PT2 of PT 3 Obsidian Veil

11-20-25
Part2 of Part3
Obsidian Veil
clawed her way through the Night Lords' intrigues, her beauty a lure, her cunning a noose. Alaric's line crumbled under her subtle poisons; Valerian met his end in the Sunken Crypts, his essence drained to fuel her ascent. House Vespera rose from those ashes, with Isolde at its pinnacle—the Crimson Sovereign, her throne a monument to the light she had lost.
Yet in quiet moments, as the Iron Sea's ghost-winds moaned against Eldrathor's spires, Isolde traced the phantom scar at her throat, the locket's shards long forged into her crown's hidden heart. Her turning was no mere curse; it was the crucible that birthed a queen from a girl—teaching her that power's true venom lay not in fangs, but in the eternal ache for a hand once held under the sun. And when she turned Thorne centuries later, in the pyres of Dawnspire, it was not mere whim, but echo: a gift of shadows to one whose light mirrored her own stolen fire. In him, she glimpsed redemption's fragile gleam—a knight to guard not just her throne, but the mortal dreams that lingered, unquenched, in the velvet dark of her undying soul.