She wore the night.
Her gown was silken black. The jewels at her throat, darkling stars. Long skirts billowed out from her waist, flowed down to her bare feet, a corset of midnight cinched tight across ghost-pale skin.
White powder on her cheeks.
Black paint on her lips.
Legions in her eyes.
She alighted on the stony shore of the Nethers, a city of bones laid before her. A blade of the same in her hands. The black velvet wings at her back were vast as open skies, tips brushing the piers, the cobbles, the buildings beside her as she stalked up from the crusted waterline. The city’s shadows sighed at her coming, caressed her face with loving hands, welcoming her home.
The merrymakers. The hucksters. The beggars and the priests and the whores. All of them felt her before they saw her. Their music falling silent, their laughter falling still. A chill brushed the backs of their necks. A stillness deeper than death. Bringing to the pious and the sinner alike, a whisper.
A warning.
A word.
Run.
The fear spread out from her feet like a black tide. The suns had never seemed so far away, the night above never so dark, and they felt it, those mortals—felt it in their chests and in their bones. She was a reckoning. A ruin. The vengeance of every orphaned daughter, every murdered mother, every bastard son. Her father awaiting her, ahead and above.
Many waiting to become one.
And so they ran. The cobbles emptying before her. Rats flooding up from the sewers, fleeing as if she were dark flame. Folk scattering for their lives, not just back to the comfort of hearth and home, but down to the waterline, across the aqueduct, like the vermin all about them. Panic, pure and black, rippling before her. The city about her trembling, this tomb of a fallen divinity too long profaned by the tread of mortal feet. The grave of a fallen god, set now to become the grave of an empire.
She stalked the emptying streets, the deserted thoroughfares, on toward the forum. Pausing beside an upturned cart, she opened one pale hand. The shadows lifted a fallen mask, leafed in gold, placing it over her eyes. It was shaped like a crescent. Like a moon not yet full. The dark was alive about her. Inside her.
Pale and beautiful, she walked on.
She wore the night, gentlefriends.
And all the night came with her.