A Crown Of Shadowed Wings

The air in Veridium was always thick, not with fog, but with the suffocating scent of coal smoke and fear. Tonight, however, the fear had a sharper, metallic edge. It clung to the cobblestones and seeped into the stone of the spired, skeletal buildings that clawed at the moonless sky. Lysandra moved through the back alleys like a whisper of midnight. Her presence was announced only by the faint, rhythmic rustle of her great, feathered wings—a sound that, in the lower districts, was instantly recognized as a harbinger of either salvation or ruin. Tonight, she carried both. The city's citizens, veiled and hunched, scurried into the shadows whenever her silhouette passed, their eyes refusing to meet the molten gold of the crown hovering just above her brow. It wasn't a piece of jewelry; it was a curse forged in the deepest shadow-pits, constantly flickering with an angry, captive flame. Lysandra reached the square where the Tower of the Magisterium stood a structure of white marble that seemed to mock the darkness of the surrounding city. Here, the elite gathered, their laughter thin and brittle, their hands clean of the soot that coated the rest of Veridium. She stopped. In her outstretched hand, an orb of shimmering, captive fire pulsed with a light that seemed to devour the surrounding gloom. She had come for the one who had condemned her people to the darkness: Arch-Magister Theron. A low, guttural roar escaped her lips, and her massive, obsidian wings snapped wide, shattering the silence. The feathers, sharper than any blade, seemed to absorb the light, making her presence an absolute void in the square. Her mission was simple, her intention pure: to reclaim what was hers and to finally allow the veiled city to see the sun again, even if she had to burn the whole kingdom to ashes to do it. The price of the crown, she knew, was not power, but perpetual war.