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Haleine Coileáin wanted to die.  So desperately did she desire it, she now dragged her broken body across a stone floor as she sought to finish what her husband had begun.  The life would seep out of her of its own accord, she knew, but not quickly enough.  Her lover would come, her lover would save her and Haleine did not want that.  No, she wanted to die.

It hadn’t always been that way.  She hadn’t always been so wretched.  She could remember how it all began.  How could she ever forget how a letter to her father from her king had started her on the path which had led her to such a low place?

She was to be princess once.  She was to marry Revelin Maoilriain, King Nathan’s second son and as true a gentleman as ever was.  Betrothed at her birth they had been and eighteen years they had waited.  Eighteen years she spent at his side, his wife in all but name.  They would have been happy; all would have been bliss, had it not been for that one solitary letter.  With its arrival, eighteen years were suddenly gone, lost in a broken wax seal and drowned in the ink scratched onto a bit of parchment.

Instead of princess of a beloved country, she became queen of a strange land.  Instead of a man she loved, she married Maddox Aelhaeran, the crown prince of Lira and a man renown for insatiable cruelty.  It was an honor, her father had told her, an honor to have been chosen, and for her father and all his aspiration, it was.

But it was her burden.  She had been raised an ambitious warlord’s daughter.  She knew something of the demands of duty.  She spent years watching her father work in its yoke happily but never dreamed she might pull alongside him.  Still she went to her new fate with the intention of serving her country as she had been so required.

But all good intentions, she soon found, come undone.  Her own unraveled when she found herself wrecked on the shores of a country poised to succumb to a dormant darkness.  Ancient powers, long thought as myth, ached to reclaim what was once lost.  Their thousand year struggle edged ever closer to toppling the fading goddess Laorans.  Maddox’s coronation was its catalyst and his talent for torture its fuel.

She was the thing that could quench the flames of a world at war although she had not known it then.  At the start, she had been a sparrow trying to bring down a hawk but she fought him regardless.  Each day did she struggle against the demon called her husband and the controlling evil surrounding him.  Each day did she strive for her own survival as well as the preservation of the population inherited upon the completion of her wedding vows.  For reasons she could not fathom, Maddox was hell bent on raining destruction down upon his lands and all souls within.  She was hell bent on stopping him.  No matter the consequence.

But despite her efforts, despite her determination, she soon found herself drowning in the blood of her people and would have given anything for a lifeline.  The cost wouldn’t matter, even if it was her life, for what would there be to lament?  Her life had been forfeit the moment Nathan decided to send her away.  All she had left was a desire to see the evil ended.  If she could bring her husband to ruin, any sacrifice would be well worth the price.

And a year ago, she had meant it.  A year ago, she aligned herself with the people’s rebellion, the goddess’s rebellion.  For twelve months she lied, cheated and stole on their behalf.  For twelve months, she did anything and everything she could to further their cause.  She cozened her husband for all he knew, using her body as currency.  She watched Revelin devastated and his father assassinated.  She sent her parents, first her mother, then her father, to their deaths.  Unwavering had she served the rebellion.  How could she not?   A year ago, they had saved her life.  Their leader, Dana, fell into her world and in his appearance, in his azure eyes, had she found her much needed salvation.

Loving him had been inadvertent.  She had tried to stop it, the heavens knew she tried, but it had come to her as naturally as breathing and quickly became just as necessary.  A year ago, he had saved her from drowning.

Now he was what pulled her down.

Torture was his excuse.  Captured he had been by her husband in the sanctuary of her bed chamber and taken to the bowels of the palace, dragged away while she watched, stricken and silent.  She did not know what befell him there but knew pain to be her husband’s art and knew her lover would assuredly become his masterpiece.

Her fears were confirmed when Dana escaped and reappeared before her.  He had been beaten.  He had been bled.  She could plainly see his injuries but did not realize his heart and soul had sustained the very worst damage until he opened his mouth to rail against her.

Liar, he called her.  Whore.  Traitor.  Lies they forced him swallow, lies they made him believe, rolled off his tongue like some sort of sacred writ, striking her down and tearing her asunder, never to be whole again.

And yet, she could not blame him alone for her sorry state.  Methodically had they all used her: him, the goddess he served and her court of mystics.  Careful, precise cuts had they made in her soul, slow, shallow slices to strip away that which they could not use.  It was their way: the goddess, her unicorns and her pegasus, none of them innocent.  Use what they needed, take what they wanted and sacrifice what they must all in the name of their perceived righteousness, all in the name of their cryptic ancient prophecy.

Two from one, they’ll come, they’ll come.  The first from moon, the next from dark began their scripture.  She was the first, they claimed, the one who might save them.  The power was within her, they claimed.  The ability to staunch the rising dark was hers.  She was not the human she’d thought herself to be, but something more so.

She was a weapon.  All their meticulous work had been designed to hollow her out, to drain the humanity from her and leave her with nothing but that which would be needed to smite their enemy.  Hate, grief and death came together, twisting her and rendering her unrecognizable.  Even her dreams were hers no longer but were instead brutal glimpses into an ever blackening future.

Oh, how she had feared it, the future and her role in it.  The idea she was something else, something other than the daughter, mother, wife and lover she had long thought herself to be was paralyzing.  Did her heart not beat the same?  Did she not bleed or cry or laugh or love the same?  Not human, but something more so, they said she was, but how could such a thing ever be real?

Despite all the evidence, she didn’t believe it.  She wouldn’t believe it.  She would not, could not, give up her last scrap of humanity.  No, she would keep hold of that.  To that, she would cling.  Let them think her weak.  Let them think her selfish.  She did not care.

And mayhap the goddess knew that.   Haleine suspected Laorans did for, underneath a mask of benevolence, lay a deity as calculating and self serving as the ones considered her enemy.  No lie would give her pause.  No manipulation would stop her from getting what she wanted and so the goddess sent her warrior to gain for her a much wanted weapon.

Help me keep this fight going, he beseeched, his azure eyes looking at her in love.  Haleine, he implored before it all had gone so terribly wrong.  Do this for me.
And because he had asked and because she couldn’t say no, she became the weapon he needed and the goddess required.  Once again did she give herself over to an undesired fate and stood against the very evil that sought to eliminate what the goddess sought to protect.  She tore into Laorans’s enemy without any sense of what she did or how it was done.  She bent the laws of time and nature to snatch the goddess back from the grip of darkness and breathe new life into a rebellion on the verge of defeat.

She was left empty and numb, a broken collection of useless sticks wrapped in a human guise.  She was a shell propelled by a heart beating only from habit.  She had nothing left to give.  Not for anyone.  Not even for him and his damned eyes.

But still they came, the goddess and all those who followed her.  Dana, that faithless fool, was at their head, his conscience driving him, his guilt so thick, it choked her.  He knew she had done it for him.  He knew she had done it in spite of him.  Haleine could feel it in her bones.  But he didn’t know there was nothing left of the girl he thought he loved.  He didn’t care to know.

None of them did.  They came ever closer, thinking there was more within her, something worth saving lurking somewhere behind now dead eyes.  They came thinking they might shake the husk of her body to find something more to take.

They wouldn’t let her go.  They would never let her go.

So she wouldn’t be there when they came.

It was her only way out, she knew that now.  It was the only way she might be free.  She could lay the blame on whoever she liked but the truth remained she was the one at fault.  Aye, Laorans had used her and had molded Haleine as she’d liked but Haleine had allowed it to happen.  For the good of the world had it been done and Haleine could understand the transgression, and even forgive it, for what was the loss of one life, one she had always been willing to give, when compared to the salvation of all the rest?

Her lover’s betrayal, however, was a different matter, one for which there would be no absolution.  After all she had done for him, his goddess and their rebellion, he still dared to name her traitor.  Call her a liar, call her a whore, she did not care.  It was true enough; she was as he had made her, but to call her disloyal?  To condemn her for it?  No, that right belonged to none but her husband, the man she had made a cuckold, and most viciously had he claimed it.  Maddox would have beaten the life from her had the puppet masters working his strings not stayed his hand before the mercy of death could upon her be bestowed.  Why they were suddenly interested in keeping her alive, she did not know, but her death, they told her then, would not come at their hand.

Which only left her own.

So what her lover started, what her husband failed to finish, she would end now with the aid of a dagger long hidden in her chambers, left there by her lover for her protection.  Its purpose would be fulfilled that night though none but her would recognize that truth.  How fitting, she thought, that his would be the instrument to finish what his knife shaped mouth had begun.

The rebellion could find another way to survive.