Featuring most of Auster!

Spring, Year 1994.

The Wishing Tree, Carlin Forest.

Then, chaos.

Cadhara stepped forward, her voice fair near drowned by the cries of alarm from below.  “You are not of the current Queen’s Line, you have no blood right,” she stated bravely, stepping forward to act as a shield between her mother and aunt and the silver-haired doe.  The dark doe chuckled, a smile curling across her lips.  

“Perhaps not, Princess,” she began, stepping forward to meet nose-to-nose with the would-be Queen of Auster.  Into the Cadhara’s green eyes she stared until she broke the contact with a wink and a nod to Princess Elebrea.  “But she does.”  

The dark doe cackled madly as Cadhara leapt away, unleashing a veil of shadow after her although her shadows only rolled against Cadhara’s silver coat.  As the shadows danced behind her, two of the dark doe’s cohorts appeared, each of their pale jaws snapping open and shut with a hiss.  With a nod, the doe commanded them.  “After her…  And boys, do make sure she is alive, mmm?”

Stepping to the edge, the dark doe watched as Cadhara fled through the crowd, a red roan stag shouting orders at his fellow guardsmen to protect the Queen as he dashed after the Crown Princess while, across the glade, the cream-colored coat of a doe raced into the forest as a pair of her minions chased after her.  Directly below the petrified shelf mushroom, a handicapped prince struggled valiantly - but hopelessly - to break free of a trio of the intruders, shouting to his dark-coated son to make his escape.  Panic hung heavily in the air and, as if to taste it, the doe licked her lips.

The sound of hooves bounding up the staircase toward her made the doe turn.  Before her, a dark chestnut and a six-eyed stag bounding onto the balcony.  With a sneer, the doe turned in a sweeping motion and held her bejeweled tines to Queen Haraedla’s throat.

“Move and she dies,” she hissed at them, pressing harder into the elderly doe’s throat so that just a drop of the Queen’s blood began to spill.  Beside her, Elebrea, still clutching the basket that bore the crown in her mouth, trembled.

“Having second thoughts, are you dear?”  The dark doe laughed, her chest rising and falling in exhilaration.  “This is only the beginning.”  The doe smack the basket with her tail, causing the precious crown to tumble to the floor.  From the stairs more stags appeared, dark in coat and covered in scars too plentiful to count, and stood behind the valiant princes forebodingly.  Two of them moved around the princes, taking the dark doe’s place as they held their unshed tines against her neck.  

Shaking her head, the doe stepped forward.  Shadows trailed her as she lowered her tines to the crown and, with a flick, allowed it to settle into the crook of her antler.  She raised her head and closed her eyes, shivering in delight before whirling to the edge of the balcony and shouting to those that had been corralled and contained in the clearing.

“A new time is upon you, Auster!  The beginning of something grand and wonderful!”  She strode back and forth, her hooves grinding into the old wood as smoke fell over its edge like a waterfall.  Her scarred minions cried in delight, snapping at anyone who dared to try and flee.

“Where there is light there is Shadow, where there is Shadow there is strength!”

With a hissing sound, the doe swathed herself in the inky black shadows she had arrived in until only the bright purple gemstones upon her body glowed.

One of the dark stags keeping Haraedla hostage barked a command.  “All hail your Queen!”