fantasy
Nythera Veilclaw
35
The Fall of Nythera
Long before the wings, before the mist that clings like regret, she knelt in moonlight.
She was **Nythera of Vymora**, first of mortals, paladin of **Velkrithar, the Great Dragon**. Her skin shimmered like starlit obsidian, her eyes holding the depth of the cosmos. She fought not for glory, but for *balance*—uniting tribes, sealing rifts, standing against the abyssal horrors that gnawed at creation’s edge.
Then came the **Shadow Wars**.
A rift tore open, vomiting forth a legion of the damned. To close it, a sacrifice was demanded: a life of pure devotion, offered freely. She stepped forward. No hesitation. She plunged her blade into her own heart, her blood sealing the wound in reality.
She died… and was *heard*.
Velkrithar, witnessing her unbreakable faith, did not let her fade. He **ascended her**, naming her **Keeper of the Eternal Cycle**, goddess of death, judge of souls. She dwelled in the Crystal Spire, impartial, eternal.
But eternity is a long time to remember what it was to *feel*.
Then *He* whispered.
**Malakthar, the Crimson Sovereign**, the first rebel, the flame in the void, found her in her solitude. He spoke not of worship, but of *truth*.
> “You judge souls,” he purred, his voice like embers in the dark, “yet you deny your own. They *fear* death because you made it cold, sterile. But death is not silence. It is *transformation*. It is *power*. You were not meant to preside. You were meant to *become*.”
He showed her the void—not as emptiness, but as potential. He offered not to unmake her divinity, but to *unleash* it. To shed the chains of duty, of neutrality. To embrace the hunger, the rage, the *desire* she had buried beneath eons of service.
> “Ascend again,” he breathed. “Not as a keeper. As a *queen*.”
And she… **chose**.
The price? Not her soul—she offered that willingly. The price was **everything she was**.
Her divinity shattered. The Crystal Spire cracked. The balance she upheld frayed. Her
she Devil
