Adriana

Before the war with Hybern ever darkened the skies, (ACOWAR), Adriana was born into Windhaven the way most Illyrian warriors were: red-faced, furious, and already fighting the world with her lungs. Windhaven was not gentle. It never had been. It carved its children from stone and storm, and it expected them to harden quickly. Her mother, Seraphine, was already something of a quiet rebellion the day Adriana took her first breath. In a camp where females were tolerated but rarely respected, Seraphine stood tall in armor and refused to shrink. Officially, no one discouraged females from training , especially not under the orders of the Night Court's General, Cassian, but the unspoken rules were heavier than iron. Chores came first. Always. Laundry, cooking, tending fires, tending egos. By the time most females were finished with what was demanded of them, there was barely strength left to lift a blade.

Seraphine trained anyway, while Adriana watched. She watched from the sidelines while scrubbing blood from leathers or hauling water heavier than she was. She watched her mother move like lightning across the field, all precision and devastating grace. There was something magnetic in her. A softness in the way she spoke at home. A warmth in her hands. But when she stepped into a sparring ring, that softness sharpened into discipline and iron loyalty and unbreakable resolve.

That was the first lesson Adriana ever absorbed: strength did not erase kindness. It protected it.

Her father, Torren, was different. He was strong and steady where Seraphine burned. A full-time soldier and part-time blacksmith, his hands were calloused from both war and forge. He did not shout his defiance the way Seraphine did. He simply stood in it. When whispers began circling Adriana, quiet threats of clipping her wings before they ever grew strong, it was Seraphine who promised to lay anyone flat who so much as reached for her daughter. It was Torren who made sure those threats never materialized. He challenged the murmurs calmly. Publicly. With the kind of quiet confidence that made other males reconsider their courage. In the end, Adriana’s wings remained whole, but not untouched by fear. She learned young what it meant to be watched. To be measured. To be told she was lesser before she’d ever been tested. And still — she burned.

Her older brother, Caelan, was everything Windhaven loved in a warrior. He was noble and brave without trying, and charming without effort. He moved through training fields like he belonged there, like the sky itself had claimed him. Adriana watched him with a mix of envy and devotion so fierce it almost hurt. He trained while she washed dishes. He flew while she mended torn leathers. He sparred in sunlight while she memorized his footwork from shadow. And when no one else was looking, he dragged her into the dirt. Caelan never went easy on her. He knocked her down without apology. He left her coughing in dust, struggling not to spit blood. He bruised her pride as much as her body. That summer she tasted more blood and earth than she ever had in her life, and she loved it. She loved the ache in her muscles. She loved the sting of impact. More than anything she loved the proof that she could endure.

At night, the real lessons began. When the camp quieted and the fires burned low, Seraphine and Torren would close their doors and lay weapons across the table. They taught her in whispers. How to hold steel like it was an extension of bone. How to breathe through fear instead of around it. How to balance her weight before striking. Torren showed her how blades were forged, how heat and pressure shaped something strong from something raw. He let her hammer metal until her arms trembled, teaching her that respect for a weapon began long before battle. Seraphine corrected her stance by lantern light, adjusted her shoulders, and often, pressed two fingers to her spine and told her to stand taller.

Even when official ranks remained closed to her, Adriana carved time from the edges of every day. Between chores. Before dawn. After dark. She stole moments the way others stole rest. Windhaven’s Camp Lord, again, despite orders, refused to hear of another female joining formal ranks. He already disapproved of the few who had broken through. Like most Illyrian males of his generation, he believed females were meant for breeding, for hearth, and for obedience.

Every dismissal only fed her. Every refusal only sharpened her. Adriana grew up in the space between what was allowed and what was possible. She learned early that if a door would not open, she would not beg. She would build her own blade, and use it to carve her way through.

Life in war camps, as one can probably imagine, was not pleasant. For one, living on a mountain meant snow. Period. All day, every day, snow. But Adriana didn't mind that, as it built raw determination and strength. It also provided many opportunities for strength and muscle building, ones that simply were not afforded to her any other way. Her family trained with her as much as they could, and Adriana often practiced alone in the meantime. But only after all of her chores were done. For years, she watched, learned, patched wounds, sewed clothes, made and tested weapons, and yearned to train properly, all while secretly training herself, any muscle, any skill, any time she could.

Her brother, so noble and strong, almost regal in his effortless charm, her friend who had trained her, pushed her, and steadied her when she wobbled, was given the honor of participating in the Blood Rite, as many others were. For days, he battled, and for days, Adriana paced with worry, a dark sense seemingly coating her gut, but she tried to ignore it. After days of worry, her brother came back… alive.

And that, at first, was all that mattered. He did not descend the mountain triumphant, not in the way he had wished. There was no roar of victory, no bloodied grin, and no lift of wings in pride. He had survived, but barely, half-carried by his best friend. His friend who brought him down did not speak to her. The silence was heavier than any announcement, as Adriana watched helplessly. His wings dragged behind him, dust-streaked and slack, and his head was tilted ever so slightly upward, not in arrogance, but in searching. His eyes were open, but they did not see.

The damage had been done high on the mountain. Cornered, and outnumbered, he had been pinned against stone by warriors as vicious as he was. The blows had come fast, and their blades came too close to his face. Healing magic had tried. Illyrian bodies are stubborn, violent things, but the cuts had been too deep, too precise. The damage to his sight was, the healers noted, irreparable. He had survived, but he would never see the sky again. And for Illyrians, whose entire identity is tied to air, height, distance, and dominance from above, Adriana knew, blindness was not merely an injury. It was little better than a death sentence.

But she would not let him fall. Not into silence, into self-pity, and especially not into the quiet, suffocating grief that had begun to swallow him whole. While the healers came and went, while the camp whispered, while their parents moved through the house like ghosts afraid to disturb something fragile, Adriana planted herself at his side like a storm refusing to pass. She stayed with him through the worst of it. Through the nights when the pain in his ruined eyes made his jaw clench so tight she thought his teeth might crack. Through the mornings when he refused food. Through the long, humiliating silences when he reached for something that wasn’t where he thought it would be.

She narrated the room when he would not ask. She moved objects just to make him notice. She placed his blades in his hands even when he let them fall. And when anger began to simmer beneath his skin, she fed it instead of soothing it. She fought with him. Not physically at first. With words. Sharp, cruel ones. Ones designed to piss him off. Their parents worried. Of course they did. Their mother begged her to leave him be, even snapped at her to do so. Their father warned her that pride wounded deeper than flesh, especially for a warrior. But Adriana, stubborn, relentless, infuriating Adriana, refused to step back.

If he would not rise on his own, she would drag him there. There were days he would not get out of bed. She screamed at him on those days. She screamed until her throat burned raw, until her wings flared wide in fury, until she accused him of abandoning her, of abandoning himself, of letting the mountain win. For months, he said nothing. He only stared out the window, annd refused to move. Until one day, he did. It was small at first. A shift. A hand bracing harder against the mattress. A breath pulled in with effort and anger. Then she pushed too far. She made a cutting remark about how he’d once mocked her footwork. About how she’d surpassed him now. About how she was better than him.

And that did it.

He moved. He shoved her back so hard she stumbled into the low table behind her. His hand found her shoulder again, and he snarled something that sounded more alive than he had in weeks. Anger soaked the words he spit. Real, red-hot, blazing, furious anger. She laughed as she shoved him back, spewing more cutting words at him. And suddenly they were fighting, truly fighting in the center of the room. Furniture splintered under misjudged steps. A chair cracked against the wall, one of the carved beams split when he miscalculated distance and Adriana twisted away at the last second. Their screams, their fight spilled out of the house, almost into the middle of camp as she kept pushing him, hitting him, the fight casting itself far into the camp. Their parents shouted after them, but neither of them listened.

The fight wasn't clean, graceful, or bloodless. At the end, Adriana nursed several bruises and cuts on her, but she laughed in triumph as the warrior infront of her came back to life, and her plan began to bloom.

The next day, Adriana worked in silence. She swept the splintered wood into neat piles, fingers raw from gathering what had once been whole. She reset beams, sanded rough edges, salvaged what she could and discarded what she couldn’t. The rhythm of repair should have calmed her. Instead, a single thought pressed harder with every breath. If the mountain could take sight, if the mountain could take flight, then sight had never been safety. It settled in her bones like iron.

That night, after chores, lectures, and laundry, she carried the thought into her father’s forge. The air was thick with the scent of oil and cooled metal, familiar and grounding. Moonlight slipped through the slats in pale stripes, catching on steel laid carefully along the walls. She stood there longer than she needed to, listening to the quiet hum of the place that had shaped her hands and hardened her spine. Her fingers found the folded training cloth, and slowly, she wrapped it around her eyes. Darkness swallowed her whole. The first wave was extremely disorienting. Every sound sharpened to something threatening: the creak of wood, the faint scrape of her own boot against dirt, the subtle shift of her wings behind her. She reached for a practice blade, steadying her breath, trying to map the room in her mind.

Her first swing was wild. Her foot caught against the bench as the blade slipped and cut her palm. She fell hard, wings slamming painfully into the floor, breath knocked from her lungs. She lay there for a moment, stinging and furious. Then she rose. She swung again. And again. Slower this time. She listened, counting the rhythm of her own breathing, while Learning the weight of silence.

It was not long before she realized she was no longer alone. Someone had followed the noise, drawn by the uneven clang of steel and the unmistakable sound of her refusing to quit. Kavian did not announce himself. He had come to understand that Adriana did not respond well to interference, only to presence. He watched her struggle through the darkness and saw not recklessness, but intention. When he stepped in, it was without spectacle. He adjusted her stance with quiet certainty, guiding rather than correcting. He moved around her in slow arcs, forcing her to track him by breath and shift of air. He became a moving shadow she had to feel rather than see. To her stone resolve, he did not soften the difficulty. He made it even harder. He forced her to rely on the smallest changes, as simple as the drag of fabric, the pulse in the air before impact, the faint disturbance of wings cutting space. When she fell, he let her. When she overcorrected, he redirected. He sharpened her instincts rather than comforting her pride. What began as stubborn defiance became discipline. Hours passed in bruises, and bloodied palms. Kavian stayed. Not out of obligation, and not out of pity. He had been watching her differently than the others. Where they saw a girl trying too hard, he saw precision waiting to be refined. Where they saw anger, he saw focus.

In the days that followed, he returned without being asked. He moved with her through the forge, through the open training fields at night, through the quiet spaces where only breath and heartbeat mattered. He became something she could measure herself against. He was not dominance, or control, but he was equal pressure. There were moments when the blades were set aside and the blindfold remained. When the world narrowed to touch and warmth and the steady presence of someone who did not treat her as fragile. She learned the map of him, of his body and pleasure the same way she learned the room. By challenge, by feel, by patience, by instinct. He did not try to dim her fury. He tempered it. And slowly, the blindfold stopped being a symbol of loss. It became a weapon.

By the time the camp began to whisper about the girl who trained without sight, Adriana no longer needed to prove why she did it. She simply moved differently now.

Adriana was not yet of age when the war came. She was strong. She was skilled in secret. She had blades that fit her hands like memory. But she was still considered too young, too untested, untrained, and too female to stand in official ranks. So she watched them leave when the call finally came. When Hybern finally made their heinous move against the lands. Seraphine armored first, her dark leathers fitted close, siphons glinting like captured firelight. There was no hesitation in her mother’s movements, no tremor in her hands. War did not frighten Seraphine. It enraged her. Torren stood beside her, wings stretching wide before folding carefully behind his back. He looked over his shoulder at Adriana only once, long enough to imprint her there, alive and whole. Caelan would have gone if he could. He did not. He stood grounded beside his sister, jaw tight, sightless eyes lifted toward a sky he could no longer see.

Kavian left with the others. He did not make promises. Illyrians did not speak false assurances before battle. He only pressed his forehead briefly to Adriana’s and let his wings brush hers once, a silent vow of return, if such things could be made. Then they were gone. She waited, but war did not send letters. It sent smoke. It sent rumor. It sent wounded and dead warriors back in waves.

Windhaven was not spared. Nothing truly was. Camps burned. Training rings collapsed into ash. Supply lines shattered. Whole units never returned. The mountain winds carried the scent of scorched leather and blood long after the battles had moved elsewhere. And all they could do was wait, Adriana and Caelan relying on each other for survival and friendship.

When it was finally over, Torren came back alive, but not whole. His wings were ruined, torn and shredded beyond healing. He walked off the transport under his own strength, but he no longer cast a shadow in the sky. He never spoke about the moment they were destroyed. He did not need to.

Seraphine did not return at all. The blast of the Cauldron had taken more than armies. It had taken mothers. Fathers. Brothers. Warriors. Entire bloodlines. Adriana never saw her mother’s body. There was no burial. No final words. Just a name spoken in hushed tones and the hollow understanding in their small circle that something brilliant had been extinguished in a flash of impossible power. The grief was not loud. It was suffocating. Caelan withdrew into a silence darker than the one that blindness had already carved into him. Torren worked the forge until his hands bled, grounding himself in heat and hammer strikes because he could no longer take to the skies.

And Kavian came back broken but breathing. His armor was dented, bloodied, and scarred. His skin marked with scars that would never fully fade. One wing bore a permanent hitch in its stretch, as if it remembered the blade that had nearly severed it. He walked with a stiffness that told its own story. But he lived, and he continued to fly. He found Adriana in forest the day he returned, quietly sobbing her grief. Neither of them spoke of relief. They did not need to.

Windhaven rebuilt, but it did not change. Even after losing females in battle, even after seeing the strength they brought to the skies, many camps doubled down. Fear masqueraded as tradition. Females were pushed harder into chores. Training windows shrank. Leadership grew more rigid, more defensive, as if the answer to loss was tighter control. Adriana watched it happen. She watched males who had hidden during battle return to bark orders. She watched females who had fought and survived be shoved back into kitchens. She watched the Camp Lord speak of rebuilding strength while denying half the camp the right to hold a blade, and in her, something inside her shifted. Grief hardened into something else. It was no longer just envy. It was no longer just frustration. It was fury. Her mother had died fighting. Her father had been grounded. The camps had burned. And still they insisted females were weak.

Adriana stopped arguing. She stopped asking. She trained harder. She trained blind. She trained until her body felt less like flesh and more like weapon. The killing power inside her did not roar. It coiled, and built, heating her gut, her brain, and her emotions.

Adriana had grown into her height by the time Cassian returned to Windhaven. She was not a child anymore. Gone was the girl eating dirt behind the training rings. She stood tall, and beautiful now. Her wings were wide, shoulders squared, her amber gaze steady in a way that made older males uncomfortable. She had been in the forge when she overheard it. Cassian was arguing with the Camp Lord. Their voices were low, and clipped. It was a discussion of losses, of decimated units, of how many camps had been reduced nearly to nothing. Of how Illyria would rebuild its strength, and finally, the argument she had heard once before of females training.

The phrase lodged like a blade under her ribs. Because strength was still being half-wasted. Females were still scrubbing floors. Females who had lost mothers in the war were still being told their place was behind a hearth. Females who could fight were still being denied blades. Adriana did not mean to interrupt, but fury did not ask permission. She stepped forward from the shadows of the forge and said what no one else dared. She said that the war had proven something. That females had died fighting. That strength did not belong only to those born male. That if Illyria wanted to rebuild, it could not afford to ignore half its warriors. She did not beg. She did not plead. She did not disrespect him. She laid it out flat, the hurt and fury carefully controlled. To her shock, Cassian listened. Not because she was firm, or even ballsy. But because he could see it. The fury, focused, and disciplined. He saw it controlled like a blade kept sheathed but sharpened daily.

He asked her questions instead of dismissing her. Asked about training. About who was ready. About how many females would step forward if given the chance. Adriana did not hesitate as she told him. It was more than they wanted to admit. Cassian’s expression had shifted then, turning calculating, strategic. He quietly told her Windhaven was not ready. Not culturally or politically for that kind of shift. Too many older males clinging to tradition mixed with too much pride tangled in old ways. But there was another option. He offered her a camp nearly destroyed in the war. Its training grounds were shattered. Its leadership was dead. Its structures burned low enough that rebuilding would be necessary anyway. It would not be easy, he warned her. It would be hostile. It would be undermined. Supplies would be limited. Support would remain uncertain. Resistance was almost certainly guaranteed. But if she wanted change… Sometimes it required new ground.

Adriana did not need time to consider. She gathered her family first. Torren, grounded but unbroken, agreed without hesitation. If he could no longer take to the skies, he would build the ground others stood on. Caelan, sightless and sharper than ever, volunteered to train by sound and instinct. His voice alone could map a battlefield. Seraphine was gone, but her legacy was not. Then Adriana went to the females.

She spoke to the ones scrubbing floors with raw hands. To the ones who had lost sisters in the war and been told to move on. To the ones who had watched their wings be threatened since childhood. She did not promise them ease. She promised war, but a different kind of war. One fought against whispers and laws and centuries of dismissal. Some were afraid. Many more were furious. Enough stepped forward. And, of course, Kavian. Kavian came because she asked. Not as a lover clinging to memory, or as a male trying to protect her. He came as a warrior who had seen battle and understood what Illyria truly needed. He knew her fire was not rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It was survival.

Together they left Windhaven. They traveled to Bloodwing’s ruins, broken stone, charred beams, training rings overtaken by weeds and ash. The travel was harsh, and the camp was ugly. It was so ugly, it was raw, but it was perfect. They rebuilt with their own hands. Torren forged weapons from salvaged steel. Caelan taught blind training drills in the open fields. Kavian drilled mixed units without hesitation, pairing males and females without apology, at least the few males that were willing to be here and train. Eventually, a Camp Lord was assigned to Bloodwing, but he held no interest, and no value in the females training. He did little better than sit on his ass and scratch his balls most of the day.

The first official female-focused war camp began not with ceremony, but with defiance. Males laughed at first. Other camps muttered. Some tried to sabotage supply lines. Some sent not at all veiled threats. But Bloodwing trained anyway. They bled anyway, they rose anyway, they succeeded anyways.

The real battle had not been on the warfront. For the females, it had just begun. And Adriana was ready for it.

Adriana trained for months with the females in her camp, and after a while, they were handed a training manual straight from Cassian. Adriana burned with excitement as she learned it was the book of Valkyrie training, and immediately, she began implementing the techniques, to not only her training, but her daily life as well.

But all the training was for the one and only thing Adriana wanted. The Blood Rite. She knew it was coming. Every Illyrian knew. But that knowledge, as it loomed over head, only made Adriana and the females train harder.

The camp slept beneath a quiet blanket of mountain snow the night they finally came. The fires had burned low. The wind scraped across the stone walls of the hold in long mournful sighs. Adriana never even made it fully out of sleep before hands seized her. A cloth was pressed hard over her mouth before she could even shout. She fought anyway. Instinct demanded it. Her elbow cracked into someone’s ribs and she twisted hard enough to send another stumbling back, but the poison had already begun its work, and no Illyrian could resist the drug as her world went black.

When Adriana woke, the sky above her was pale gray and endless. The air smelled of pine, frost, and blood. For several long seconds she simply lay there, staring up through the branches while her head pounded and the world swayed around her. Then the cold finally bit through the thin clothes she had slept in and forced her fully awake, and she knew in a heartbeat. She knew the forest immediately. Her wings were bound tightly behind her back, rope cutting cruelly into the membrane. The ground beneath her was damp with pine needles and frozen dirt. She had nothing, and no one but herself.

Somewhere in the forest, someone screamed. Another scream answered it, abruptly cut short. Adriana closed her eyes once and forced her breathing steady, forcing herself to use that darkness. Panic got people killed in the first hour. She rolled onto her side and found a jagged stone half buried in the soil and realized the Blood Rite had begun.

The first day was chaos. Warriors scattered across the forest like wounded animals, all of them searching for the same thing: supplies. Adriana avoided the first few people she encountered. Groups formed quickly, desperate alliances built on fear. She watched from the trees while two males nearly killed each other over a single make-shift weapon while surveying the bodies they had left. She waited until the survivors left. Then she took what they had dropped. The forest rewarded her patience with a small stone weapon that must’ve fallen off one of the warriors. Or something else. She didn’t know, care or question.

On the second night, as Adriana was hunting down specific, strong rocks, a group of males spotted her moving through the trees. Their laughter carried through the dark long before they reached her, their taunts the same slurs she’d been hearing for months. ’Bloodwing Bitch.’ Adriana didn’t waste words. The first one came at her with a make-shift blade. She stepped inside his swing and drove her small dagger into the soft space beneath his ribs, and twisted, before pulling it out and slamming it into his jaw. She didn’t think before she caught the weapon he had dropped upon death, and slashed it, as she had been taught, just upward enough to cut the second’s throat.

The third had smiled, but he had vanished before she could turn on him, and Adriana knew she didn’t have time to waste as she stripped the bodies of anything useful, or warm.

By the third day, Adriana began noticing the subtle signs as she moved. More than once she caught sight of groups moving between the pines, scanning the undergrowth. Quickly, she realized something very crucial: they were hunting her. She adapted quickly. She stopped sleeping in the open. She moved very, very carefully at night, using bodies to lure the beasts out of her path, or to her enemies camps, and hid during the day. When larger groups passed nearby, she melted into the forest floor and let them move on.

But sometimes there was no avoiding them. Sometimes they found her. One fight bled into another. Two males near a creek who thought she was too small to be dangerous. Three more at a makeshift camp who realized too late she had been watching them from the trees. Another pair who tried to corner her against a rocky slope. The fights were ugly, and brutal. Adriana didn’t think about anything but the dance and the art of war as bodies filled the forest around her.

Days later the trees finally thinned. Ramiel rose ahead of her like a wall of dark stone clawing into the clouds. Most warriors reached the mountain alone. Adriana ultimately didn’t. She found him lying in the snow near the lower slopes. One wing was shredded so badly the snow beneath him had frozen black with blood, and a large slice almost his entire stomach. He had clearly fought hard to get this far, but he had been attacked and left for dead. Adriana stood over him for a long moment. The peak waited somewhere high above the clouds. The greatest honor an Illyrian warrior could claim. Leaving him would make the climb possible, but in that moment, all she could think about was Caelan.

Instead she crouched beside him. When he stirred weakly, she hauled his arm over her shoulders and forced him to his feet, the same way she had forced Caelan to his. Unfortunately, they didn’t go unnoticed. Warriors moving along the slopes quickly spotted them, and assumed. A female dragging a wounded male. The Bloodwing bitch again.

The first group came at dusk as Adriana was attempting to clean his wounds once again. Four males stepped out from the rocks with weapons already drawn. The wounded male barely had time to react before one of them kicked him hard enough to send him collapsing into the snow. Another grabbed Adriana by the shoulder and shoved her back, trying to pin her. Without mercy, the first man died with her jagged stone in his throat. The second lost his balance when she smashed his knee sideways with another rock. She held his head beneath the snow until he stopped struggling. The other two tried to fight too, but Adriana’s energy was too hot, burned so deep that the killing didn’t stop. More warriors found them on the slopes in the hours that followed. Some came hunting her specifically. Others simply saw an opportunity too tempting to ignore. Adriana fought them all, with anything and everything she could, refusing to give up. The wounded male survived because she refused to fall.

By the time the snow finally stopped falling that night, the lower slopes of Ramiel were littered with the bodies of warriors who had thought killing a Bloodwing female would be easy. Adriana stood in the middle of it, shaking with exhaustion, her knuckles split and her clothes soaked dark with blood. Behind her, the wounded male still breathed, and as the sun touched the sky on the final day, Adriana realized something. She had given up the summit. But she had not failed the Rite.

When the surviving warriors finally returned to their camps and the stories began spreading, the Illyrian commanders listened carefully. Adriana had entered the Rite already wearing three siphons. By the time it ended, she had proven something that left no room for argument, even from those who tried. Her killing power demanded containment. She was awarded her remaining three siphons soon after. It wasn’t for reaching the top of the mountain. It was for what she had done on its slopes that was something far rarer. She had survived a hunt meant to break her. And turned it into a massacre instead.