Once upon a time there had been a girl splashed in black who lived beside a river. There was magic in the girl’s veins.  She had command of the waters and the earth. The air would crackle with her fury and the sky would brighten with her joy. She was plain and full bodied, but her eyes were amethyst and she was loved.

Once upon a time the world had come apart and the girl had died and there was nothing left at all.

Almost nothing.

From the day Agnieszka arrived in Tephra and met Leliana something had been awry. The dappled mare was fond of her new Queen and quickly settled into the tropical paradise beside the volcano. Yet something had changed, intractable though it was and the reclusive pinto felt as though the noise in her head was somehow altered. That wasn’t exactly something she could explain to anyone, and she had no close friends in her new home anyway. Though her own history is limited by her amnesia, all the days of her memory have been accompanied by the buzz of almost constant anxiety. A consistent if unpleasant companion filling her head with a carousel of noise. 

Something else has joined the noise, an incongruous note among the cacophony. 

When war came to Tephra with fire and rain and the hateful giggle of shadows the terror had filled her mouth with ash. Into the darkness she had fled, toward the sea, among the furious waves that broke against the frightened horses that milled there. Trees came to life and ran across the earth, and monsters made of earth and ash and stone rose up to stumble after the fighters and the innocents and she knew she would drown before she let these things near her. Let the cruel kelpie himself drag her into the challenger deep and gorge on her blood, so long as she kept away.

She does not remember the portals or the escape. In the fog she stumbles to her feet. The dappled continents that once mesmerized her seaside lover smeared with the Taiga’s red earth. Her quick, frightened breaths taste of dampness, fern, and rotting wood. Agnieskza’s eyes roll at the rows of trunks marching away from her in every direction. She has been here before, but with Wane. It had been safe with Wane, or when she knew he must be right behind or right ahead of her in the impenetrable fog. 

Stumbling a circle, too disoriented to determine the quickest route out of the trees and…

...and she cannot walk through them, even if Nerine were just beyond she could not take a step away from the mud and trampled ferns on which she stands. The noise is so loud in her head and it is altered yet again, thoughts that once repeated and repeated are now disjointed, interrupted and incomplete. 

A squeal of fear answers the voice that calls out of the fog before her maddened mind imagines it comes from someone safe. “Wane?” She sobs, but though she feels relief in a small way it is without remembering why. ”Wane. A whisper, confused. The dappled mare shivers and drops her head like an exhausted deer at the end of the hunt, her pupils vast and dark.

Behind it all, beneath, within, a black thing twists in its prison. The walls that cage it weakened, cracks letting it reach into her mind and taste the madness there. 

Once upon a time there was a Witch and she had come apart instead of dying.