POV - Morgana
There are things a mother knows without being taught. These are instincts existing before language, before reason, before any experience might justify them. The instinct to protect. The instinct to provide. The instinct to wake when a child's breath changes rhythm in the dark.
And there is an instinct no one mentions, perhaps because it is far too embarrassing to admit: the instinct to know, with absolute and irrevocable certainty, when one's child is about to do something catastrophically stupid.
Yet there exists a third instinct, more ancient than the others. This one I did not learn by being a mother; I brought it with me from before, from the time when I was merely magic and darkness and roots seeking water in parched soil. The instinct to recognise when something is about to change. Not change as the seasons do, gradual and expected, but as lightning does: in an instant that cleaves the world between before and after, scorching the scent of all that cannot be undone into the air.
The next memory followed softly, as though someone had opened a door without making a sound. But what lay on the other side was not soft. The air possessed a weight, not hostile, but something more immediate. More alive. Electricity, quite literally, vibrating at a low frequency that made my perception as an observer contract like skin beneath static. Like leaves before a storm, when the entire forest falls silent and even the deepest roots stop drinking, waiting.
A courtyard appeared within the memory. Vast, encircled by corridors of dark timber and pillars carved with crests I did not recognise, yet which spoke the same language spoken by crests in every world: lineage, power, and the conviction that blood is destiny. The floor was of polished white stone, impeccable in a way that spoke less of cleanliness and more of the number of servants required to maintain it so. Ornamental gardens flanked the space with the precision of chess pieces. An artificial lake lay so motionless it resembled glass.
Beautiful. Suffocating. The type of beauty that exists to be seen, not felt.
I knew such places. Demacia was made of them, marble halls where light entered filtered by stained glass that told tales of heroes who never bled; where every flower in the garden grew at approved angles and no root dared to break the stone. I lived for centuries surrounded by this aesthetic of control: beauty as a leash, as a frame telling all within it: 'Remain in the shape I have chosen for you.' And here, in this courtyard of another world, the selfsame dialect. The selfsame fragrant suffocation.
The kind of setting one assembles when one wants an encounter to seem casual and cares not that everyone knows it is nothing of the sort.
Guards stood in discreet positions in the corridors. Servants circulated like well-trained shadows.
And in the centre of the courtyard stood my daughter.
Azra'il was by the lake. Dark hanfu, silver embroidery, Jian at her waist. And something was wrong. Not the 'wrong' of danger, but of exertion. Lupine ears held too erect. Too controlled. Lacking the natural movement of someone simply existing in a space; the movement of someone behaving. Her tail was pinned to her waist with an unnatural, forced rigidity. Hands clasped behind her back when they would normally rest upon the Jian's hilt or be gesturing with her signature impatience.
I knew her all too well, after seeing so many of her lives. I could read every variation, every degree of tension in her shoulders, every minute tilt, as one reads verses of a poem known by heart, one that never sounds quite the same. And what I saw was something that did not suit the woman who faced kings and gods without flinching.
And she hasn't the slightest notion she is doing it. My daughter, who has survived horrors that would make gods retreat, is nervous about a meeting. Is there anything more human than this? Anything more hopeful? It is like seeing a tree that has survived a thousand winters hesitate before a single spring, unsure if it still remembers how to bloom.
Then came footsteps.
From the eastern corridor. Measured. Each landing with the authority of someone who had learned to walk as if the ground belonged to her.
And then, I saw her.
Her hair first: black as the night sky of a moonless world, of a depth that seemed to absorb the surrounding light and return it on its own terms, translated into a darker tongue. Wavy, nearly curly at the ends, cascading to her waist like a river refusing to follow straight banks. Half-bound with a silver clasp that fought a losing battle against the volume, and there was something in that battle that told me more about its owner than any crest could. For hair that refuses to be tamed usually belongs to a soul that refuses the same.
And the eyes.
Violet. A deep violet with the quality of gemstones cut by someone who knew the most dangerous beauty is the one that asks no permission. Eyes that asked for nothing. That did not invite. That did not offer themselves. Eyes that demanded; that swept across the courtyard and registered every guard, every servant, every exit with the cold efficiency of one mapping terrain before stepping upon it, not out of fear, but an absolute refusal to be caught at a disadvantage.
She wore a snow-white hanfu. A belt laden with adornments at her waist. Silvery embroidery climbing her sleeves. The attire of someone who does not pretend that beauty and combat dwell in separate worlds.
Her face, meanwhile, was the sort that makes folk forget what they were about to say, not due to delicacy, but impact. Sculpted features. Pronounced brows. A jaw locked with the strength of one marching to their execution, refusing to grant the executioner the satisfaction of seeing them tremble. There was beauty there, but it was the beauty of a freshly forged blade: the kind that cuts those who draw near without care, and which was made to cut.
And around her fingers, at her wrists, climbing her forearms: sparks. Violet discharges dancing upon her skin like living static. Appearing and vanishing. Not a technique, not an attack. Instinct. The body reacting to what her posture tried to hide, like a cat's fur bristling. Power betraying what discipline could not contain.
I observed those sparks and felt something stir within me. Not recognition, for nothing in that woman reminded me of what I was or what I am. My magic has always been silent. Roots that seek, envelop, extend. Darkness that welcomes. Pain that blooms. All that I am moves towards, seeking connection, seeking depth, seeking what is buried and alive beneath the surface of things.
But this, this woman was the opposite. Everything in her radiated outwards. The sparks sought nothing. They repelled. They scorched. They said 'do not draw near' with the same clarity a lightning bolt tells a traveller that now is not the time to cross the open field. Where I am root, she was discharge. Where I pull inward, she pushed away. Where I welcome, she set ablaze.
And it was fascinating. In the way all things we do not entirely comprehend are fascinating, not for their similarity, but their strangeness. Through the vertigo of standing before something that functions by laws completely different from our own, and yet recognising there, in the difference, a form of truth that familiarity could never teach.
I must admit, upon seeing her for the first time, she was quite beautiful. The sort who inspires poets to write and armies to march, and who makes any mother wonder if such beauty is not armour too, forged not by the world, but against it. Not the beauty that invites. The one that warns. The one that says: 'I am beautiful as storms are beautiful, and if you mistake admiration for permission, the fault is yours.'
Anastasia soon arrived and halted five metres from Azra'il. The distance of one who intends to let no one closer. The exact distance between distrust and courtesy, measured with the precision of one who has learned that every centimetre yielded is territory that may never be reclaimed.
The sparks intensified.
"Grand Elder."
The title came out sharp as a newly-wrought sword. Each syllable a wall. And I thought of all the words that have been used as walls, of all the titles and formalities and reverences existing not to honour, but to maintain distance. Of how many times I myself heard "sister" leave Kayle's mouth like a barricade, filling the space where love should be with ceremony.
Azra'il looked at her. And I saw, fleetingly, nearly invisibly, something pass over my daughter's face. I cannot name it. But her ears shifted half a degree toward the other woman. And her tail tightened around her waist.
"Lady Anastasia." Azra'il's voice held the casual tone I knew, the one pretending nothing was too important. "Thank you for coming. I know it was not of your own volition."
The sparks intensified on the other's fingers.
"The Grand Elder is correct. It was not."
"Might we dispense with the 'Grand Elder'? If we are to be married, it seems excessively formal. Nearly bureaucratic."
"We are not to be married."
The phrase cut through the air with the precision of one who has trained with a sword her entire life. And sparks leapt from her wrists, crackling upon the courtyard stones like tiny, miniature thunders.
The guards in the corridors adjusted themselves. The servants halted. The air grew dense.
Azra'il did not move. She did not recoil. She did not react to the sparks as if they did not exist, the same unshakeability of one who has seen too much to be impressed by storms. And I, who have seen my daughter remain unmoved before things that would make continents tremble, knew this was not disdain. It was the opposite. It was the total attention of one recognising the weight of what is before her and choosing not to insult that weight with fear.
"Very well. It needn't be today."
"Neither today, nor ever."
"Also a valid option. But since we are here and your father has invested considerable resources in assembling this courtyard to appear casual..." she looked around with the expression of one appraising décor and finding it functional yet uninspired, "...we might at least converse. Without titles. Without commitments."
"After all," Azra'il added, "it would be a waste of a perfectly good courtyard. Though the shrubs pruned into geometric shapes are a questionable aesthetic choice. It appears someone threatened the plants with a sword until they surrendered."
Anastasia found no humour in it. Her violet eyes narrowed with the kind of disdain needing no words to be articulated, the gaze of one born in drawing rooms who knows exactly what each out-of-place attempt at humour is worth. The sort that says 'I came prepared for many things, but folly was not upon the list'.
"Why did you accept?"
The question came without transition. No preparation. A direct strike to the centre. And there was something admirable in that, in the refusal to circle the matter as servants circle a courtyard. She was a woman who wasted no time. Who squandered no words on pleasantries when she could go straight for the jugular. A warrior even in conversation.
"My father offered my brothers first. The primary heirs. If the Grand Elder desired political power, she need only have accepted any one of them to secure influence in the succession. If she desired to take the sect, she needn't marry anyone, no elder, not even the Patriarch, would have the means to stop her."
Those violet eyes sparkled with sparks that were not only on her hands. "So why me? Out of them all, why precisely me?"
Azra'il looked at her. Her ears swivelled once: processing. Choosing words with a care she rarely demonstrated.
"Your brothers are incompetent."
"No offence intended."
"None taken. Continue."
"The eldest possesses mediocre cultivation inflated by clan resources and the ambition of one who confuses birthright with merit. The second is marginally better, in the sense that one stone is marginally better than another stone." A fraction of a second where her ears flicked like one searching their memory. "The third... quite honestly, I had forgotten he existed until just now."
The violet eyes remained fixed. No visible reaction. But the sparks did not increase, which, coming from one whose power reacted to every emotion, said enough. In the brief time I had been in this memory, I realised the sparks were the diary Anastasia did not know she was writing with her body, and the lack of reaction was a blank page denoting agreement.
"I do not respect incompetence," Azra'il continued. "I cannot. It is a personal limitation I have no intention of correcting."
"And I am what? The least incompetent option?"
"You are the one who wakes before the sun to train when there is no one there to be impressed."
The sparks on Anastasia's fingers did not diminish. They became absolutely still, like flames frozen in mid-air. And her violet eyes narrowed in a different way. Not rage. Something sharper. The expression of one touched on a point she didn't know was exposed, and who detested, with every fibre of her being, the sensation of being seen where she did not intend to be visible.
"How does the Grand Elder know of this?"
Azra'il's ears shifted half a degree back. The twitch I already knew, theequivalent of someone realising, half a second too late, that they have said something they shouldn't.
"I... did my research," Azra'il said. And for the first time in that meeting, her casual voice wavered. Minutely. The sort of wavering only those who knew her would notice.
I noticed. And by the way the violet eyes narrowed even further, so did Anastasia.
"Research." The word came out as though holding an insect by the wings and examining it. "The Grand Elder 'researched'. In the small hours. In a training courtyard. Without my knowledge."
"I would say 'prior verification' is a term more—"
"The Grand Elder spied on me."
The sparks returned with a vengeance, no longer static but crackling upon her knuckles like small whips of light. Anastasia's jaw locked with a new intensity.
"I wished to know who you were before accepting something that would change both our lives," Azra'il said. And here her voice returned, not the casual one, not the wavering one. The real one. The one that dwelt beneath it all, like a subterranean river flowing quiet and dark until someone digs deep enough to find it. "And what I saw was someone training alone before dawn. Not out of obligation. Not for an audience. But from a hunger I recognise, for I have carried that selfsame hunger my entire life."
The sparks hesitated. They did not vanish, but they hesitated. As though Anastasia's body were divided between the indignation of being observed without consent and the fact that what the observer saw was precisely her most honest part. The part the crests and hierarchies and polished courtyard could not touch, the woman who existed before dawn, when there was no audience for whom to maintain an impeccable posture.
Violet eyes upon blue ones. Two seconds. Three. Something recalculating behind that gaze.
"Through effort, then," Anastasia finally said. Her voice contained, yet the blade slightly retracted. "Through competence. Is that it?"
"Through effort. Through competence. For being the most talented cultivator of your generation, likely of the last five."
"And for being, of all the Patriarch's children, the one most pleasing to the eye."
The sparks exploded.
Violet energy leapt from Anastasia's wrists in arcs that crackled against the stone and made the courtyard air vibrate. The guards reached for their weapons. Servants retreated. The lake's surface trembled, and for an instant, the water's perfect glass shattered into a thousand reflections, as though even the Patriarch's controlled scenery surrendered to what that woman carried within her.
"Appearance." The word came out through clenched teeth. "The Grand Elder who has traversed all twelve realms. Who has lived for centuries. And the final criterion was appearance?"
I admit I have never had a romance. I have never courted anyone. I never had to navigate the treacherous waters between two people attempting to know each other romantically. But I know, with the certainty of one who has observed humanity for centuries, who has seen entire civilisations born and fallen upon the foundations of what people feel for one another, that this is not how it is done.
"It was not the final criterion. It was an additional one. There is a difference."
"The difference being that the Grand Elder is as superficial as—"
"I did not say it was the primary one." Azra'il interrupted with the calm of one conversing about tea infusions. "I said that among all your brothers, you are the most competent, the most dedicated, and yes, the most pleasant to look upon. That is not superficiality. It is comprehensive observation. To ignore any aspect would be dishonesty, and I have many flaws, but that is not one of them."
The sparks decelerated. Not through peace, but the change that occurs when rage meets something it doesn't know how to categorise and needs an instant to recalculate. Like a storm pausing between two peals of thunder, not out of kindness, but necessity, to catch its breath before the next.
"And the matter," Anastasia said, her voice at a different frequency now, more controlled, more dangerous for choosing to be, "of us being two women. Did the Grand Elder consider that?"
"I did."
"And?"
"And I don't see how it is relevant."
Anastasia's pronounced brows rose minutely. A surprise that her discipline almost hid. Almost. And the sparks on her fingers, those sparks that reacted to everything, which were the most honest map of that woman's emotions, did something different for the first time. They neither increased nor decreased. They flickered. Like a heart losing its rhythm for half a second when it hears something it did not expect.
"Not relevant." The repetition came flat, measuring every syllable. "The Grand Elder is aware that marriages between two women are not common in this realm. And as far as I know, not in many other realms either."
"I am aware the world holds many opinions on many things. They seldom strike me as useful."
"That is not an answer."
Azra'il looked at her. And for a moment, the mask of humour and casualness gave way, it didn't fall entirely, but slipped enough for me to see what lay beneath. And what lay there was something I recognised with the intimacy of one who has felt the same thing: the vulnerability of someone treading unknown ground without a map.
"I care nought for gender." The words came out with care, each placed as though plucking a flower without breaking its root. "I care for the person. And the truth is, I know not what love is. I never have. I have lived far too long, and that is the only thing I have never understood. Accepting this proposal was curiosity. The curiosity of someone who has spent her entire life wondering what it feels like to feel something the world seems to feel with ease, and which to me has always been... inaccessible."
The courtyard went quiet. Not the polished quiet from before, but a living quiet, the kind born when someone says something so naked that even the surrounding air falls silent out of respect.
Anastasia's sparks diminished. Her body was processing something that did not fit within rage. Something that had no place in the arsenal of responses she had brought to this encounter. And I imagined what was happening behind those violet eyes, the elite cultivator, the Patriarch's daughter, the woman who turned every conversation into a battlefield because it was the only terrain she knew how to navigate, trying to find, in the vocabulary of pride, some word that would serve to respond to someone who had just said 'I do not know how to love' with the same voice one uses to announce their own defeat.
"I do not know how to love."
Spoken with the selfsame dry voice. With the selfsame clumsy honesty. With the selfsame courage of one facing ravines and monsters, yet kneeling before the possibility of feeling something new. And I, who have seen her die and be reborn so many times I have lost count; who have seen her be a child and a warrior and a monster and a saint, I know this is her oldest truth. Older than any life. Deeper than any scar. My daughter knows how to kill and knows how to survive and knows how to laugh in the face of death, but love... love is the only battlefield she enters disarmed.
"So I am an experiment." Anastasia's voice cut low. No longer a blade of attack, but the blade of one struck and assessing the damage. And there was pain there, behind the coldness, hidden with the skill of one trained an entire lifetime to never let a blow show.
"No. You are a person I could not ignore. And for someone like me, that is rare enough to merit attention."
Violet eyes stared into blue ones. For several seconds which I did not measure, for certain moments ask that time remains silent and observes too. Like those instants between one peal of thunder and the next, when the entire world is but waiting, and within the wait, anything is possible.
Then Anastasia recoiled a step. Shoulders rising back up. Jaw locking. Sparks returning to her fingers, smaller, more controlled, but present. The armour being donned piece by piece, with the efficiency of one who has practised this gesture so many times it is a reflex: to don her pride again as one dons mail, swiftly, before anyone sees the exposed skin beneath.
"The Grand Elder is strange," she said. And within the word lay more than the obvious meaning. It held confusion. For she had come prepared to deal with arrogance, with manipulation, with raw power, all the things folk in positions of authority usually are. And what she found was sincerity, which is, of all weapons, the one pride knows least how to combat.
"I have been told as much with considerable frequency."
"It isn't a compliment."
"I know. But I come from a long tradition of transforming insults into identity. It is almost a hobby at this point."
Anastasia's jaw remained locked. Eyes hard. But the line of her shoulders, so rigid since her arrival, yielded something almost invisible. A crack. Not a door, not a window. A crack, the kind only someone with much patience and no pride would notice.
Azra'il noticed. Her ears shifted.
"I will not accept this." Firm. "I will not be my father's bargaining chip. I will not be a curiosity. And I will not pretend this is anything beyond a political arrangement."
"I am not asking you to pretend anything."
"Don't say that as though it were simple."
"It isn't simple. None of this is." Azra'il looked at her, and her ears tilted slightly, not a provocation, not humour. The gesture of one choosing their next words as though treading ground that might give way. "I shall force you to nothing, Anastasia. I shall not touch you unless you permit it. I shall not demand you feel something you do not. If this marriage occurs, it shall be on your terms as much as mine."
The sparks on Anastasia's fingers flickered, diminishing for an instant and returning in the next. Her body was fighting against something rage knew not how to process. And I saw the exact moment her resistance changed shape. It did not diminish. It shifted. Like a storm that loses no strength but changes direction; and where before there was rage, there was now something more complicated, more dangerous, harder to name.
"And if I never accept?"
"Then you never accept. And I shall have learned something about myself in the process." The corner of Azra'il's mouth curled, devoid of the usual provocation; something quieter. "I have already lived too long to waste what remains of my time forcing someone to be where they do not wish to be. That, I can promise you."
Anastasia did not answer. Those violet eyes stared into Azra'il's blue ones for longer than any previous exchange. Lacking the blade from before. Simply... measuring. Searching for the lie, the trap, the double meaning that ought to be there because it always was, in every promise people made. Searching for the thread that, if pulled, would reveal the real tapestry behind the pretty one.
She found nothing.
And her face closed, not from rage, but from something worse. From the frustration of someone who knows not what to do when the defences she prepared serve no use for the actual battlefield. It is the most disarming of defeats: the one coming without a sword, without a strike, without a foe. The one forcing the warrior to face the possibility that perhaps, on this specific field, fighting is not the answer. And for one who only knows how to fight, there is no thought more terrifying.
Anastasia turned. Without reverence. Without a farewell. The movement of one who had reached the limit of what she could process and needed distance before the sparks said more than she permitted.
She walked back to the corridor. Firm steps. Black hair undulating like a night-curtain someone draws closed when the light outside is too strong to endure. And upon the stone where her feet touched: marks. Small scorch marks. The lightning leaving scars on the floor as a signature its owner did not intend to sign.
She disappeared without looking back.
The courtyard went quiet. The type of quiet remaining after storms: charged, smelling of ozone, still trembling with the echo of what has passed. The lake was no longer glass; small waves still died at its edges, the last witnesses to the discharge that had disturbed it.
Azra'il stood still. Staring at the empty corridor. Ears erect. Her tail, loosened from her waist at some point without her realising, hanging behind her, swaying slowly, like a compass that has found something and now oscillates around it, unsure if it trusts what it points to.
And she smiled.
Not her typical, indecipherable smile. It was a new smile. Small. The sort born when someone finds something unexpected and knows not what to do with the find, yet knows, with a certainty dwelling in the bones, that she wants to keep it. The smile of someone seeing the first crack of light after a long dark and not running towards it, because she learned that certain lights must be left where they are so they do not go out.
And this time, the thought came with everything at once, the tenderness, the worry, the urge to laugh, the urge to weep, and the absolute certainty that I was witnessing something fragile and important and entirely disastrous around the edges. Like holding a newborn bird in one's hands and feeling its heart beat too fast, and knowing the world outside has wind and cats and a thousand ways to break something so small, but knowing as well that birds were made to fly and that holding too tightly kills just as surely as releasing too soon.
The memory began to dissolve. The courtyard losing its contours. The lake returning to being glass and then not even that, simply light unravelling into light, like everything in this space between lives. The scorch marks on the stone fading, the last to go, reluctantly, as if the memory itself knew they were important.
And I, in that gentle space where I awaited the next door to open, kept two things.
My daughter's smile, small and new and completely unprotected. The smile of one who has found the beginning of something and does not yet know that beginnings are the most dangerous things in existence.
And the marks on the floor. Scorched into the stone by a woman who fled without looking back, yet who left, in every step, the proof of what pride tried to hide and her body refused to keep silent.
I know what I saw.
And what I saw was the spark of something new.
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💬 Author's Note
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Those who follow my other Fairy Tail fanfic might already be a little more familiar with Anastasia. Azra'il has mentioned her a few times there, and we've also had small glimpses in the form of flashbacks, but nothing that really explored her past or her story in more depth.
What can I say about her? This creature wasn't born here. Anastasia is old. Like, really old (as a character concept, not as a person, calm down). I created her way back for an original novel I wanted to write even before I delved into fanfiction. This novel would take place in Shénvara, my own little world with a Wuxia/xianxia aesthetic, full of powerful people, existential drama, and questionable decisions (in other words, perfect for her).
Incidentally, a fun fact: her appearance was slightly inspired by Yennefer from The Witcher. "Slightly," in this case, means that at the time I was completely smitten with her. Priorities.
Now, about Anastasia's powers… HA. Did you really think I was going to explain this already? Have patience, young cultivators. This will be revealed little by little, and when it comes, it comes. 🤭
But I can let you drop one little thing: just as Faruk taught Azra'il the art of tea, Anastasia will also teach her something.
And it's no small thing.
It's the kind that sticks to your soul and transcends lifetimes.
Well, see you in the next chapter 🫰