The lights of Esthar are bright, and the night air is sticky and thick with humidity ahead of a rare desert thunderstorm. She stands on a street corner, under the orange glow of a gas lamp and watches the moths bash themselves against the glass cover, over, and over, and over again. One by one, they fall, broken, crumpled, victims of their own mindless drive to throw themselves at the brightest thing in the darkness.
Adel is eighteen, a beauty they say. With her long red hair and statuesque frame, she stands out among these Estharians, a full head and shoulders taller than the tallest native man. They are drawn to her and she wonders how many will destroy themselves to be near her, to bathe themselves in the light of her power.
It's not their fault. Men can't help but be drawn toward the things they admire yet fear. They throw themselves at her feet, upon her mercy, and she has too many suitors to count, all brave men, soldiers, warriors, all vying for the title of Knight. Not one of them knows what it means, not truly, but every one of them believes it's a euphemism for lover and they would all have her bare her flesh to them and surrender to their base and crude passions.
They couldn't be more wrong.
Esthar promises Adel will be a different kind of Sorceress. Cities will not burn or fall at her feet, and children in their beds will not dream of terror or death. Soldiers will not know the horrors of war in her name, and spouses will never know the pain of mourning loved ones lost in battle.
She will be worshiped, but not feared, and they will love her as they've loved no other like her before. This whole world will call her queen, her benevolent rule an example for the ages.
Adel, at eighteen is more practical than those men who make promises they can't deliver. They dream of peaceful coexistence, of a utopian world where men are more civilized than their predecessors.
It's a lovely daydream, but it won't last. Already, the darkness is creeping up on her, and it calls to her at night, in dreams and in visions of bloody battles, and they fall at her feet and beg for salvation and their pleas fall on deaf ears. The power does not know or understand mercy or sympathy or kindness. It only knows how to conquer and destroy.
They will use her for their own purposes, and when she resists they will fight back, burn her like they've burned so many before, and the cycle will repeat, with some other girl, in some other place, in a time not long from now.
Adel is eighteen and innocent, but it won't be that way for long. And already, she is too numb to care.
A single moth flutters to the sidewalk like a leaf on the breeze and it lands at her feet, battered and tired and wounded from attempted self-immolation. Adel watches as the pathetic creature flaps its broken wings, but it has rendered itself flightless, its short life now without purpose and she bends down and invites it to climb onto her outstretched hand.
The merciful thing to do is end its suffering. Crush it in her palm or underfoot, extinguish its life in the space of a heartbeat. She is the last thing it will know, the only thing it will remember in those last few seconds of its existence.
Instead, she lets the magic flow into her palm and watches in fascination as it repairs the crumpled wings and broken antennae until there is no sign it was ever less than perfect.
She releases it back to the sky, where it flits around the lamp, driven by a force it doesn't understand. It will destroy itself again, just like mankind is doomed to do, over and over, and Adel will be there to mend it again so all it knows is dissatisfaction and suffering. It will remember her and come back, time and time again in hopes of a different outcome, a pathway to the light it so desperately seeks and will never quite reach.
Esthar is under her command and she has ruined half the world.
She is twenty-seven and no longer a girl. Her innocence faded the second the first shot was fired in her name. A hundred thousand dead, and more will fall before this is done, yet they keep coming, falling all over themselves, drawn in by the lure of power. The more she takes, the more they want to give.
Her hair is still a bright flame among a sea of pale gold and inky black, but her body is so altered, she doesn't recognize herself sometimes. They said she needed a Knight, to defend her and give her peace of mind, but they were wrong. In the absence of a champion, her body has grown strong and powerful and there is not a force in all the world that can take her down.
The rebels are many, but they are disorganized and weak. They try and fail time and time again, and Adel taunts them from her throne. She is the light, and the stupid among them are like the pathetic winged creatures driven by instinct to hurl themselves against that which will eventually kill them.
But her time grows short, and she has chosen a successor, a sweet and precious little child to follow in her footsteps, a little girl with power of her own. She is innocent now, but the second the magic touches her soul, she will be forever changed, altered, poisoned by it, just as Adel was so long ago.
They will flock to this poor child, like moths to a flame, and some idiot will swear she is different from the rest and the world will ignore history to kowtow to sweet little Ellone, their savior, their queen, the exception, not the rule.
And as the rebels plot her demise in darkened, underground rooms, and her end becomes an inevitability, she makes the little girl a promise:
No matter what happens, the world will never forget Adel's name.