Disclaimer/Author's Note: I own little more than Aeron. There will be spoilers for The Dream Thieves. Thank you ever so for reading!
Llangedwyn, Wales | 1340
It begins, as most great tragedies do, with the betrayal of a lover.
Darling, human Aberthol, the one she was betrothed to and had finally convinced herself to love, still too human to resist temptation and leave the human wench alone.
He comes home with a bit of ripped ribbon in his pocket, and his sweet, sweet Aeron, with her fiery eyes and quick, silent feet, retrieves the ribbon from his pocket in his sleep and gags him with it; he just thinks that he's having a nightmare, the way her eyes flash in the darkness.
The next morning, he wakes with violent tremors, sweat from a fever on his brow, his stomach emptying itself again and again until it's just acid spewing from his mouth.
Aeron watches his body waste away, turn yellow and pale and sunken. She sees the minute he gives up, watches as he seems to deflate from within. He coughs and blood splatters on the bedclothes, and she cringes. She'd hoped she could keep that, but she can make do without it.
She doesn't know for certain when his breathing stops. She's already gone.
The history books will come to say that the plague was spread by vermin, by ticks and fleas and God's great wrath.
The history books, as they are with most things, are wrong.
The being once known as Aeron travels the world, leaving death in her wake. Red crosses are painted on the homes of the infected, and it creates a path, red like hellfire, that tracks her progress through Europe.
She goes blind in one eye and she does not notice that her leg has broken until she catches sight of the white of her bone (the purest thing about her) sticking through the skin of her leg; the masses - stupid, stupid, stupid people, they are sheep, every one of them, and she could slaughter them, she could paint this country with their blood, she could, she could, she could - cry witch.
This, at least, brings a smile to her face – the townsfolk tried to contain the virus, tried to lock people in their own sickness and filth, but their every attempt was unsuccessful. There are carts full of corpses and mass graveyards being built across the ocean.
Those that still risk venturing outside keep their heads down, specters of death themselves with their hooked masks, stuffed with herbs to wield off the infection. Not a single one of them looks up as the broken body passes by.
Aeron has little interest in dying.
Wales is lush and green, built and surviving on her peoples' shoulders. She slits her throat at the base of an oak - her last, sputtering breathes are spent praying, blood spilling over the words, blood sliding through the ridges of the bark.
With the last of her breaths, she pulls Glyn Dŵr from history.
With her first, she inhales a cloud of dust; it rattles through her, shaking her lungs awake, her heart slowly picking up its rhythm.
When she was young, Aeron was revered as a beauty. Pale skin, dark hair, bright green eyes.
But as she notes her reflection in the surface of an eerily calm pond, she's filled with a disgust strong enough to turn her stomach. Her hair is dull, stringy, her skin yellowed, her eyes dull and glassy; she's been in this body for too long, she's put it through too much: human bodies aren't meant to withstand the power that pulses through her veins. If she'd been more careful, if she'd – if she'd – if she'd -
Her legs contort beneath her, her ankles bending, the bone crumbling.
Finally, finally.
It is her time of exodus, and her blood is pumping thick through her veins, trickling down her foot, making the slate-rock ground slippery under her rotting body.
Finally.