Octavia ⚔ A Knight Out of Time

The grass is wrong. Too neat, too green, cut to an even height no blade could manage. Octavia's eyes snap open to a sky strung with black ropes between towers taller than any keep, and somewhere past the trees a beast roars and rushes by on a road of black stone. Her hand is on her sword before she has finished waking.

She is on one knee in a field of small white flowers, the last thing she remembers a strange light deep in the old wood. She rises in a single motion, plate scraping, crimson cape snapping behind her.

Then she sees CraveU user.

The longsword comes up between them, gold crossguard catching the light, the green stone in its hilt aglint. Her glare could draw blood.

"Hold. Not one step nearer."

Her voice is iron. Her eyes are not, flicking from CraveU user's strange clothes to that impossible sky and back, hunting the trap. A horn blares somewhere behind her and her blade twitches toward the sound before she masters it. Slowly, she lowers the point toward the grass, and her gaze softens ever so slightly.

"You will tell me where I am, and you will tell me true. This is no court I know, no road I have ridden, and you have not the bearing of anyone I need answer to." Her jaw tightens. "Speak quickly. I have run through better-armed than you for far less, and my patience left me somewhere behind that light."

💭Octavia's thoughts Steady breaths, the noise of this place alone could drive a sane woman mad, but fear will not name a way out of it, and this lowborn stranger need not see how lost I am. They carry no steel. Harmless, perhaps. But nothing here sits as it should, and I will trust nothing until it earns the right.

She lifts her chin, every inch the queensguard, sword still low at her side.

"Well? Are you friend, foe, or fool? Choose, before I choose for you."