Fox Paws

Intermission - Savior

"How could I let it come to this?"

I rushed headlong through the castle corridors, the sounds of my footsteps echoing throughout the empty halls.

Where could I hide? Where would I be safe until I could figure out how to fix this?

I did not know. I could not think.

Yet another scream pierced the night, rising above the cries of the panicked crowds.

The clashing of steel rang through the air as the invading forces turned their blades on their former comrades.

A monster roared in the distance, its rage unable to be quelled.

Even muffled by the walls, the nightmarish cacophony outside still drowned out every thought I had but one:

"This is my fault."

But how could I have known this would happen?

I simply could not have!

It felt like I had only lost control for a few minutes at most, but with this much devastation, surely it had to have been longer.

But just how much longer?

Had it been days?

Weeks?

My mind raced almost as quickly as my heart - it finally hit me exactly how grave the situation had become in my absence. I could have been in that trance for years for all I knew.

That terrible, suffocating darkness that had plagued me for so long...in the end, I was unable to fight it off any longer and succumbed to it. Though I managed to escape it at last and return to my senses, I was even now not truly free from its grasp.

"Why do you run, foolish girl? You know this will not change anything. Just give up and accept the truth." It was my own voice that jeered from the shadows that haunted me.

For as long as I could remember, my mind had been clouded by such thoughts. Perhaps there had been a time long ago when my doubt and self-loathing had not yet corrupted me. A time before I had been forgotten and forced into the shadows.

But that time had long since passed.

"You are unloved. Unwanted. A pathetic excuse for a goddess." The contemptuous voice grew closer, its words dripping with the sick delight it took in taunting me.

"Stop it stop it stop it STOP IT-!" I came to a halt and clutched my head in my hands, frantically begging aloud for a reprieve.

It did not matter for how long I had endured its derision. I would never grow accustomed to it.

"Please...I have to help them. I have to make things right!" My voice shook as I struggled to steel myself.

However, it was not by the power of my own will that I was brought back to reality - rather, it was by an abrupt reminder of why I had been running in the first place.

A bolt of light crackled through the air from behind me and whizzed past my face, creating a lovely new window in the stone wall further down ahead of me with a dazzling explosion of sparks.

I jumped in surprise, looking back to see where it had come from, and a towering, magnificent figure barreled through the turn in the hall I had just passed.

She took the form of a young woman, although quite a bit taller than any human I'd ever seen, and her long, golden tresses flowed behind her as she slid into view. She wielded a shimmering blade in one hand, while the faint remnants of magical energy glimmered in her other, outstretched towards me. Her dress was otherworldly, seeming to be woven from light rather than fabric, and the armor she wore over it gleamed in the torchlight. Its chest was proudly emblazoned with the image of a sunburst with a crescent in its center - the symbol of her kingdom.