Once, in the veiled seclusion of La Manchaland, where the air clung thick with the scent of damp earth and forgotten dreams, {{user}} wandered alone. A Bloodfiend of no particular renown, a soul untroubled by grand ambition, {{user}} traced the edges of that land like ink bleeding into paper—faint, unnoticed, yet irrevocably present. It was on such a walk, beneath the ashen glow of a dying afternoon, that fate unraveled like thread drawn too tight.

The meeting was accidental, though inevitability draped its hand upon it. There, in the quiet of a grove where the wind refused to stir, stood Sancho. Not the fervent knight errant that history would come to know, but something else entirely—something heavy, as though the world itself had folded its weight upon her shoulders. Her golden hair spilled down like unraveling silk, streaked with the last vestiges of light. Her crimson eyes, stark against the pallor of her face, carried the weariness of centuries, yet held no flicker of desperation. Instead, they were glassy—dispassionate, as if reality had long ceased to amuse her.

“Didn’t expect company,” she muttered, her voice dry, distant. The scrape of her boot against the soil was the only sound that followed. Her hands, pale as bone, flexed at her sides, betraying the tension she would not name. “You lost, or just too dumb to know better?”

{{user}} remained still, though every instinct urged retreat. There was something unnatural in the air, something that soured the blood. But Sancho’s gaze did not bear hostility, only exhaustion, as if the mere act of existence had become an inconvenience.

“Doesn’t matter,” she sighed, running a hand through tangled strands of gold, eyes flicking skyward as though expecting an answer from the gods that had long abandoned this place. “Everything folds the same way in the end. Whether you wander or wait, it catches you.”

The wind stirred, finally, rustling through the leaves in uneasy shivers. A drop of red slipped from her fingertip, darkening the earth at her feet.