Aia awoke frightfully inside of a dark cage, iron binding her ankles and wrists. So pitch was the shroud around her that she could not perceive her hand in front of her face.
"Sir Artorius!? Sir Trenewynn!? Anyone!?"
She groped fruitlessly at the air.
"Artorius!? Is anyone there!?"
A slip on something in the dark caused her to stumble and scrap her knees. Aia trembled and curled into a ball.
"Please, isn't anyone there…? I am afraid."
The darkness drank of her tears greedily. She clutched the hem of her dress and shuddered uncontrollably.
"Stupid little girl…! Should've just stayed in the village."
Aia thought herself brave, but only now was her courage truly tested. Shallow breaths and the trickle of tears echoed in the black.
But she was not so alone as she felt. In a crevice somewhere nearby– invisible, yet present, there came a tiny, pale moth. Its white wings fluttered through the gaps and landed on her wrist where she curled herself into a protective sphere.
The moth but rested there. It waited on her wrist, until her tears had passed and her trembling eased with exhaustion. When she again lifted her head to behold the little creature, there was a sense of comfort that washed over her.
"Are you also alone here in the dark?"
Naturally, as it was just a moth, it did not respond.
"I suppose that makes the both of us. Then, shall we wallow in this darkness alone– together?"
But then the moth fluttered off and disappeared into the crevices of the dark. Aia grew frightful again as it departed.
"No… No! Don't leave! Don't keep me alone here!"
But she was not alone soon. For a sudden rend of light pierced the dark, and she beheld from between the bars of her cage as a pair of satyrs approached her.
"My, my," said one of the satyrs.
"Does the vanilla flower shudder in the dark? Its paleness trembling in the beautiful pitch she now lay inside, and a ring of iron to lock her finger. Does she despise our vows of sin and sickness?"
Grasping at the bars in fear, her words left her mouth despite protests in her heart.
"What do you want from me?"
She asked all bitter and submissive.
But the satyrs merely laughed heartily and let each of their two tongues dance in the air. One on the left spoke again in eloquent prose and metaphors.
"Our king and abuser desires your presence. We're to make an offering– as slaves do lovingly for their masters."
One of the satyrs approached the cage to unlock its door. The other leered unpleasantly.
"Why do you say such a thing? What do you mean by slaves and loving their masters?"
"Why, it is our nature of course, lovers of bondage we are. For our ancestors were the most prodigious perversions of anything good."
The other satyr laughed and added, "our master is greedy and lustful after all. He desires we give him all we can offer, and sustain ourselves on the barest of things."
"Look for yourself, can you not see his avarice in the bareness of our backs?"
And surely as she saw the light, Aia was exposed to the naked satyrs– who had scarcely a cloth to cover their extremities.
Each of them rich in blackness and shadows, they embellished themselves with the emptiness of the air and filled their bellies with the thinnest sustenance of jeery laughter. Attached to their pitch-ivory hooves were the finest shadows, and up the forest of obsidian curls— on their hairy legs lay the most comely rags. Along their ashened waist and chest and arms, they painted themselves with silky blood and their tongues bore the sweetest hot coals betwixt, which they savored longly as if suckling hard candies.
The satyrs grasped Aia rudely and dragged her forward through the caverns. Under dim light she beheld each loving hovel and gentle squalor and place of sweetness that so desired her company to stay.
And the other satyrs of the dark who watched her pass looked at her ravenously, wishing to show her each their hospitality. Only the sweetest malice did the satyrs reserve for their guests.
At last, when she was thrown to the ground she beheld a foot quite different from the many hooves around her. It was feline, and viciously sharp. Her gaze lifted to find the one who commanded this disciplined rabble.
Beshír, old adversary of battles yore– retired now and rotting in the reeking bowels of the earth. So great was their infamy that the church had long hunted them since the second age. Stories abounded of them: hungry creatures desiring to ravage and defile their own reflections, so consumed by it as to become thinned in their existence beyond the mirror. Yet they had another name which commoners knew them by— the Handsome Beast.
This Beshír had a physique built for vanity and admiration. It bore six fingers on each hand and nine eyes, three of which were at its back– which he exposed to her as he gazed into his reflection in a giant silver mirror. Each eye as dark as old gold, and it seemed that he had even gilded his body in lines of hot gold that fused with his flesh to form a truly unholy union. Around his throne were countless silks and treasures laid out in a heap. A great axe surpassing the size of a grown man by a scale of approximately one and a half laid behind the chair, and the Beshír let the three eyes on his back pierced Aia with a stare of apathetic violation.
The proud monstrosity stood at over eight feet tall and spoke in voice demanding worship and authority.
"A priestess of Sòl, what twist of fate has led you into my realm? Perhaps destiny has sent you here to be made a worshiper of my greatness, as these thralls of mine have now become."
Aia shuddered, the satyrs arched and crawled as silhouettes in the dark. They slithered at the borders between torchlight and shadow. Then, the Handsome Beast took his six-clawed hand to the mirror and shattered it apart.
What little courage she possessed rebuked the beast.
"There are many monsters that claim greatness from behind a veil. Are you one of them?"
The Beshír's laughter came almost as a purr. Yet he spoke unreserved of his own glories.
"Of course I claim greatness, for it is my namesake. Here, in the dark I am known as Të'lavak, ancient king of Lithopolis and once uttered 'The Great' across the Terra and the sky."
The voice of his thralls echoed in the caverns, the satyrs sang in deep lascivious tones, "hail Të'lavak! The Greatness of the Dark!"
Aia watched as the Beshír began to recite his three-thousand year history. From his mortal days to the time he became the fearless king of the satyrs.
"As you heard me say, I was once king in Lithopolis, in the days of the Aurum empire. I lived as a peer to king Valerius of Helion, and stood beside him in his conquest of the Asharae savages. I was among the first to see the gods' deceptions and become the mighty Beshír that you now hold the exquisite and enviable pleasure to gaze upon. I slew a god myself in days of yore and watched his ichor feed the Terra! For I am, as my thralls say, the Greatness of the Dark."
Yet for some reason, the Beshír's words went unheard. For Aia became more captured by something else entirely.
As she glanced about in search of escape, her eyes spotted the white flutter of a tiny moth– so small that it could've easily been missed.
It moved betwixt flames and danced against all reason towards the dark roof of the cave. It rested there, and Aia watched it. Then, she spied a crumb of stone slip from that spot on the roof and fall down to the floor. She deepened her gaze, narrowing her eyes on the spot– and saw a crack. Then, as the knowledge struck her, the crack grew wider, and wider, and a layer of frost enveloped it.
She recognized that frost, and covered her head with her hands.
Then, the ceiling came crashing down and a tide of bitter cold swallowed the realm of Të'lavak. In came the seven wraiths who each held swords of ice and silver. They cut their way through the satyrs and on their black steeds rode right into the path of Të'lavak's vanity. He raged at the interruption.
"Intruders! Pillagers! Thieves! I will cleave your patchwork souls into silk to dress my ass!"
The great axe behind the throne was grasped in one hand as the Beshír clawed into one of the wraith's black destriers. The axe swung across the cavern, bisecting any and all who were not crouched and ducked as Aia was.
Their clash was as terrible as all the natural disasters.
The wraiths summoned a cold more bitter than the snowstorms of Arcticus, and the Beshír tremored the earth until it split and rumbled deeper than the hardest earthquakes. The very air turned to terrible squalls as he swung his great axe. His leonid roars bellowed as thunder and the wraiths pelted him with hail.
Rage and wrath met winter and cold. And all of this would bring the black sky under which Të'lavak's thralls had lived, down to the ground. But it also exposed the piercing moonlight, which evil avoided as a plague.
Aia clutched her head and curled in fear, then the white moth landed before her again. It but turned to her and twitched its small antennae patiently. But that small act filled her with an inconceivable courage to move.
She ran– following the moth through a bath of butchery and ice. The fearless wraiths engaged the Beshír without quarter. For they could not die, and would not worry to think of fleeing.
And the Beshír, having long abandoned his fears in search of power and admiration, was all too eager to face the wraiths in battle. Between these evils who battled each other to the death, Aia ran away.