The First Rider.

As the covered wagon trundled away from her home, she turned around to look at it one last time. It didn't really hit her until she saw soe of her siblings crying and waving, before her stomach sank and she realized she'd never return to the collection of shabby houses off to the side of the road, bordered by fields. She bit her lip and watched it disappear into the distance.

Turning back around, she glanced back at the man who'd bought her. He'd said it wasn't that, for the war effort, a valuable resource for the state, so forth and so on... But her parent's had three years of wages in their pockets, and she was leaving to a new city. A bigger city, made of stone. She'd heard the houses had two levels, that the streets were made or red brick and filled with different and exciting characters. For his part, the wizard kept reading his book, every now and then quietly turning a page. He'd called himself Guildstern, and had drained the fields of fallow water sitting in the post-harvest rains free of charge. It had taken him moments before the small lake had bubbled and evaporated into nothing, people gasping and hitting the ground on their knees, stunned.

She smiled at him; he glanced up and smiled back. His short beard was greying.

Some time later, she thought back to that trip. He'd been nice, and explained that she had powers similar to his. She'd never noticed, because she hadn't used them. But the Evian bloc had need of her, and they'd sent him to find her and train her. Whatever it took.

Laying on the operating table after yet another surgery, surrounded by white-robes in masks, her own blood, and pain, she wondered if it had been easy for him to take her here. Some castle... She'd been unconcious and it had been dark. For two years afterward, her training had been in their military, and her almost-holy fire had burned scores of men to ash. She wasn't bad with her sword, either... Damned artillery. She'd felt her shattered legs after the barrage had cratered the earth and passed out on the battlefield, blood leaking out of her blown eardrums.

When she'd woken up some time ago- she'd stopped bothering to keep count- they'd started operating on her, with scalpels and magic. No one would respond to any of her questions. As soon as she was whole again, they'd begun doing... other things. They'd strapped her to a stretcher and put her inside some machine, some great white empty thing that burned her. It was so loud it was almost silent in there, and all she could see was white. She'd screamed at first, but she couldn't hear that in the defeaning quiet. When they let her out, she usually vomited before they injected her with something and dragged her back to her room.

She was turning white... And her hair was purple now. The cycle repeated over and over. When she was awake, sometimes she punched her walls. More and more, they cracked under her bleeding stony skin. Even then, her escape attempts didn't work...

They'd cut into her and measure the cuts, charting the growth of her outer shell, spending extra attention on her back. It hurt badly every time, but eventually the pain was like the sound and sight of the machine- something that was in the background. She never forgot the first time she saw the wings.

Once, she saw Guildstern again. She broke her restraints and killed three men in the ensuing scrabble, one dead wing flopping across her back, her arms covered in red up to the elbow. As doors banged open and the operating theater began to fill, she knelt down in the pile of gore, staring right up at his neutral face and starting to laugh.

She laughed and laughed hard, up to the ceiling as she was surrounded and took down. She didn't resist, just continued to laugh, because it didn't matter. The damage had been done, there wasn't anything she could do to warn that little peasant girl about what happened to people like her in cities like this; horrible things. Things that broke you as a person, not from horror, but banality. When what you couldn't fix or stop just became the white that painted the walls.

Guildstern didn't care. She could see how little her suffering meant to him.

When it was said and done, she'd been given to a Cardinal, an Ivory angel wreathed in fire. Guildstern had been Amioch's friend from a time long before, and wanted his tithe to be a little excessive. She'd strode in with her sword at her side and looked down at the owl-like robed man, her eyes dull.

She'd annihilated a village soon, in short order. A test run. She'd been excessive. It was the first time since her reforging that she'd been free to fight and destroy. The houses burned around her with white flames in the night as she slammed her sword tip into the ground and knelt, her wings gathering up around her. She was wreathed in blood and viscera, and pools of red glinted like molten metal in the firelight as she picked up the doll. Just a small, straw-headed little girl's toy, like the one she'd had, once, so long ago, except this one was dripping with blood like most everything else. Ash blew around her in the dead wind.

It hurt to be human now. Her hand shook as she realized she wasn't anything like who she'd once been. That now, she was something else, given the power to Destroy. She clenched her teeth and bowed her head, tears cleaning trails down her face as she let it go and accepted it. Her humanity was no more, and it had to be given leave to die. Behind her, her Aura slowly burned back into life, the circle of fire connecting over her head and lighting the devastated marketplace around her.

When she'd looked back up, her eyes were hard as stone, and she determinedly got back to her feet. Even with all the wreckage around her, pieces of everything not burning scattered throughout the dirt field, all she could see was the white.