The hallways were damp and dripping with the near-overpowering scent of grimy seawater.

She sighed. It was absolutely going to ruin her boots, but she'd come this far. She supposed the hallways were long enough for at least part of her wings, but honestly, she preferred finding humans in their natural state. It made the situation far easier to judge, the honesty of their surprise, their reaction when they realised who stood before them. It was worth at least one pair of wet, damp boots.

She continued forward. The smell of the strange spice was harder to make out among the seawater, but it was still present. She kept her pointed ears pricked, listening for voices, for heartbeats...

She scowled at the water, dripping from the ceiling and into the well-settled puddles among the stone in haphazard patterns. They didn't drip one after the other--no. They dripped at different rates, large drops and small ones to create such discord that she almost decided to make the ocean's destruction her next goal.

Instead, she just pressed her hands over her ears.

By the blood of the old, it was so distracting. How did the humans cope?

She steadied herself with a breath and lowered her hands. It was just water and noise. She'd heard worse screeching from her various snacks of the last year. She could handle a little dripping.

A minute later, her hands were back over her ears.

She stalked forward with a scowl firmly set into her features, and it was like that she met her first set of guards.

Three of them, to be precise, sitting around a table playing cards on a slightly elevated section of floor. They were all wearing the same, grimy tunic bearing the same wiggly circle with the hand below it, over their armour. It looked ridiculous really--bright yellows like that just didn't stay clean for long, and as an immortal with exceptional eyesight she could confirm it was definitely not their colour.

"Why hello," she said, taking her hands away from her ears and ensuring her hood remained in place. "I'm looking for Emily. Do you know where I might find her?"

All three of them rose out of their seat, grabbed their weapons, demanded to know who she was, the usual routine that was so mundane by this point that she found herself covering a yawn. Honestly, what did it take to get people to have a little creativity for once?

Well, she supposed she hadn't been giving them much to work with. She usually just entered dramatically then waited for their reactions. Perhaps if she did something different, took a little inspiration from the rather curious game of 'Magic and Monsters' that Ted had explained the basics of. Pretending to be someone else, fighting, interacting, bluffing your way through situations.

Roleplaying, he'd called it.

She swept her cloak off one shoulder and strode forward, slamming her hands flat on the table.

"You three dare to ask who I am? Perhaps I should be asking who you are--and whether I should be taking your colours next!"

She wasn't quite sure why 'taking your colours' was supposed to be a threat--anyone who'd seen what they looked like wearing that yellow would probably thank her for it--but she'd heard the military-oriented humans use it enough, and it seemed to have the same cowing effect on these three idiots here.

She straightened up, giving each of them a derisive look. "Are you honestly telling me that you forgot I was coming? Ted assured me that everything had been prepared for my arrival. How do you expect me to completely my sacred duty with guards who would sit around and play cards on such an important day?"

All three of them just looked at each other, weapons still drawn and pointed at her as they tried to figure out exactly what was going on.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," said one of them eventually. "We, well, weren't expecting anyone. We're just guardsman, we aren't told anything vital to the mission."

"Yet you are still expected to be competent," she shot back. "Must I remind you of our mission?"

They just looked at her. Damn. She'd been hoping they'd reply.

She folded her arms, raising a careful eyebrow. "Now I really am concerned. Do you three know your mission, the pledge you made to those colours you wear?"

They droned in unison: "To protect the light, to guard the dawn, to raise the sun once more."

She reached through the memories she'd tasted in the blood of those in the previous room. One of their memories was little more than pages upon pages of words--scripture, he called it. In them, she realised the wobbly-edged circle was, in fact, supposed to be a sun. Well. That did make sense, and it appeared she'd stumbled onto a sun-cult, of all things.

It made her all the more curious. The man with the knife in his back had quite a clear mission. He was to bring Emily back, alive, with his companions to this hell-hole of a dungeon hidden under the harbour, but what by the stars did a sun cult want with a girl?

Perhaps she could find out.

"A little more enthusiasm would be nice the next time," she said. "Our mission is a sacred one. The night is strong, but not eternal. The dawn must come. You must never forget that."

"Yes, ma'am."

And that was it. Without any Persuasion, thralls, or other night-blessed means, all three of them had accepted her as the authority because she'd thrown a bit of confidence around and yelled a lot.

Humans were strange.

She flicked a hand towards their drawn swords. "Now that we've got that sorted out, put those away." They nodded and complied. "I'll return to my original question: where is Emily?"

"The girl they brought in a few days ago?" She didn't answer them, leaving them to leap to assumptions on their own. "We assumed she would be like the others. We didn't realise she was special."

There was the taste of... something reeking off their skin. Nerves.

It set her stomach boiling with suspicion.

"I understand that you are mere guardsman," she said slowly. "But surely you know at least a little of the work we are doing here to know better than to potentially sabotage it."

All three of them were definitely worried about something.

"We--we'd heard whispers that they were looking for the girl they thought sun-blessed, but well, they've been doing this for months now, they keep bringing in the blonde ones in the hopes that it might be the Queen of Dawn, but they never are, it's always just another peasant girl--"

Just another peasant girl.

She regarded each and every one of them, letting a flicker of her fury reach into her glare.

One of them swallowed and began to speak. "Ma'am, we're sorry, we weren't told--"

"Are you going to tell me what you did to Emily, or shall I ask her myself?"

"W...we only did what we did to the others--it wasn't anything--"

"Take me to her."

"Ma'am, please, she's--"

"Take me to her."

She didn't need Persuasion to get them moving. As the acrid stench of urine reeked out of the left one's pants, all three of them gave her a stiff nod and death-marched down the middle corridor.

They didn't speak a word as they crossed an ankle-deep river of filth across their path. They didn't look anywhere but straight ahead as the walls changed from solid and straight to grate-covered indents in the walls, barely large enough for a human to lay diagonally across without curling.

In each indent, chained to their grates, was a girl.

All of them were blonde, though with the muck covering their hair it was nearly impossible to tell. They were all dressed in the same, white robe. Some were more ripped than others, with barely enough left to cover their modesty, let alone stop them from shivering. Most of them barely had enough of a heartbeat to hear over the drip-drip-drip of the water.

Three. Four. Five. Six. Six too many girls who had been chained to the heavy metal grates like animals. Most of them heard the footsteps and didn't bother calling out. They just crawled as far back into their indent as they could to shake inside the shadows.

Until they reached the end.

Emily was, like the rest, chained to her grate. Her robe was filthy. Her skin was raw and bleeding in multiple places. There were bruises across her face, her arms, her neck--but her eyes were blazing with a core of fire.

"What?" demanded Emily. She pulled against her bindings. "Come back for more, you creeps? Friends this time? Not afraid to show off your tiny swords to someone who can laugh at it without being backhanded?" Her eyes swept past the three guards and landed on her. "And who are you? Friend of theirs? You gonna assess me like the last one did?"

"W--we--" The guard cleared his throat as his voice came out as barely a squeak. "We had to move this one, ma'am. She was urging the others--giving them ideas, but if we were to give her another week, she'll be ready."

"You think this is anything?" screeched Emily. "I lived with my father for eighteen years. You bastards are nothing. Nothing."

The dark, swirling void of the eternal night within her chest stirred, ready to rise up and devour these putrid, rotten--No. She calmed herself.

This was not her revenge. Not this time.

It took every little piece of strength she had to keep her voice modulated. "Ready for what?"

"Training," replied the guard, a little more confident this time. "Girls who are deemed to not be the Queen of Dawn are inducted into our order correctly and then given as wives to loyal members of our order, so we may bear children who are fit to carry on our sacred mission."

"Ah, yes," she said. "Your mission, that would require you to beat and abuse girls like Emily because the sun is absent. Because within the darkness, your crimes against your own species do not count, that these girls do not matter in view of the bigger picture?"

The guard looked at her. "Ma'am?"

She pulled down her cowl, tugging it off her crown of horns as the fabric snagged.

This time, it wasn't just the left guard who lost control of his bladder.

"I am here to tell you, that I am the darkness, and I have seen what you are. I have seen what your species has become, what was festering beneath the surface even while the sun still shone from the heavens above."

She stepped forward.

All three of them fell to their knees.

"The sun has set, and with it, mercy, patience, and tolerance for such hideous acts of brutality has passed. The darkness will not forgive. The darkness will not forget. You think it your ally, your excuse, but it will reveal every piece of the evil that has always laid within you and transform you into what you humans have always been: your own executioners."

The night within her stirred.

She reached back, casting her hand down the hall and letting an echo of its might swirl down the hallway, erasing the gates and the chains. It brushed against the girls, gentle, solemn and steadying. It was no harsh light, jolting them back to consciousness, but a soft, humming darkness that lifted them back to what they were.

As the night stirred the girls back to life, she turned her gaze back to the three guards.

"You will not harm these girls," she said, Persuasion filling her voice. "Aside from that, you will retain your wills. You will remain conscious. You may beg. You may plead. Your fates are left to them. You may make no move to defend yourself physically or run from their judgement unless they so will it. You will agree to their demands. You will comply with their requests."

With a final gesture, the night erased the steel between Emily and the world, leaving its sole existence within her gaze.

She looked towards Emily, and on impulse, inclined her head.

There was a strength to this girl. A strength and a will that... well, she hadn't seen since her own reflection disappeared.

"You may take however long you wish with them," she said, as Emily slowly stood up, clearly wary for some trick. "I'll be waiting just down the hall when you're finished. Simply follow the line."

She pulled off a glove, extended a claw, and scraped it across the wall. A pitch-black line etched into the stone, and not waiting for a reply, she turned and strode back the way she'd came, past the girls who were now standing, with shadows trailing behind them like wings.

She didn't stop them, didn't give them suggestions, didn't do anything except continue to walk with a satisfied smirk on her face when the first of the guardsmen screamed.

Yes, she decided. Screams like those were far more pleasing to the ear than the infernal drips of the water, but they were not her screams to enjoy.

It left her with some time to kill. She didn't wish to hurry Emily and the other girls through their revenge, but neither did she wish to remain bored.

She took out the figurine of the woman mid-swing of a sword out of her pocket and turned it over in her hands.

With any luck, Ted hadn't woken from her Persuasion yet. She had rather enjoyed her little impromptu roleplay, and it had been rather successful. Assuming his mind was still mostly in one piece, she could have him explain the rules of that curious roleplaying game further.

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