SMALLEST LIGHT | SHADOW & BONE

i, one

War didn't just wretch the borders, the Fold torn it's way through the middle of Ravka and it were as if the Shadow's anger raged within all of them one way or another. Some of them knew how to fight for their lives, by choice or not: Emiliya for one had always been a fighter even if the world decided her death.

However one question remained and lead to another.

What if she hadn't died?

And what if she survived being lost at sea, scarred for life, only to come haunt an immortal man?

Not everything that vanishes and hasn't been found is dead or lost. Survivors will always claw their way back. The question isn't how they will but when; no one will know they lurk in the shadows.

Ravka wouldn't know their legend was a shadow walking amongst them like a ghost, unnoticeable for she was a no one. She had a past that no longer looked like her, a person that felt like a million years away from being who her present self-had become.

A past that felt like a prison in ways more than the people knew about her story, the darkness a once lover had been. It was the things she would see upon closing her eyes, the demons of a war no child in the realm could outrun.

The past would be heard, but it wasn't who she was anymore. She now no longer sought out paths to stop the unstoppable and destructive, but an end to the darkness plaguing her country. A darkness that had blackened her heart and soul alike, so she had to become like him to destroy him.

One would say the chances to survive a fall off a cliff in broad daylight were small. The chances to do so during a destructive storm with unpredictable seas were slim to none, and yet somehow she did.

Emiliya didn't believe in anything, no faith in any being or a destined path but something saved her from the roaring seas that night. Though she had not known what or whom. It still didn't make her believe, but it meant she had a chance to do what she hadn't been able that night.

The young woman never meant to destroy him that night, a time shall come when she would. And perhaps she did not hold the power to stop the immortal, not possess shadow or sun. But she was a Squaller and a deadly one at that, and she wanted end it.

She had to find the thousand year old man that would not be easily killed. But even if it was the last thing she would do, she had to. She had to kill him so he couldn't hurt anyone else ever again, even if it meant he would want to kill her in return.

Her father didn't know then the impact his words would have, a man that was nothing more than a blur in the back of her mind. A face seen too long ago to remember who he was or what he looked like. But even upon his death, the stories he had once told her about the city on Kerch before settling in Ravka had stuck.

She merely remembered the words he had last spoken days before his passing, one she wasn't sure to be murder or collateral damage of war, as estranged it may sound.

'Whatever the world throws at you, you fight it. You fight and claw your way back. It's what you do when you don't give up, you survive.'

She had to become like him, the Darkling.

༄

They should never have left Os Alta for maybe none of it had happened.

If they hadn't gone to the seas that night then maybe none of what was to occur in the future would come to be. An ending that had always been meant to come.

It was as if the stars had foreseen it all, too bright amongst the darkness they had always been surrounded by, darkness that had surrounded her from birth long before they too haunted her through love.