Warriors
Hotaru had never really been innocent. From the moment that she took her first breathe as she held in the arms of her mother she could feel the souls that passed through the midnight gate. Hotaru was raised as a warrior, one in a long line of warrior queens. She could recite the many different uses of herbs, from how it could be used in the most powerful healing potions, to the most deadliest of poisons. Her hands which she used to soothe the sick and wounded and crush the chains of the oppressed could just as summon the wrath of hell upon all who dared to cross her path
But she never really realised what it meant to hold life in one hand and death in the other. She truly lost the mindest of a child the day she realised the true repercussions of using her powers.
All because she wanted to save just one person.
She never wanted to go through that again.
And so she refused to let those that managed to force their way through the shields around her heart to run on to the battlefield half-blind.
Hotaru grew into a warrior queen without a crown, a monarch without a kingdom. Her kingdom was the departed whose cries echoed eternally in her ears for vengeance and forgiveness and peace.
In the eternal game of chess she was a pawn that through blood and sweat and tears became a queen. Let it never be said that Hotaru did not know the sting of loss, the pain of death and she held her head high like her mother before her in the face of cruel rumours and spite.
She refused to welcome anymore friends into her kingdom before their true time. So she forced herself to learn the ancient arts and taught them to those that had the will and determination to join her. To weave protective enchantments with the same precision as Athena weaved cloth, to cast blood boiling curses and bone breaking hexes at those that dared to attack the unprotected backs of their comrades.
Those that stayed by her side did so with utmost loyalty.
They laughed and joked with her and kept her spirits high even when all she wanted to do was crumple into a heap of the ground and scream no more. Watching them live their lives, smiling, laughing achieving their dreams, Hotaru didn't regret helping change them from children to warriors.
Because in the end if it saved their lives that was the only thing that mattered.