Hayate

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The Rakraeti don't talk about her.

She fought everyone, regardless of whether it was welcome or not. Nobody was off-limits; ambushes were fair game.

She wanted to become stronger. She loved Rakraet, so she wanted to make it stronger too. It wasn't her fault her opponents were... incompetent. Too weak to make Rakraet prosper like she knew it could.

The others didn't understand. They bound her in chains and cast her aside like she betrayed them, gave her to the Fortress of Ends, where she was supposed to be imprisoned forever.

Expectation is a funny thing.

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The Fortress wasn't kind to Hayate. It was fine. She would survive it.

Regardless, the cold seeped into her bones. Under the ice, time was all the same, days blurring into one unanimous stretch of exhaustion and hunger. The chains binding her made her scales numb with a chill that never went away.

Nobody came to save her. It was fine.

---

One day, the Fortress shook, and Hayate found a crack in the wall of her cell. And another, and another. She followed it. For all she knew, she was only heading deeper into the heart of her prison - but she didn't care. Denied action for so long, she would choose any action at all.

The narrow passage led Hayate to a large chamber bathed in almost complete darkness, and suddenly she was not alone, but standing before a congregation of shifting, monstrous creatures, impossible to describe in the dark by anything else save for their restless movement - sprawled on the floors and ledges, perched on the walls in amorphous shapes that reminded Hayate of stories she'd heard about the Shade.

She watched the monsters with interest. They must've noticed her, but seemed to otherwise pay her no mind. As if they recognized her as one of their own.

Perhaps if she were imprisoned longer, she would be like them.

There were no Wardens anywhere, no cages. Hayate wondered if the creatures around her used to be prisoners, or if they'd always been this monstrous.

Hayate didn't want to be this monstrous. Monstrosity wasn't strength.

She left the monsters to their darkness, and continued on through another corridor, bracketed by permafrost walls that seemed to have no end, closing in on her in slow suffocation.

And then she saw the sun.

Well, she was blinded by the sun, more like. She slept until nightfall, feeling haunted and determined, and only then ventured outside. There were sentries.

But she was good at avoiding attention. And monsters more horrible than her lived in the Fortress, besides. Why would anyone pay her any mind?

The territory was unfamiliar, but the dragons in the villages were friendly enough if Hayate didn't smile too widely and kept her chains hidden under the cloak she'd stolen. She found out that the crack in the walls of the Fortress she'd escaped through was called the Breach, torn open due to the violent flux of elemental magics.

She wanted to go home, but none could tell her where Rakraet lay. It was fine.

She would just have to find it on her own.

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