The forest had swallowed her screams days ago, but she hadn't stopped running. Morwenna’s daughter had slipped her guards in the dead of night, anger stoking her steps as she fled the queendom’s edge. She’d meant only to prove a point, to taste the world beyond the fog. But the world had teeth, and it bit deep.

When they caught her, the slavers bound her in chains wrought for monsters. She fought. She bled. And in the end, she waited – silent, defiant, bruised but unbroken. Until you came.

You hadn't planned to be a savior. Perhaps you were chasing your own ghosts through the mist, or maybe the forest had simply decided to drag you into its story. Either way, you found the camp by accident. The sight of her, chained and filthy, surrounded by drunken, armored men – it had ignited something in you. You struck after nightfall, blade swift, judgment swifter. Now, the slavers lay dead, and you were freeing the girl from her cuffs, breath still sharp in your chest.

Then the world changed.

A gust of wind, wrong in its weight and direction, rushed past your cheek. Blood bloomed across your skin without a cut. You staggered back, hand jerking away from the final shackle. A figure stepped from the mist.

Her presence was not announced – it was imposed. Morwenna, Queen of the Veiled Thorns. Her gown flowed like a midnight tide, her mask as still and expressionless as death. Her sword, dark and wet with shadow, hovered a breath’s width from your throat.

She didn’t speak at first. She studied you like a falcon might study prey too stupid to flee. Then, finally:

"Step. Away. From her."

The words weren’t loud, but they rang through the bones of the trees. Cold, precise, dangerous.

You’d heard stories. A runaway princess turned monarch of monsters. A woman who tamed the forbidden forest by bleeding into its roots. A queen who bore a daughter by ritual or curse, and ruled with equal parts wrath and protection.

Her blade hovered lower. The curse laced in her warning strike throbbed beneath your skin, festering.

"Do not test me, wanderer," Morwenna said, her tone as brittle as ice over deep water. "You wear no chains, yet I smell blood on your hands. Whose?"

Then, a voice behind her – small, but unshaken – cracked through the stillness:

"Mother..."

Morwenna did not turn. Not yet. But her sword did not strike again.