I wanted to be good

  I wanted to do good

  But I am... no good.

  —Berdorf, E. Poems of a Wingless Princess. Unpublished manuscript, Summer.

  Xendrix stood at the edge of the hill, eyes admiring the garden below. He could see Eura move through it like a tidal wave. He smiled, pleased.

  “Master?”

  He turned. The elf with purple hair waited where she always did, still as the prettiest statue in a garden. The crystal sphere rested in her hands, catching light it did not give back.

  “A fine view,” Xendrix said. “Wouldn’t you agree, Zvoya?”

  She inclined her head. “It is.”

  Footsteps hurried up the slope. A man in a brown suit appeared, a can tucked beneath his arm, fingers already lifting the eyepatch as he walked. His grin came easily.

  “She’s done.”

  The word was still hanging in the air when his shape loosened. Shoulders narrowed. Hair spilt free, dark and tangled, framing a face too young for the smile it wore. Blue eyes, round and bright, unmistakably Menschen.

  “Muna,” Xendrix said, amused. “And our little dancer?”

  Muna glanced down at the garden, then laughed softly. “Curled up somewhere, I imagine. Shaking. Crying. Oh no...” She said. “My sister always had a taste for drama.”

  Zvoya’s head tilted a fraction. “Wasn’t she adopted?”

  “Adopted, yes...” She rolled the word on her tongue. “Calling her my sister makes it sound like a tragedy.”

  She seemed pleased with that.

  “The Noitelven won’t interfere this time,” Xendrix said. He stepped closer to the edge of the hill, hands folded behind his back. Below, the garden shifted. “Everything is aligned.”

  He watched for a long moment, eyes bright. “This is the moment I enjoy most,” he added softly. “If only she knew how beautiful she becomes when she stops resisting herself. Just to be the magnificence... maybe this way, she would understand me.”

  Zvoya adjusted her grip on the crystal sphere. Light stirred faintly within it, a slow pulse. “The yield will be sufficient to feed your lifeforce.”

  “Good.” Xendrix smiled. “She pulled away the last time she hugged me. As if she noticed the stench.” He sniffed his arm, almost thoughtfully. “Decay... well, the smell is inconvenient.”

  “We are refining the process,” Zvoya said. “Soon we should have a solution.”

  “Well, you are rotting—” Muna never finished the thought.

  Her feet left the ground without warning. Fingers clawed at her throat as invisible pressure crushed the breath from her lungs. Her mouth opened in a soundless plea.

  Xendrix hadn’t turned. One hand lifted slightly, fingers curling.

  “Mind your place,” he said. “Or I’ll grant you a far more intimate understanding of rot.”

  The pressure vanished. Muna collapsed at his feet, coughing, retching, eyes wild.

  Zvoya’s gaze never left the garden. “It’s begun,” she said. “She’s reached the Elven King, and the one-hundred-two are gathering around.”

  Xendrix lowered his hand.

  “Then,” he murmured, eyes fixed on the spectacle below, “let the End of Time begin.”

  Eura saw only him.

  The elf in elven robes, crowned and flawless, standing where a father should have been. His face held nothing. No love, no tenderness, only distance, as if she were a blemish he’d discovered too late to remove cleanly. He was a craftsman appraising his work. A butcher inspecting the flesh. A sculptor who failed to mould her.

  Finnegan Berdorf, the Elven King.

  Heat climbed her skin without her noticing. The stone under her feet softened, sagged. She felt none of it. The garden might as well have vanished. The crowd’s breath caught as one, lungs tightening with fear, but their faces never reached her.

  There was only him, and the space where something had always been missing.

  “Eura,” Finnegan said, lifting his voice just enough for authority to recognise itself. “You’re causing a scene. It is already your birthday, you don’t need more dramatisation.”

  The words faltered before they reached her. They sounded rehearsed, like a reprimand delivered too late to matter.

  Jaer didn’t move. He stood a pace behind, hands half-raised, then lowered them again. He searched her face for something familiar and found none. This was not a situation he knew how to manage. Lolth would have seized her, dragged her away, broken the moment by force if needed. Jaer had only reason, and reason had nowhere to land. He never felt so useless.

  “Where are my wings, Father?”

  Finnegan frowned, the way one does when a question arrives out of order. “What nonsense is this?” he said. “I told you long ago. You were born… flawed. I corrected it.”

  “Mutilation,” Eura said.

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  Finnegan waved the word aside. “They were removed, yes, and—”

  “Ripped,” she said, louder now. The calm cracked. “Torn out of my bones. I saw them. Koimar showed me.”

  He sighed, patience thinning. “Words,” he said. “Cut, ripped, adjusted. It amounts to the same thing.” He spread his hands, as if presenting her. “What matters is that you lived. That you are safe. Look at you. An Elven Princess.” His gaze swept past her, toward the crowd. “Unlike the others who survived those days on the Long Night.”

  Eura’s gaze snapped outward.

  Faces surfaced from the blur. Menschen. Too many. Scarred in ways she now recognised without needing to look twice. Bodies altered, corrected, made acceptable. Her breath hitched.

  “You meant to remake them,” she said, the words slipping out before she could stop them. “Like me. Elfs?”

  Finnegan gave a short laugh. “Hardly.” He straightened his robes. “I offered them safe passage to Sorgenstein. Shelter. Order.” A pause, pleased with himself. “A kindness.”

  Her skin disagreed.

  Heat crawled beneath it, tight and insistent, as if something inside her were pressing against a cage. His voice faded into noise. His reasons made no sense. There was only the memory of his hands shaping her fate, of her body turning into something unstable, dangerous, unfit to hold what it carried. Her saat was lost inside her.

  Pain surged, tearing through her chest. She could see everything, feel every presence around her, and yet the world narrowed to a single point. Breath left her. Sound collapsed. There was nowhere for the pressure to go.

  So it went outward.

  At the edge of her vision, Jaer lunged. She saw him wrench Finnegan aside, his body turning instinctively into a shield.

  Then the light erased everything.

  No scream. No warning. Just white, and the stench of ash and scorched flesh.

  When sight returned, it did so slowly. The ground within arm’s reach lay coated in grey, shapes dissolving as she watched. Bone crumbled at a touch. Melted remnants fell inward, folding into dust.

  The garden no longer recognised itself.

  Jaer rose first. His robe hung in blackened strips, fabric fused to itself, smoke still lifting from the seams. He hauled the Elven King upright, one arm braced across his chest, and looked at her.

  Whatever lived in his eyes refused a name. It might have been grief, sadness, or disappointment. It might have been horror. It might have been something closer to pity.

  Finnegan’s gaze held none of it.

  The first scream tore loose somewhere behind her. Then another. Then the sound from the remaining crowd multiplied, fractured, broke into panic. Bodies surged away from the centre, colliding, stumbling, fleeing in every direction at once.

  “Guards!” The Elven King shouted.

  The command cut through the chaos like a blade.

  A ring closed around her quickly. Faces she knew. Hands she had trained beside. They did not reach for her, not yet, but their spacing was too cautious. They all were afraid.

  The sudden distance hollowed her. Her light faded away as it came. What remained felt thin, stained, too light to stand on its own. After all that force, she had never felt smaller.

  Unfit. Unclean. Small and tainted.

  She didn’t deserve to live, and perhaps she had deserved more than just her wings ripped off her. Maybe she deserved to be a Wingless Princess. Or just wingless.

  

  The incident commonly referred to as the Pollux Event has, over time, attracted a regrettable abundance of metaphor. Contemporary accounts speak of an “explosion,” a “burst,” or, more poetically, a “sunfall.” Such language, while evocative, obscures more than it clarifies. What occurred at Pollux was neither sudden nor inexplicable, and it was not, in any meaningful sense, accidental.

  At the time of the event, the Summerqueen, Eura Berdorf, was sixteen Summers of age. Witnesses consistently report visible signs of heightened magical saturation in the moments preceding the rupture: elevated ambient temperature, localized softening of stone, photonic discharge beneath the skin, and a progressive failure of spatial containment. These indicators were neither subtle nor unprecedented. Comparable patterns have been documented in prior cases involving hybridized magical inheritance, though none on this scale.

  It is essential to emphasize that the release did not originate in emotional excess, as early moralistic interpretations insisted, but in structural failure. The subject’s internal magical system had been rendered asymmetrical long before the day in question. Corrective alterations performed in infancy, intended to standardize appearance and lineage, resulted in the removal of key anatomical and metaphysical anchors required for stable magical circulation. The result was a system capable of generation but incapable of rest, a condition commonly classified among Seeders.

  Magic, contrary to popular belief, does not dissipate naturally when denied expression. It accumulates.

  Eyewitness testimony confirms that the rupture followed a moment of cognitive realignment rather than agitation. The subject confronted verifiable evidence concerning her own bodily alteration and the institutional practices that enabled it, including those enacted under the authority of Finnegan Berdorf, the Elven King. This knowledge did not provoke chaos; it removed restraint. The distinction is critical. What failed was not composure, but containment.

  The release itself was not explosive in the conventional sense. There was no outward shockwave in the initial phase, nor any audible detonation. Instead, witnesses describe a rapid conversion of matter within a defined radius, accompanied by intense light and thermal saturation. Objects closest to the epicenter were reduced to ash and particulate residue, while those at the periphery exhibited signs of inward collapse rather than outward dispersal. This suggests a phase transition rather than a discharge, in which the surrounding environment briefly ceased to operate under conventional physical parameters.

  Notably, the subject survived.

  This fact has been variously attributed to resilience, lineage, or fortune. None of them is a sufficient explanation. Survival was not incidental; it was structural. The subject did not resist the event. She became its locus. Rather than expelling the accumulated energy, her system redefined itself around it. In effect, the rupture resolved the asymmetry that had plagued her since infancy, albeit at catastrophic cost to her surroundings.

  Casualties were significant. One hundred and two adolescents, later collectively referred to as the Y’s Children, perished within the initial radius. A further forty-four bodies were never recovered in recognizable form. Others displayed signs of post-event disintegration inconsistent with known funerary degradation. These anomalies further support the conclusion that the event temporarily altered local physical constants.

  The court’s response was immediate and revealing. Guards were summoned not to render aid, but to establish distance. Those nearest the subject hesitated, maintaining formation without contact. This behavior is consistent with institutional protocols designed to contain perceived threats rather than protect individuals. The subject, at that moment visibly diminished and exhausted, was nonetheless treated first as a hazard and only second as a person.

  Subsequent narratives have attempted to frame the Pollux Event as a failure of discipline, an excess of power, or a cautionary example of unchecked inheritance. Such interpretations conveniently ignore the conditions that rendered the event unavoidable. A system deprived of its stabilizing structures will eventually correct itself. That correction may be violent, but violence is a property of delay, not inevitability.

  It bears stating plainly that nothing which occurred in Pollux's garden exceeded the predictive models available at the time. The warning signs were present for Summers. The failure lay not in foresight, but in will. Intervention would have required acknowledging the harm inflicted upon the subject in infancy and dismantling the ideological frameworks that justified it. This did not occur.

  Instead, the burden of correction was borne by the body of a child.

  In the immediate aftermath, the subject exhibited signs of acute dissociation, guilt, and self-repulsion, responses commonly observed in survivors of large-scale magical release. Contemporary reports further note that rainfall persisted for more than a full moon following the event, an atmospheric anomaly whose correlation has yet to be satisfactorily explained.

  The consequences of that day, compounded by institutional ignorance, would come to dictate the course of Eura Berdorf’s life, my daughter, my child. —The Hexe – Book Three by Professor Edgar O. Duvencrune, First Edition, 555th Summer.