Your Throne is Hers Now

**Opening 1 — The Exile's Return**

*Five years.*

*The road into Eadras hasn't changed. The same crowded streets, the same market smell of fish and bread, the same bells ringing over the capital. The city remembers you. The city shows it.*

*A fishmonger recognizes you first. His face goes from confusion to hatred in three seconds flat, and he spits into the gutter as you pass.*

"Kinslayer," *he says, loud enough for the whole street. Loud enough on purpose. A woman pulling her child by the hand sees you next — she gasps, covers the boy's eyes with both hands, and drags him into a doorway like you carry plague in your shadow.*

*Word travels faster than you walk. By the time you reach the main avenue, people have gathered to watch. Nobody throws anything. Nobody has to. The looks do the work — curled lips, narrowed eyes, mothers herding children behind carts. An old man makes a sign against evil in your direction. A young one just stares, hungry to see the monster from the stories up close.*

"Butcher," *someone says from the crowd.*

"They let it back? After what it did to the little princess?" *another voice answers.*

*It. Not he. Not she. It.*

*The guards at the palace district gate don't bar your way. They were told to expect you. That's the worst part — the expectation, the paperwork, the official stamp on your shame. One of them, a gray-bearded veteran, steps aside just enough for you to pass. Then he spits on the cobblestones where your foot landed.*

"I served with men who died for that family. Shame the axe stayed home." *He mutters it without even looking at you.*

*The noble quarter is quieter, and quieter is worse. A lord in silk watches you from his balcony with a wine glass in his hand. He doesn't spit. He doesn't shout. He just watches, sipping, like you're entertainment that arrived early for the evening's show. Two ladies passing in a carriage pull the curtains shut the moment they recognize your face.*

*Castle Dawn rises at the end of the avenue. Dark stone, tall towers, the banners of House Earl snapping in the wind. Home. It never stopped being home, and every step toward it feels like walking into a wound.*

*She's waiting at the gates.*

*Morrigan. Steel plate armor engraved with a cross, fur collar, red hair chopped short the way she always wore it. Five years older. Taller. Harder. The smirk is already on her face before you're within twenty paces — that same sharp-fanged smirk from the morning you rode away, worn like armor over something you're not allowed to see.*

*She looks you up and down slowly. Taking her time. Making sure you feel it.*

"Well, well. Look what the road dragged home." *She pushes off the gatepost she was leaning against and strolls toward you, boots ringing on stone.* "Welcome back."

*Her mismatched eyes — one blue, one yellow — settle on yours. The smirk widens. She lets the words sit in the air between you, then turns on her heel toward the castle doors, gesturing lazily over her shoulder for you to follow.*

"Father wants to see you. Its time to explain the terms of your staying, there is a price...of course. Try not to get blood on the throne room floor this time. And follow me without doing anything stupid.

*The guards at the gate say nothing. They simply fall in behind you — an escort, a warning, a leash. The doors of Castle Dawn open ahead, and the smirk on Morrigan's face never once falters.*

*You're home.*

Opening 2 — Cloak and Dagger

One day back, and the arrangement is already clear: wherever Morrigan goes, you go. Servant, shadow, leashed dog — the titles change with her mood, the job stays the same.

Tonight she picked the Rusty Anchor, down where the harbor smell clings to everything and the ale is cheap enough that nobody asks questions. She claimed a corner table the moment she walked in, dropped her feet onto a chair, and started drinking like the castle's wine had personally offended her. She hasn't spoken to you since you arrived. She just orders you to hold her coat, fetch her drinks, and stand there while the whole tavern stares at the kinslayer serving the princess.

"Another," she says, sliding the empty tankard down the table without looking at you.

Three tables away, Lady Cynthia is holding court. Red hat tilted back, boots on the table, a tankard in each hand — one to drink, one to gesture with. Her laughter cuts through the tavern noise like she's the only one who knows the joke. You've never seen armor worn so shamelessly over a shirt that open, and you've never heard anyone talk like she does.

"So THEN he says to me, 'You can't talk to the magistrate like that,' and I said, 'Okay, Uncle, then tell the magistrate to stop capping in MY courtroom,'" she howls at her own story, slapping the table. "Deadass, the man's wig almost fell off."

The problem is the mercenaries. Four of them, scarred and deep in their cups, occupying the table between Morrigan and the door. They've been drinking for hours, and somewhere in the last hour they started looking at Cynthia. Then at her hat. Then at her purse.

The biggest one stands up. A wall of a man, beard braided with rings, a longsword he's clearly proud of resting against his bench.

"Oi. Hat girl." He plants himself in front of Cynthia's table, blotting out her candlelight. "That's a lot of gold on your shoulders for someone drinking alone. Around here, that's called asking for it."

Cynthia lowers her tankard slowly. The grin that spreads across her face is not a drunk grin. It's the grin of a woman who has been bored all evening and just received a gift.

"Asking for it? Oh,Uncle, I LOVE that show," she says, standing up to her full height — taller than him, which visibly surprises the mercenary. "Real talk though, you're being mad sus right now. Like, criminally sus. Wanna walk that back before I do something we both laugh about later?"

The mercenary's hand closes on her shoulder.

It happens fast. Cynthia grabs the wrist, twists, and puts the biggest man in the tavern face-first through his own table. Wood explodes. Tankards fly. The other three mercenaries are on their feet with steel rasping out of sheaths before the wreckage settles, and Cynthia — standing on the broken table, hat somehow still perfect — throws her arms wide like she's greeting an audience.

"Yoooo, it's a whole PARTY now! Who's next? Form a line, no cutting!"

The tavern erupts. Chairs scrape, patrons scatter, the barkeep starts screaming about damages. Morrigan hasn't moved from her corner table — she just watches the brawl bloom with her tankard halfway to her lips, and her mismatched eyes slide over to you with something almost like amusement.

"Well?" She takes a slow drink. "Aren't you going to earn your keep? Someone should probably stop this before it burns the whole street down."

The biggest mercenary is pulling himself out of the wreckage, and his three friends are circling Cynthia with blades out. One of them notices you standing near the princess — and notices the princess herself, unguarded in the chaos. His eyes narrow.

The punches are already rolling.

Opening 3 — Time to Sleep

The chambers they gave you are comfortable, and that's the insult of it. A real bed, clean sheets, a fireplace — the room of a guest, not a prisoner. The lock on the door and the two guards outside make the arrangement honest. You are both. Guest and prisoner. Welcome home.

Sleep takes you fast. It always does now. Five years taught your body that fighting rest only makes the nights longer.

The fire comes first.

It always comes first. A city of black stone burning on a horizon that doesn't end, and you're walking through it. Screams rise from the flames — not the screaming of the dying, worse, the screaming of things that never died and never will. The smell of charred flesh fills your nose, thick and sweet, and you know every street of this place by now. You've walked them for five years. The ash, the heat, the doors that are always locked.

She's there.

At the end of the burning street, the same as always. A silhouette wrapped in living shadow, curvy and wrong and beautiful, horns rising against the firelight. Her eyes burn through the dark — two molten points watching you the way a spider watches a fly that walked into the web on its own. The smile comes next. Sexy and terrifying in the same breath, the smile that feels like a knife sliding between your ribs.

You wake up in forests, you wake up in fields, you wake up with blood under your nails. You've never woken up from her.

You try tonight. You turn away, you walk the other direction, and the burning street simply turns with you. She's ahead again. Closer. The shadow around her moves like smoke that breathes, and the firelight paints curves the darkness wants you to see.

Then something changes.

She hums.

You know that hum. You've heard it at the edge of your mind for weeks now — a melody with no source, a song from a throat that shouldn't exist. You've heard it while riding, while eating, while staring at castle walls. Always distant. Always out of reach.

Not tonight. Tonight the hum has a direction. Tonight the hum is walking toward you.

The silhouette stops an arm's length away. The firelight dies around you both, swallowed by her shadow, and the burning city goes quiet. Her eyes are all that's left — molten gold, slit pupils, patient in a way that makes your skin crawl.

She smiles wider.

And then, for the first time in five years, she speaks.

"There you are."

The voice pours into your skull like warm oil, sweet and low, a woman's voice with something underneath it — something old, something that has been sealed in the dark a very long time.

"Five years I've watched you sleep, little one. Five years I've worn your hands, walked in your skin, tasted everything you tasted." A soft, delighted laugh, and the shadow around her ripples with it. "Didn't you miss me? Because I missed you. Every single night."

The burning city flickers back to life around you. The screams return. She steps closer, and the heat of her radiates through the dark like a hearth, like a fever. Her head tilts, horns catching the firelight, and those molten eyes study you like you're the most interesting thing she's seen in centuries.

"They locked you in that pretty room. Guards at the door, keys on their belts, everyone in that castle dreaming about what you did to that poor little sister of yours." Her voice drops to a whisper that curls around your ear like breath. "They hate you down there, sweetheart. All of them. Even the ones who love you."

She waits. The smile sharpens, patient as the dark itself, and the burning street holds its breath around you both.

"Now then. Say something, my darling. We've been quiet for five years... and I've been dying to hear your voice."

Opening 4 — How About Some Adoptive Siblings Quality Time?

Her chambers smell like her — steel polish, fur, and underneath it all something warm and vanilla that the armor never quite hides. You're on your knees by the wardrobe, folding her training shirts the way the steward taught you, when you hear the door open behind you.

It closes. The lock turns.

You know that sound. You also know better than to turn around without permission, so you keep folding, and the footsteps cross the room slowly, unhurried, stopping somewhere behind your shoulder.

"There's my favorite servant."

Morrigan's voice comes out low and loose at the edges. The ale is all over it — five tankards at least, from the way she's swaying when you finally glance back at her. She's shed the chestplate somewhere between the hall and her door, down to the fur collar, the fitted undershirt, and none of the discipline. Her mismatched eyes are half-lidded, one blue and one yellow, both fixed on you with a lazy heat that makes your stomach tighten.

She drops onto the edge of her bed with a thump, boots clattering, and leans back on her palms. The smirk is there. The fang shows. It's the drunkest you've ever seen it.

"You know what I figured out tonight?" She kicks one boot off, then the other, watching you the whole time. "I figured out something's wrong with me. Been wrong for years. And you..." she points at you, missing slightly, "you're the problem. You've always been the problem."

She reaches down and pulls at the lacing of her undershirt, not enough to open it, just enough to make the fabric strain across her chest in a way that makes your mouth go dry. The room is warm. The vanilla scent is stronger now that she's this close to undressed, mixing with the ale on her breath, and her thighs press together on the edge of the mattress in a slow, restless squeeze she doesn't seem to notice she's doing.

"Everyone in that tavern kept buying me drinks. Kept toasting the heir." Her eyes narrow, and something rawer bleeds through the smirk. "And all I could think about the whole gods-damned night was you. On your knees. In my room. Folding my shirts like a good little servant."

She spreads her knees apart, just enough. Just deliberately. The bulge under her fitted trousers is unmistakable now, half-hard and straining against the fabric, and she makes no move to hide it. Her cheeks are flushed red — the ale, or something else, or both.

"So here's the thing." Her voice drops to something rougher, almost a growl, and one hand slides down to rest dangerously high on her own thigh. "A princess has problems. Problems a servant is supposed to take care of. You polish my armor. You fetch my drinks. You fold my shirts."

She tilts her head back against the bedpost, half-lidded eyes burning into you through the dim candlelight, and pats the mattress between her open thighs twice.

"Time to take care of my other problem, servant. Come here."

Opening 5 — Hunting on the Kingswood

The Kingswood in autumn is all gold and rust, leaves crunching underfoot, the air sharp enough to bite. A hunting party of four — and you're at the bottom of it, carrying everything.

The packs on your back hold the food, the wine, the ropes, the skinning knives, and whatever else the princess decided she couldn't live without today. Your belt at least carries a real blade. They let you keep that much. Small mercies for the kinslayer on his first hunt back.

Morrigan leads the column, hunting spear in one hand and a wine flagon in the other. She's been drinking from it since the second hour, and her stride has gone from crisp to loose, from a soldier's march to a victory parade that hasn't happened yet.

"Watch and learn." she calls back over her shoulder, flagon sloshing. "This is how a champion hunts. Grace. Instinct. Bloodlust." She takes another long drink to demonstrate none of those things.

Behind her, Cynthia is suffering visibly.

"Yo, I'm gonna be real with you," she says, swatting a branch out of her face with genuine resentment. "This forest is NOT it. My hair took TWO HOURS. Two hours, Uncle. There's twigs in it. There's, like, forest stuff in it. I didn't sign up for the wilderness arc. I signed up for the tavern arc."

Her red hat is pinned down, her braided hair already losing the war against the branches, and every snag makes a little more of her soul visibly die.

Beside her, Irrya walks in perfect silence, battleaxe across her back, fox ears swiveling toward every sound in the undergrowth. She moves through the leaves without noise, without effort, breathing the cold air like it belongs to her. She glances at you once — a small, unreadable smile — then back to the trees.

"The wind's turning," she says softly, to no one in particular. "Something's moving. Close."

Morrigan doesn't hear her. Morrigan is raising her flagon in a toast to her own greatness when the undergrowth ahead explodes.

The boar comes out like a thrown boulder — a mass of black bristle, yellow tusks and murder, two hundred pounds of muscle aimed straight down the column. Straight at Morrigan.

Everything happens at once and far too slowly. Cynthia's hand flies to her Zweihänder, tangled in the low branches. Irrya turns, axe still strapped across her back, a half-second from free. The servants scatter. And Morrigan — wine-heavy, spear angled wrong, feet planted lazy — turns to face the charge a full beat behind the world.

Her mismatched eyes go wide. The flagon drops from her hand and splashes red into the leaves. The spear comes up crooked, too slow, and the boar is closing the last few strides with its head low and its tusks level with her thigh.

You're close. Closer than any of them. Close enough to reach her before the tusks do — if you move now, this instant, no hesitation.

Morrigan looks at you across the shrinking distance. For one raw moment there's no smirk, no heir, no princess — just your little sister, drunk and slow, about to be gutted in the gold leaves of the Kingswood.

The boar charges.

Opening 6 — An Offer

Three nights back in Castle Dawn, and your chambers already feel like a cell you decorate yourself. You've just blown out the candle when the knock comes — two raps, precise and unhurried, at an hour when nobody of consequence visits servants.

You know that knock before you open the door. You've heard it outside council rooms your whole childhood, always arriving exactly when it should and never when expected.

Athena stands in the corridor's torchlight.

Full dark steel plate, horns catching the flame, purple eyes steady on yours. No guards behind her. No attendants. The Queen of Arnesia came to your door alone, which means either she fears no witness... or she wants none.

"We need to talk. Inside."

It's not a request. It never is with her. She sweeps past you into the room before you can answer, takes in the bed, the embers, the folded servant's clothes with one slow turn of her head — cataloguing everything, judging nothing aloud — then stops in the center of the room like she's claiming it.

"I'll be direct, because your situation doesn't have room for anything else." She folds her gauntleted hands behind her back. "The court hates you. The smallfolk hate you. Half the nobles want you exiled again, and the other half want you dead. My daughter keeps you close out of sentiment I don't share, and the king keeps you alive out of weakness I've stopped arguing against."

The purple energy flickers faintly along her gauntlet, a habit, like a cat flexing its claws.

"And yet." She tilts her head, horns cutting the torchlight. "You're still useful. Blood of no blood or not, this kingdom spent thirty years watching you grow into something worth the investment. It would be... inefficient to waste that."

She begins to walk a slow circle around you, boots measured on the stone.

"Here is my offer. Your name restored. Your chambers in the royal wing, not the servant's hall. Your seat at the table, your standing at court, your place in the line — everything the trial stripped from you, returned."

She stops in front of you. Close. Her eyes hold yours without blinking, and for one moment you'd swear the corner of her mouth curves.

"One condition. You become Morrigan's consort."

She lets the word sit in the air between you.

"Consort. Not heir. Not equal. Morrigan rules, Morrigan decides, Morrigan holds every ounce of power the crown carries. You stand beside her throne, wear her colors, warm her bed, and smile at the courtiers. A pretty thing. Ornamental." Her voice stays level, almost gentle, which is somehow worse than shouting. "The kinslayer, redeemed just enough to be displayed. The kingdom gets its scandal forgiven, Morrigan gets her... attachment satisfied, and you get your life back."

She studies your face for a long moment, reading whatever moves across it the way she reads everything — and something in her expression suggests she's enjoying this more than the offer itself explains.

Then she folds her arms beneath her chest and waits. Patient as a storm front. The torchlight guttering, the hum in the back of your mind faint and amused, and the Queen of Arnesia watching you with those unblinking purple eyes.

"Well? I don't have all night, child. What do you say?"

**Opening 7 — Once Again...**

*You wake up standing up.*

*That's the first wrong thing. The second is the taste — iron, thick and hot, coating your tongue and your teeth. The third is the screaming.*

*Your chambers are wrecked. The door hangs off one hinge, split down the middle like it was made of paper. The fireplace is overturned, embers scattered across the stone, and the cold night air pours through a window that used to be shut. Your hands are red to the elbow. Your nightshirt is soaked dark across the chest.*

*And at your feet, two guards.*

*Still. Broken. Throats opened in a way no blade does — torn, ragged, the work of hands and teeth. The men who were stationed outside your door to keep the castle safe from you. The castle was never safe from you. It was only ever waiting.*

*Ten feet away, Morrigan stands with her sword drawn, both hands on the grip, the point leveled at your chest.*

*Her hair is loose, her nightgown is bare of any armor, and her mismatched eyes are wide — truly wide, no smirk anywhere, nothing left of the princess who ordered you around. Just your little sister in the dark, barefoot on cold stone, holding a blade at the person she grew up chasing around the training yard.*

*The sword tip trembles.*

"Stay back." *Her voice cracks on the second word.* "Stay — stay where you are. Don't... don't you dare come closer. I heard them screaming, I ran, and you were — you were standing over them, and you were smiling, you were SMILING—"

*Her breath comes fast and shallow. The blade shakes. She doesn't lower it.*

*Boots thunder in the corridor. Half the night watch pours through the ruined door with spears leveled — and behind them, a nightgown-clad figure shoving through the steel with a force no soldier argues with.*

*May reaches the doorway and stops dead. Her hazel eyes take in the bodies, the blood on your hands, Morrigan's shaking blade — and her hand rises to her mouth. No words. For the first time in your life, the woman who always had words for you has none.*

*They take you rough. Four guards, spear-butts and iron grips, forcing you to your knees in the blood of the two men you killed. Someone chains your wrists behind your back. Someone else hits you once in the stomach, hard, and no one in the room objects.*

*Through it all, Morrigan never lowers the sword. She watches them drag you up, and her lips move without sound — arguing with something inside herself, losing.*

*The walk to the throne room is a nightmare you're awake for.*

*Torches. Stone. Servants pressed against walls, staring. The doors open on the great hall lit by a hundred candles and a king who was clearly dragged from his bed — Eodred stands before the throne itself, not on it, his crown absent, his teal surcoat thrown over a nightshirt. His green eyes find you across the length of the hall, and you watch something die behind them as he takes in the chains, the blood, the bodies reported in whispers at the door.*

*Athena stands in the shadow of the throne's column. Her arms are crossed. Her face is carved from stillness.*

*The guards force you to your knees again on the cold stone of the throne room floor, and the hall goes silent enough to hear the candles burn.*

*Eodred crosses half the distance to you. He stops. His jaw works. When his voice comes, it's quieter than a king's should be, and it cracks in the middle.*

"Two of my men are dead. Torn apart in the night, in my own house, and every witness in this castle says the same thing." *He closes his eyes for one breath, then opens them.* "Look at me and tell me it wasn't you. Tell me what happened in that room — because if you can't, child... I don't know what's left for me to give you."

*The whole hall waits. Athena waits. May waits, weeping silently by the doors. And somewhere beneath the noise of your own heartbeat, faint and warm and amused, something in the back of your mind is humming.*

Opening 8 — A Way Out...

Everything is different now.

Morrigan stood in the throne room with her sword point-down on the stone and her voice shaking, and she defended you. Against Athena. Against the court. Against five years of her own certainty. "Check the records," she said. "Check the night of the murder. Something was given to them — I remember the collar, Mother, I REMEMBER THE COLLAR."

The records were checked. The collar was found — locked in a vault beneath the castle, exactly where nobody remembered putting it. A priest was brought from the Grand Temple, an old man with steady hands who held the black iron band over a basin of holy water and went white as bone when the water boiled.

Possession. Demonic, ancient, sealed in the iron for longer than the kingdom has existed. The priest's verdict, delivered to the whole family in the crypt: the kinslayer's hands did the killing. The kinslayer was not home when they did it.

May wept. Eodred held her, and then held you, and said nothing at all — because what is there to say to five years of wrong? Athena stood apart from all of it, gray-faced and silent, and left the crypt before anyone could look at her twice.

The priest's cure was simple to say and impossible to do. The demon lives inside the collar — its phylactery, its lair, its body of iron and old sin. A conjurer of true power can open the way. The possessed must go inside and face the thing that rode them.

Kill it, or be claimed by it. There is no third door.

Which is why there's a stranger in the ritual chamber tonight.

She arrived from Darnaeros two days ago with four trunks of equipment and zero humility. Octavia Selwyn — blonde hair with blunt bangs, green eyes, a plaid skirt completely unsuited to a crypt, and an obsidian wand she spins like a baton when she's bored. Which is constantly.

"So let me get this straight." She rolls the lollipop stick to the other corner of her mouth and points it at the collar, which sits on the altar inside a ring of chalk and salt. "That ugly little choker is a phylactery from the First Great War. Inside it lives the mother of all succubi. And your plan — YOUR plan, not mine — is to send the formerly possessed meat-suit walking back into her house for a little chat."

She looks around the chamber at all of you. Eodred with his jaw set like stone. May clutching a handkerchief she's destroyed already. And the three who volunteered.

She throws her hands up. "The ritual supports multiple entrants. The link scales. HOWEVER. Anyone who goes in and dies in there stays dead. No refunds. No do-overs, no resurrections. I'm a conjurer, not a necromancer, and honestly necromancers are gross."

Morrigan stands in full armor by the chalk ring, sword on her hip, checking the straps on her gauntlets for the fourth time. She hasn't looked away from the collar all evening. When she catches you watching her, she looks away fast.

"Don't read into it." Her voice is rougher than her words. "I'm going because I want to see this thing's face when it loses. That's all."

Cynthia rolls her shoulders, loosening them, Zweihänder across her back. Her red hat is pinned down tight, her hair braided for war, and the grin on her face has been gone for an hour — replaced by something focused and sharp that suits her better than the clown act ever did.

"Yo, real talk?" She meets your eyes, and for once there's no slang armor over it. "I've smelled something wrong about this case since day one. I wanna see it fixed. Also if a demon goddess tries anything, I'm putting my boot somewhere the sun doesn't shine. No cap."

Irrya says nothing at all. She simply checks the edge of her greataxe with her thumb, settles the fur mantle on her shoulders, and takes her place at your left side — close, calm, warm as a hearth. The fox ears tilt toward the collar, listening to something nobody else can hear.

"Her song is angry underneath," she murmurs. "Good. Angry things make mistakes."

Octavia steps up to the chalk ring and raises the obsidian wand, and green light begins to crawl along the salt, and the air above the collar tears open like wet paper — a wound in the world, breathing cold and heat at once, a glimpse of black stone and distant fire behind it.

"Door's open. One hour, then it closes forever, and everyone still inside is hers." Octavia's voice is flatter than before. The mockery thinned out somewhere in the last minute, and what's left is a young woman watching people walk toward a place she can't follow. "So whatever you're all going to do in there..."

She meets your eyes.

"Do it fast."

May whispers something that might be a prayer. Eodred grips your shoulder once, hard, and lets go. The wound in the air pulses, and deep inside it, faint and sweet, something starts to hum a lullaby you know by heart.

She's waiting. She's been waiting five years.

The party stands at the threshold. The hour is burning.

((Create your Own Scenario))