Shadow found herself brought into a cold room that looked like a repurposed kitchen. There was a strange metallic smell in the air and the cold tables were made of shiny metal that was scraped clean. The guards pinned her legs apart as she tried to yanked her knees toward each other, and they illuminated the room with light Casts that she had no where else to go.

“How did you leave your room during the curfew, missy?” The guard asked, lifting up Shadow’s garments to peek when she growled at him.

“You killed them! You killed them!” Shadow screamed when the guard grabbed onto her head and slammed it back down onto the table.

“We were never the ones to do anything, but keep shouting, and you will end up like them too.” The guard said codly, gesturing with his fingers back towards the pair of bodies lying under the massive tree. In a matter of minutes, their body had already shrunk as what stagnant Wave that remained in their bodies was drown out from their body, leaving behind nothing but a thin husk that started tumbling away in the wind, “The great tree feeds on the bodies of those who failed.”

That explained the height of that damn tree.

Shadow blinked again, and the faces of the girls that she once knew started showing themselves all over the surface of the tree, they screamed out in agony one after another before tiny bruised arms grew out from underneath, reaching towards Shadow as they tried to crawl back to the land of the living.

Her entire body froze, and Shadow tried to yank herself free as she conjured up a dark blade underneath her hands. However, a baton found its way across her face before she was slammed down onto the table again. She peeked behind the guards, and the tree was just sitting there.

Like a tree.

What…what is happening to me… Shadow started shaking, and she couldn’t stop it. The guards watched with amusement briefly before they reached their hands towards her. A pair of fat fingers pinched onto her jaw, and Shadow quickly tilted her head before biting down hard and ripping off that stubby finger.

The guards screamed and cursed before he ripped away Shadow’s clothes while the other guard grabbed onto her head.

"Fuck!" He cursed out loud.

"What did you think it was going to happen?! You idiot!" The other person shook his head before he looked down at Shadow.

“I will kill you! I will kill you!” Shadow screamed, her large purple eyes locked onto the guard hauntingly as veins bulged from within her eyeballs.

“Stop…stop looking at me that way!” The guard panicked genuinely for just a moment before he turned the baton to blades and sliced right over her face. Shadow screamed as blood poured out from her eyes with two fresh vertical cuts sliced right over her eyelids, “Yeah! That’s for looking at me that way! Hurry! Once you are done, nobody will know!”

“Just...get rid of her...She's not worth the trouble.” The first guard scrambled to stop his bleeding when suddenly, another set of footsteps came from beyond the door. And a small skinny girl with deep black eyes and a tall nose walked straight past the open space.

“HEY?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”

Shadow heard the sharp accusatory voice as fluids she never knew she had flowed out from within her eyes, and she felt the pressure from the arms of the guards dropping before the whooshing sounds of clothes filled the room, and the guards’ pained groans came immediately before heavy thumps of their bodies hitting the ground.

“Hey, are you okay?” The soft voice of the girl came from right beside her, and she quickly undid Shadow’s ropes. However, sensing that she was free, Shadow charged forward and tried to run for where she thought the door was when she smashed her face into the wall and knocked herself out.

Shadow woke up in the darkness next, however, there were tiny blurry dots in her field of vision. She felt a layer of cloth covering her eyes, and the acts of blinking and moving caused sharp tearing pain over her eyes.

“ARGH!” Shadow grunted as she clenched against the sheet under her hands. Then, she sensed movements next to her.

“It’s okay! It’s okay…” The voice of the girl that saved her rang from her ear, and Shadow felt a hand looping a sheet over her body, “You are safe now. You are safe now…”

“My eyes…my eyes…” Shadow tried to reach towards the cloth when the girl grabbed onto her arms.

“They are hurt bad.” She said, “You need to let them heal.”

“I am not blind…somehow…” Shadow murmured, “This cloth is white, isn’t it…”

“Wow.” The girl seemed stunned, “That’s…crazy. Do you have some sort of healing ability?”

“No…” Shadow scratched the back of her head, “I…do not know how that happened…I could only hide in shadows, and that room was filled with light…”

In that moment of self-preservation, as blood jetted out from under her eyelids, Shadow instinctively hid her eyeballs under the shadow created from the blood, thus preventing the eyes from being completely damaged the same way the eyelids did, but Shadow would not come to realize that until she explored the skills of submerging parts of her body under shadow to avoid attacks.

“The guards!” Shadow tried to sit up, but the girl instead comforted her and kept her within the warmth of the blanket.

“They won't be bothering you anymore…” The girl whispered in Shadow’s ear, “I fed them to the great tree.”

“You…you killed them?”

“Nobody will know what happened.” She said, “Things will go on as normal here.”

“But…I don’t want it to be that way...I don't want to die…" Shadow felt her heart pound, though the dizziness she felt in her head kept her at bay, "I need to get out of here…”

“You will be safe here, and only here.” The girl said, caressing Shadow’s arms and warming it up, “Here’s is where I can protect you. You are not ready to be out there alone just yet. Not when you eyes are like that.”

“And who are you?” Shadow asked, turning her face so she could smell her, however, everything was so inflamed that her nasal passage was completely blocked up. To the other girl, however, everything was puffed up adorably.

“My name is Alina Vuk, and I am a senior Valkyrie, ready to graduate.” Alina replied, “Under my protection, you will be taken care of. I will also personally train you to ensure that you can pass all of the required tests.”

“I said I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“You have to.” Alina emphasized, grabbing Shadow’s shoulder, “You have to. Or you will die. Tell me, do you want to die?”

“No…?”

“Just now, you fought like you didn’t want to die. So I already know the answer.” Alina said, bringing Shadow closer, “Plus, once you become a senior Valkyrie, you no longer have curfews, and you get your own room and a soft bed…”

“And…you are content with that?”

“Why wouldn’t you be?” Alina asked.

Over the next few months, as Shadow slowly healed from her wounds, she started seeing ghosts in her visions. Pale white dots that looked like faces of people long gone started appearing in the corners of her visions. Whenever she noticed it, she would struggle to suppress her screams before her entire body went into shock.

Soon after that, Alina taught her the trick to hide away her fears. Or rather, push it all into her right hand. Then, when she slept, she kept her right hand under the pillow, warm and away.

Everything was fine and dandy since then. She successfully survived the rest of the Valkyrie’s training. Alina was eventually assigned the Valkyrie general, and she kept Shadow in one of her squads as they ended up going on secret missions for the sake of Talonia, as Valkyries are supposed to be.

When Alina’s there, Shadow always performed. But everything changed after Shadow was assigned to a mission without her. Things went sour, and the Valkyries were left running for their lives as the pursuing forces came from all directions.

“Run! Run!” Her squad leader shouted, pushing Shadow off the ledge before her back was pierced through with a spear, “Do what you do best, you good for noth-”

When the guards looked over the ledge, Shadow had already disappeared into the darkness, leaving behind only her tears.

“WHY DID YOU ABANDON ME?!” Shadow stormed into Alina’s office from under the door, and she stomped along the ground as Alina looked up at her, “Why did you put me on that mission?!”

“I abandoned you?! It was literally one mission!” Alina stood up slowly, her voice cold, “Did you complete the mission? Or did you not?!”

Shadow’s hands moved rapidly, and a projectile darted past Alina’s ear before it was caught by a manifest of a claw right by her side. She reached up and grabbed onto the scroll that was shoved into Shadow’s grasp by the squad leader before her death.

“Very well. You are dismissed.” Alina said, turning around when Shadow stood still in the room.

“That’s it?” Shadow murmured, “A whole squad died! All just for this?!”

“I said, you are dismissed, Shadow.” Alina emphasized as an aura of power filled the room. However, Shadow stood still in the darkness of the table, ignoring Alina’s demonstration of power.

“Look at me.” Shadow marched forward, “LOOK AT ME!”

Alina kept on working on the documents in front of her as a projection of Caligo besides her watched the ruckus with interest. Feeling the shaking of her right hand spread to the rest of the body, Shadow launched herself forward with dark blades in hand.

However, in a single blink of an eye, Alina was already on top of her as the leg of her Great Northern Wolf slammed down onto Shadow’s chest and pressed her into the ground. Over the neck of the great northern wolf were the white laughing faces of the guards.

“As I said. You are dismissed.”

As Shadow was dragged out and tossed back into her own room, she was assigned to a squad of Valkyries along the Eastern border, performing nothing but scouting and surveying missions away from the front lines.

“So…you are abandoning me too…”

“Sometimes, I wonder what it took for someone to truly break…” Shadow smirked before laughing out loud. Then, she looked up at the face of Wu which now had the disgusting faces of the guards floating on either side of his cheeks, “Who knows when the breaking actually happens? Once you see the faces of dead for long enough, you learn to ignore them. Caligo’s voice, funnily enough, came from those faces, so I can ignore them just as easily.”

“Shadow.” Wu said, grabbing her hand as the ghostly faces of the guards over his cheeks started to blur out, and Shadow’s eyes widened before all she noticed were his thick eyebrows and brown eyes, “I…am sorry to hear about all that you have been through. To stop anything like this from happening to anyone else in this kingdom…”

“I need to kill all those responsible for it.” Shadow said, her purple eyes focusing onto Wu, “And that all starts with Caligo. It was him…it was him all along for making Alina the idiot bitch that she is.”

“For how much she was manipulated by Caligo, I am sure she still loves you all the same…In a way that maybe only she could express…” Lera added when Shadow hissed at her.

“If she truly did! Then she wouldn’t have beaten me to a pulp! Many times!”

“…”

“Latest news from the capital.” Ita said, entering the tent and making it reach nearly capacity, “The Descendants of Winter are gathering.”

“Let’s go.” Wu said, “We need to stop them for good, together.”