"Albert Vel and Sana Vel are exiled from court and will have to go somewhere else."
The words fell like stone into a silent lake, and their ripples were made of ruin.
Imeena flinched as they echoed across the chamber, as if they'd been hurled at her small chest rather than simply spoken. No one gasped. No one wept.
The sentence was received by the gathered court with the same stillness one might offer to a passing cloud. But to the ten-year-old girl clutching her mother's cloak, the world had just collapsed.
The woman who had spoken those words still stood before them, tall and viciously composed. Malvoria the Demon Queen.
Red hair spilled like blood down her back, unnaturally glossy and perfectly arranged in waves that caught the high court's ceremonial firelight.
Her grey eyes were bottomless and ancient, carved from polished ash and set into a face sculpted for rule, not kindness.
And those horns, crimson, arching from her forehead in smooth, graceful cruelty were a crown in all but name. Everything about her reeked of dominance. Of power untouched by guilt. She was what nightmares knelt to.
Imeena hated her instantly.
"You are sentencing them for protecting their people," her father said, his voice calm but defiant.
Albert Vel's cloak bore the muted gold threads of a low Celestian noble, frayed from wear but worn with dignity. He did not kneel. He never had. "You can't rewrite what happened simply because it displeases you."
Malvoria tilted her head. Her lips curved, but it was not a smile. It was a blade.
"I can," she said. "I already have."
She descended from her throne with the deliberate grace of someone who had never needed to run.
Her guards faceless in dark armor, bearing spears tipped with obsidian stepped aside as she passed. The sound of her boots against the marbled floor echoed far louder than they should have.
"Be grateful I gave you exile," she murmured as she passed Albert. "The alternative was far more... final."
Imeena didn't understand what "treason" truly meant, but she understood the tension in her father's shoulders and the grief in her mother's silence.
Sana Vel stood tall despite the tremor in her hands, her pale fingers pressed to Imeena's back protectively.
"Don't speak," she whispered in Celestian, her voice a fragile thread of calm.
The court never looked directly at them. The nobles, the advisors, the priests. They stared at columns or the ceiling or the scrolls in their hands. As if looking might make them complicit. Or cursed.
Imeena's throat closed as they were escorted out of the hall, not through the grand gates but through the servant's corridor. The heavy doors slammed behind them like a final breath.
Outside, the air was cold and wet. Rain hadn't started, but it would soon.
A creaky carriage with rotting leather seats and broken lanterns waited near the stables. The horses were old. Their eyes mirrored Imeena's: tired, confused, and afraid.
She stared out the carriage window as the High Court vanished behind trees and shadows.
"Where are we going?" she asked after a long silence.
Her mother didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice was too calm.
"Someplace no one will remember us."
That place was called Drelt. A village tucked between forgotten hills and older forests. The roofs were mossy and sagged under the weight of silence.
Imeena watched the world change from marble and runes to mud and rusted iron. From measured steps to shuffling resignation. Her parents tried to pretend it was a new beginning. She saw through them.
Sana grew herbs. Albert hunted and wrote letters he never sent.
They didn't speak of Malvoria.
Imeena didn't forget her face.
---
She turned eleven when the chains first came.
A nightmare had gripped her—Malvoria's voice ringing in her ears—and she'd screamed in her sleep.
Golden lines had burst from her hands, alive and writhing, wrapping around the bedposts and splintering the wood like brittle bone. She woke gasping, glowing glyphs humming in the air.
Her father rushed in, then stopped cold in the doorway.
"Papa?" she whispered.
His eyes were wide. Not with wonder. With fear.
He entered slowly, kneeling beside the glowing links.
"This magic... it's not natural," he said softly. "Imeena. You must never use it in public. Do you understand?"
She nodded.
"Because it's dangerous?"
"No," he said. "Because they'll kill you if they see it."
She practiced in secret. Her chains answered her thoughts. They danced through the forest shadows, flickering in and out of sight. She learned to control them, to silence them, to call them with a whisper.
She started naming them. One for each glyph etched along their length. They hummed when she did.
Then came the fire.
She was twelve.
She returned from the forest late—too late and saw smoke curling into the sky from where their cottage had stood. She ran. Ran so hard her legs went numb.
What she found was not a home.
The walls were blackened bones. The roof had collapsed inward. There was no fire now—only the aftermath. And in the center of the wreckage, half-buried in ash, lay two fused silver rings.
Her mother's.
Her father's.
She screamed until her throat bled. No one came.
She buried the rings under a twisted tree near the edge of the woods and carved their names into the bark. Her hands were trembling. Her eyes burned.
"Vel is dead," she whispered to the dirt. "And so is mercy."
At thirteen, she stole a dagger from a drunk mercenary and fled Drelt. She learned to fight. She learned to win.
At fifteen, she used her chains in a real fight. The slaver never saw them coming. Neither did his men. The tavern called her a demon. She left before the crowd could make up its mind.
At sixteen, she stopped caring what people called her.
At seventeen, she joined a mercenary company under the name Cromwell. Imeena Cromwell. The name was harder. Colder. Vel sounded like velvet.
Cromwell sounded like war.
She killed her first commanding officer at seventeen when he told her to smile more.
At eighteen, she almost died during a siege. Her chains went feral. They tore through enemy mages like paper. She passed out in the mud with eight corpses around her.
At nineteen, her name was known in whispers. Not the real one. The new one.
The Chain Witch.
At twenty-one, she crossed the Celestian border for the first time since exile.
No one recognized her.
She turned in a rogue mage—bound in golden glyphs, gagged with his own spellwork. She walked into the military outpost like she belonged there.
They let her.
She was efficient. Loyal. Deadly.
Just what they needed.
They didn't ask about her past. And she didn't offer it.
By twenty-three, she was a ghost wrapped in gold and vengeance. The scars on her arms told her story better than any name ever could.
And now, sleeping in a command tent deep in the Celestian wilderness, she dreamed again.
Smoke. Screams. Red hair.
Chains lashing through fire and ash.
Her father's voice, distant and cracking: Imeena, run.
She sat up with a start. Her blade was already in her hand. Her heart hammered like a war drum, and sweat clung to her spine like cold oil.
The tent was silent. Moonlight filtered through the flap.
She wiped her face, exhaled.
Her voice broke the quiet with a grim sigh.
"Fuck," she muttered. "I need to finish this mission."