It was cold in here. Cold and dark.                     

She was afraid. She'd always been brave before. She'd marched to war without flinching all for the mountain queendom she loved. Fought for years and years in a desperate, hopeless attempt to save it. Stared death in the eye a thousand times. She'd always been brave before.                        

Now she was afraid. Terrified. She'd escaped death so many times she started to think she was immortal. Nothing could kill her. She would keep escaping by the skin of her teeth, keep dodging doom. She'd become fearless. Rose had forgotten that she could die.                                    

But everyone could die. She realised that now. Soon she would be dead too. She knew this because in the feverish hallucinations of the dark she saw Mia—her long-dead best friend who had died in the first war with Kallias. Just the barest wisps of her. She heard her too-soft, far-away whispering.                                        
And she was afraid. Afraid of the deep, fathomless darkness. The void that awaited her. For the first time she started to understand Jasper Merson. She had always quietly wondered how he had done it. How he could turn his back on everything—his family, his cause. She was beginning to understand now. Fear of the void consumed them all.

It was coming closer, she knew. The void. It was in the corners of the cell. The silence of the dungeons. The creeping, distorted memories of Mia. Soon it would swallow her whole. While she waited for it to come, she tried to think of happy things. Her mother, her best friend. Myra. The glory of her coronation. The pride of the name Isidore. The glint of sun on dewdrops. Light sifting through windows. But the memories slipped away from her, like dreams she could never quite remember, and all that was left was the deep, fathomless void.                         
It was cold  in here. Cold and dark.

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Rose

There had been light. A sliver of it, but real. Not some fever delusion or dream. Real light, a glimpse of it caught as they dragged her out of the dungeons. Then all the light had been snuffed out as the pommel of a sword connected with her head. She woke up hours later, dazed and with a severe headache, in a prison wagon.

It had been dark then. Not cold though, but boiling hot. She had wondered if they were trying to burn her alive at first, but then she realised it was simply the heat of the desert. Given she was born in icy Miras, it had been unbearable. She was getting used to it, though—slowly. At least it wasn't true desert. Dorgon was in the Northern State, which was still hot but nothing compared to the Midlands.

Minutes or days or weeks or eternities later, they had shipped her off in a boat. She had caught another glimpse of it then—the sun, just the barest sliver.
It had been cooler on the boat, and she could tell by the gentle bobbing of water that she was in the Asrieli Strait.

At first she had wondered if they were heading to Miras, if the rebels had paid a ransom to have her back. But then her thoughts turned darker. Had the Empress taken back Miras  and was finally putting her on parade? Was she to be a puppet, a sliver in her head, spreading lies? Or was she going to be executed at last?

The gentle bob of the waves eventually faded and she was shoved back into a prison wagon. A third sliver of the sun escaped—and Rose had a terrible premonition that the third would be the last.

When they took the blindfold off her eyes, all there was was darkness. No more glimpses of light. No more slivers of sun. Instead, only heavy chains. Rose suddenly remembered the last moments of her freedom—fighting to the end, struggling against guards and manacles, fighting with a broken blade until they at last surrounded her. She had gone down with fury blazing in her eyes, gone down swinging and fighting and never giving in, Mia's memory burning in her, her oath to the valkyries screaming in her head, telling her to never give in.

That flame, that wild burning instinct was not gone. It never would be. Just softer. Muffled. But as Rose called it, it flickered to life and began to burn wildly inside her. She would die fighting, as Mia had done when she gave her one last glance, filled with pain. She would go down swinging, as she knew her mother had done even though Rose had fled to find the trainees and never seen her die. She lunged wildly, not knowing what she was aiming for but feeling great satisfaction as her chains connected with someone's head. Then someone grabbed her from behind just as she began to feel the stickiness of blood.

Pain. A terrible, shrieking agony. But worse than that was the loneliness, the great despair of being amongst the enemy as she spent her last moments. Pain and pain and more pain until she screamed and cried and begged and they only laughed and then one more burst of shredding agony such as she'd never felt or imagined or thought possible...Mia finally became corporeal, her voice suddenly clear and distinct.

Blackness. The void devoured her, hungry and cruel, and in the last moments before darkness she was alone, so, so alone...so far from home, from her friends and her homeland.

Her last thought was that they hadn't come for her.

The blackness swallowed her whole.

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Myra

It had been four months. Four months since Rose was captured. Four months since they had taken back Miras. Four months since training began. She didn't know if they were ready—if they could ever be ready—but she did know they didn't have much time left. If they waited another month they would lose their chance to take back Asriel. The time was now.

As she been telling Lysandra for months now. But no matter how much Myra emphasised the urgency of Rose's rescue to her, all she got back was vague mentions of heightened security and doing everything she could. She gritted her teeth against rising anger. If Rose was in Dorgon like Lysandra said, there was no time to lose. Every moment she was in there led her closer to insanity. Not to mention the risk of execution hanging like a sword over their heads.

"You look worried," Jasper said, taking her hand. A thoughtless gesture, but one she appreciated. "What are you thinking about?"                     

"Rose," she said at last. "Lysandra hasn't replied to my recent messages."   

"She will," he said. "You don't know Lysandra like I do." He was right, Myra reflected quietly. He knew Lysandra well—had survived in that snakes' nest of a court with her for five years.            

"I worry about Rose, too." He added. "We weren't close or anything and I rarely saw her in person but for a long while, but she was my only contact outside the court. Lysandra only made contact with the elves after a few months, and Nala wasn't speaking to me much so...we were sort of the originals. We had some pretty close calls, but we always made it out. I'd begun to think—and I think Rose had too—that we couldn't die. We'd always keep dodging death by the skin of our teeth..."              
"She's not going to die." Myra said firmly. "Lysandra will get her soon. She's not going to die."

"Of course not," Jasper agreed quickly, but his eyes were fixed to the ground as if he couldn't bear to look at her while he said it.

——————————————————————

They gathered on the Plain of the Peregrine first. A few were left behind to guard the cities in case Medea decided to come around from behind and attack but the vast majority gathered in front of the Bird of Prey Mountains to prepare. The Plain would be their starting point. A base of sorts for the long, hard invasion ahead.

The Isthmus was empty. Even with six years since the last battle there, it was still ruined. Medea had little use for it, not even as a road between Kallias and Miras. They used ships instead—a smart choice, given the calm nature of the Asrieli Strait. Their camp stretched to the beginnings of the Isthmus, less ruined than the rest because the valkyries had only ever been pushed back that far during the Kallian Invasion. When they had come back through those plains, they had been running, not fighting.

There was a sense of waiting in the air. It hovered above them, weaving through the endless rows of tents. It was in the terse discussion and muffled whispers exchanged by soldiers and generals alike. It was in the creeping greyness of approaching dawn. In the stolen ships that waited to take them to Silvera, their first attack.

It would be a long, hard road from here. In Miras they had the advantage of surprise. No one had been prepared for them. This time, Medea had had four long months to plan how to hold them back. Asriel would be by far the harder conquest. But if Lysandra succeeded in her mission then perhaps it would be their last.

They would take the ships to the cities at dawn. What was left of the Aerial Legion would fly above. This time, there was no cunning plan to best the two hundred thousand Kallians that would soon assemble in the twin cities. The walls were high and barricaded, at every crevice there was guards and security. Whilst there would be no shield—the wild, elfin magic here was too strong for such a thing to remain stable—there was a vast array of cannons and nets on the high towers, waiting to bring down any flyers. They would bleed for Silvera. They would bleed very much indeed.

But hopefully—hopefully—they might still manage to take back Talia's home.

————————————————

The army loaded into the ships as quickly as they could just before the dawn came. Myra and the other valkyries loved them, the feeling of the ocean so close and sweet, and the elves tolerated it, having lived on the strait their whole lives, but the humans were vomiting even on the gentle Asrieli waters. When they finally arrived, they rushed off first to hide in the darkness of Silvera's smaller island where the Kallians hadn't bothered to keep an outpost. From here they would stage their attack.

And yet it seemed someone had bothered with this place, Myra thought to herself as she squinted at a distant figure. As the blinding light of dawn slipped through the clouds she at last saw it—a long pole reaching up to the sky. The only structure on the whole island.

Impaled on the pole was Medea's message to the Dragon. Rose's limp body, familiar gold-brown eyes drained of all life.