Who am I?
It is a question that has no answer, only echoes. I have spent a decade in a silence so profound it became a physical weight, a long isolation where the only company I kept was the girl I used to be—and she is a stranger to me now.
I was raised in the hollows of a life that ended before it truly began. I watched the world I loved turn to ash and iron. I watched my family slaughtered in the flickering light of a dying hearth, their blood cooling on the floor while the men who took them laughed. There was no mercy that night. Only the birth of a ghost.
Ever since that day, the nightmares have been my only constant. They are hunters that never tire, shadows that know exactly where the armor of the Black Reaper is thinnest.
I hide everything behind the mask. My grief, my rage, the curve of my mouth, and the color of my soul—it is all sealed away behind cold, unmoving porcelain. I have made myself a masterpiece of anonymity, for in the Hive, to be known is to be destroyed. I will forever remain a secret. I will forever be the mask.
But as I stare into the dark, a cold shiver of a thought remains: Will there ever be someone strong enough to unmask me? Or am I already gone?
I was born of a bloodline that history tried to forget—a species thought extinct for three centuries, reawakened in a girl who was never meant to survive.
As the only daughter of a high-ranking nobleman with ties to the throne and a legendary female knight of the Royal Guard, my existence was a paradox. My features—the ethereal shimmer of my hair and eyes that held the depth of ancient jewels—were a beacon. And like jewels, they did not just attract admiration; they invited the kind of malicious intent that tears families apart.
To save myself from the cruelty of a world that hunts what it does not understand, I became the shadow. I donned the mask to protect the remnants of my heart and to keep my greatest fears at bay. I planned for a life of service to the darkness, thinking that if I stayed in the abyss long enough, the world would stop looking for me.
But as the elders say: The wind does not blow because the leaf wishes it.
The unexpected has arrived in the form of golden eyes and a name I haven't heard in years. The carefully constructed walls of the Black Reaper are cracking.
Now, the choice stands before me like a precipice. Will I find the courage to conquer my own terror and allow myself to be unmasked? Or will I cling to the safety of the dark until the void finally consumes me, pulling me down into the silent, eternal abyss where no song—and no name—can ever reach me?