T ell me, little butterfly, what would you do for love?
The woman knows the tower, now.
She knows every angle of its imposing shape as it rises from the surf. She knows the way the whorls carved into its surface feel beneath her palms. She knows how the bone-white stone looks smeared with her blood. She knows its scent, acrid and stagnant, like death itself.
She knows everything, except for how to break it.
This place has taken something from her, you see. Taken the most precious thing.
Tell me, little butterfly, what would you do to get him back?
Anything. Everything.
The first time she tries, it is an act of pure desperation. She has conquered cities and defeated armies. She has ended wars. Surely she is powerful enough to do this.
Now she does not need to conquer a city, just a single prison. She does not need to free a civilization. Just one person.
The stone strikes her down like a palm to a fly. Minutes, and she is crashing back into the surf, pulled out again by friends who barely manage to escape with their lives.
But the woman knows nothing if not how to fail.
So she tries again, again, again. She collects another scar, another night of an aching heart, and a little more of her dies. She gets up and goes again.
The last night is stormy and dark—the sort of night yanked from horror stories. Her friends beg her not to go. Wait one more day, they say. If the guards don’t kill you then the storm will.
What’s one more day, they say, after all of this?
What’s one more day? She would have laughed if she wasn’t choking back sheer rage. One more day is twenty-four hours—one thousand four hundred and forty minutes—eighty-six thousand seconds of torture for the man trapped within those walls.
The storm is a monster. It is so dark she can barely see, the white tower of Ilyzath lit only in garish blue-white flashes as lightning cracks the night. Rain shreds the air like silver blades. As always, she makes it to the prison. And as always—faster than they once did—the eyeless guards are upon her in seconds.
She fights back. But there are many of them, and only one of her. Her head smashes against the ground.
CRACK.
The sky splits open, just as her skin does, just as her heart does.
She rises to her feet. Blood is in her eyes, staining the world crimson.
And there, in that moment of desperation, she feels a sliver of the magic that had so evaded her for these last weeks—a flicker of a familiar soul, contorted in pain and buried within layers of stone.
He is so, so close.
It cuts something primal loose in her.
The next time a blade opens her flesh, she doesn’t feel it. She fights back like an animal. These are not people before her—they are obstacles. Obstacles keeping her away from her most precious person, obstacles who dared deny her broken heart every time she came here, fighting for the queen that had put a dagger in her back.
She becomes nothing but the desire to burn down the world that did this to him.
CRACK.
Lightning illuminates flashes of blood, of opened bodies, of rotting flesh. Flashes of her own seeping wounds.
She fights and fights and fights as tears stream down her cheeks.
Tell me, little butterfly, what would you do for love?
