories are great, Bart! Out of all genres, those are always my favorite. I’ve always liked to think I have a powerful imagination. You know… To make up for things. And horror always makes it run wildest.” She chuckled again. “Even if I always regret it right after.”

“Why are you like this?” he questioned her rather sardonically.

She winked a milky eye at him and shrugged.

“Alright, alright. Are you ready?” he asked, his eyes scanning the words in the book. He read aloud the story’s tagline:

The Old Gods never forget.

He let out an audible grumble and shut the book loud enough for her to hear.

“Well, I am sufficiently spooked. Talk about a hair-raising experience! That last line almost had me jumping out of my seat!”

“Keep reading, you ass—” Before June could finish her insult, her darkened vision flashed a bright white immediately followed by a dull pain that passed gradually starting from the back of her head then moving to the front. She grasped the side of her temple and let out a painful cry.

“Ow! Fuck! You’re kidding me! Right now…?”

“Oh no.” Her brother bolted for the door. “I’ll call for the prioress!”

It always started the same way. The mad visions sent to her by her goddess Macha. A flash of white with a side of intense pain—a pain she jokingly likened to a “head cramp.” The intense throbbing would usually last only a few seconds before subsiding, then the phantasmagoria in her brain would begin. Haunting images would arrive in brief flashes, before repeating rapidly for about one or two minutes. This one, pain and all, had now lasted five.

Tears stung the corners of her eyes. A searing image had formed in the center of her mind and in that image, the first thing she could perceive was the ghostly silhouette of a girl, shining white amongst the pitch-black backdrop of the moonlit sky. Below, some smaller, insignificant figures looked on, almost in reverence of its magnificent presence. A glimpse into the unknown blackness behind her revealed a nascent war out in space. The heavens were spinning out of control at an increasingly fast rate—stars crashing and colliding, burning up the night. Intensely bright flashes that revealed the strange uncanny face of a man, watching the destruction in earnest. It wasn’t until about the fourth repeated sequence of this vision that she noticed the man’s face was not of flesh—but rather a creepy looking mask, seemingly alive, hiding his true identity.

At its final conclusion, one last vision flashed into June’s mind. A vision that hadn’t revealed itself before then. One that, without fully understanding why, seemed to frighten the young seeress most of all. A moving image of a lone girl in black, walking against a white background. Walking further and further into it, yet covering no distance at all.

The augury ended and June—realizing she had been rocking back and forth nervously—untensed her body. The lights of her room were glaring, causing her to reflexively look away. She turned back slowly and looked around, making a strong mental note of the placement of everything in her room. Her eyesight had returned—a temporary aftereffect that comes after every episode.

She looked to the mirror in front of her, staring intensely at her reflection. She rubbed the side of her face with her hand, making more mental notes of any mole, pore or pimple that had decided to make an appearance since the last time she had seen her face.

She made several facial expressions but couldn’t find it in herself to smile, only sigh. The eyes that were once a surreptitious milky white were now a beautiful hue of sapphire. She wished desperately for the transition to be permanent this time.

Bart returned with a woman in white. He gasped at the sight of her. He was always taken aback whenever he witnessed the natural, elegant blue color of his sister’s eyes.

The prioress, a high-ranking priestess of the church, was the woman tasked with studying and deciphering the omens blessed unto the princess.

“Relax now, my lady,” the prioress spoke softly as she kneeled toward the princess. She looked into June’s blue eyes as if to confirm what had just happened was the real deal. “Just as always: Slowly and carefully repeat to me everything you just witnessed.”