The Dagger's Wrath (BOOK 1)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

A/N: Jesus this is long. 14k words? Yeah, you're in for a long one. Picture above is of a representation of a Void. The battle has begun and it's going to continue throughout the series. It's very vague compared to the Battle of the End, which will be the final huge magic War. Enjoy this frickin' huge one!

Queen Arnaressa, the Darklands

Voids.

The toxic, deadly and imminent dangers of the world incarnate; claws as sharp as the mind of a science and history tutor, brain as quick as one of the small, immature faerie in the south. They were the spineless, fire-born, mist-driven creatures that wrapped around their victim like a lover before tightening, pulling and stretching the life out of them.

Questeria had not a specified historically driven tale with them, since they were of another realm, but somehow they had transported here due to some magical element within their unnatural creation. Their Forming Celebration must had done something to them—ripped them apart, diseased them with some infection, twisted their minds from something kindly to something wraith-like. Swift as a shadow, vicious as a mountain cat from the Gahayalans in the eastern suburbs of the Sakalaki Dunes, they were darkness given form.

Void given life—and they were in the middle of Caelon's Green, surrounding the group of the hunters, the queen's men and the Queenliness herself, the main reason why they were there. Voices whispered upon the winds of a harsh satisfaction, driven upon some divine and mighty world of death, of chaos, of despair. Arnaressa wasn't quite sure how she could cope with this, but perhaps with her power, it might help her bring a touch of Essence to their form.

Voids were not human, but their flesh and skin was. Some folk said they were once human, now possessed, driven by insanity and the entirety of darkness itself to become as lethal as a curved dagger, its tip dug into their spines before ripping it out before the Voids went out to hunt, to catch their prey. Some said this, anyway; others suggested their existence was just a figment of everyone's imagination.

The Queen of Arrea, and as she claimed, of the world thought not either of these things but the fact that she hadn't an idea from the Otherworld what this abashing, torturous, dangerous, quickly snapping thing could be. Some disproportionally shaped form of darkness? Her guesses were but them of an amateur's mind. She was next to nothing in this idea of battle and despair. But what she did know was that the Voids were out of whatever world they had come from, out of hell and beyond.

Instead, the Voids—of darkness and danger—were in a world where war was raging, rulers were conflicted about what decisions to make, choices to discover, imminent creatures to be aware of.

And a queen, reborn after magic and Revenge, didn't want anybody—anything—in her way as she made her trek to the Throne, the Throne that would be hers. Would be hers to conquer and subjugate profoundly, bravely.

Her Infusion of Sterium rushed through her body, fulfilling her with power. Burned her soul, put a wall between her and the rest of the world—but the Sterium, the Sterium... It was like a weapon of fury as it destructed the wall, a shimmering of magic ripping her apart and then remaking her. The Reborn Queen was alive with the shine of Sterium.

The sky was an ocean blue; perfect for a one-Holding Infusion. Queen Arnaressa took in a deep breath, her mind clear as crystallised glass shining upon a shadowy figure. She was overwhelmed with the darkness of the Holding within her, the space of power, which she had chosen for this particular Infusion. Sterium was filling, filling, filling her as the skies covered itself with dark clouds, like protection. Immediately, she unsheathed her Lightblade, Dasvadi, light shining through the sudden darkness of the day. The once beautiful daylight now midnight blackness, the Reborn Queen swung Dasvadi up into the air, lifting her head to the skies.