Finished! Sorry it took so long! Now you know why I can't write novels: I've got such a short attention span! Anyhow, sorry it's been a bit- very- short, but the story just had to end and. . . ya.

I'll probably be starting another sometime soon, something completely different so I won't . . . fade out. . . before the last two chapters like I did now.

Icekube: erm. . . ya. . . hehe guilty smile. Was it really a bit abrupt? I'll have to change it. . . sometime. . . heh

Wizard116: The ending to your story? I thought she'd like get really pissed off and choose her own herald whatever fate said. But yours is so much better: ).

Jezebel: I sorry I can't help it, I had to make this one a dark fic. : (. But I'm glad this story gave a bit more emotion than 'oh, that's nice' or 'that's kinda sad'.

So anyway, read, review (I'm always begging for reviews), and enjoy!

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That had been weeks, months, maybe even years ago. She did not know, she did not care. A moment was a flash, and yet an eternity. She could not say she lived in a daze, a haze of despair, because she didn't. It was difficult to say how she lived. It was difficult to speak of her at all.

How can life be cruel when one cannot feel any despair? Maie did not feel grief, or hatred, or even the want for escape. She had no sorrow in her life, no fear. So could it be called cruelty? Was Daëmor truly evil?

Maybe not. For there was no sorrow felt the first time she encountered the horrors of a newly burned village. And there was no revulsion when she first set eyes upon the charred, tortured forms of her fellow countrymen. Countrywomen. Country-children. And there was no fear the first time she'd hunted down the murderers, hunted them down and slit their throats. No. She was not haunted by who she was, nor by what she saw.

Yet maybe. For there was no brightly dancing sunlight flickering through the heavy denseness of the trees. And if there was no sorrow, neither was there joy. There was very little to see of cruelty. But, then again, there was little, very little, left to see of Maie.

There was no dawn after that one, fateful day. She could not feel the whisper of wind on her skin. The plaintive whistles from the feathered friends were lost to her. She had ventured out, she had seen the brilliance of sunlight, but beauty had been lost to her long ago. Was there any her at all?

What was her name? Who were her parents? Was she not the fire and starlight that fought through dark despair? Was she not the indomitable flame that laughed at fear and death? Yet fire was as far from her eyes as ice, and starlight as forgotten as darkness.

Oh, she was not evil. But that was because she was not much at all. Her eyes may not be ice, no, but they were glazed and unseeing, useless. Her mind was not evil, but neither was it anything else. It had no use. It was no use to Daëmor, and so it had no use.

She felt nothing. There was no brightly flaring hope, no darkly laughing despair. There were no tears, and yet neither was there laughter. She was the dark herald. She was darkness and shadows, a silent death no plague could match. She was Valdemar's ultimate tool. She was only ever a tool.

And so days fled into weeks. Time abandoned her to her fate. Her cursed fate. She was no longer Maie. She was Lady Death, and the Dark One, and Black Hawk. She was the dark herald. This is her story.