"Haunted by her past completely in her grasp, simply unaware

Was it meant to last; it fell apart so fast; life is just not fair…" Save Me – My Darkest Days

The wind was cold as it whistled sharply through the pointed towers of Haggard's castle. The stilted, swaying structure shuddered and groaned, yet being a creation of magic held its ground in the face of the winter storm.

The violence of nature was nothing new to the pale haired woman standing on one of the lonely, solitary balconies. It had awed her when she had first arrived, however long ago that had been now. Time was not something easily kept in Haggard's domain, but now both were constant companions. She questioned why it should have struck her as so strange, the cold harshness and bleak white landscape of this desolate realm. She felt as if she had seen storms like this before in another time and place when she was something altogether foreign and familiar, but even before those phantom memories she could not remember winter being a familiar or common thing to her.

Her lilac gown flickered around her slender frame, buffeted by the force of the winds rushing past her. Her hair would at times flow away from her only to come rushing back an instant later as the wind altered to cover her face like a shining veil or a crest of wild sea foam, seeming to emulate the tumultuous sea below her.

She could not say what about the sea was comforting to her; she had never seen the sea before she had come to Haggard's kingdom. The ebb and flow of the waves called to her; the white capped peaks enthralled her, at times seeming to shimmer with an inner rainbow light if she stared for too long. She was drawn to the vastness of the sea like a restless child looking for something and unable to remember what or where they had put it. It was the only thing she had found as she wandered this empty, cold, dreary castle that calmed her mind and slowed the ever present panic in her heart.

The dreams were slowly driving her here, out of her warm bed and sparse room to this barren, open place where she could watch the sea. Something tugged at her subconscious, and flashes of the dream rose in her mind: bronze wings, and bloody hands, and the image of a wavering reflection in iron bars of a pale, shining creature that she should know; its brow gleaming with a false horn.

She covered her face in her hands, the chill of the sea held in her fingertips as she touched the place on her brow that burned only sometimes now, and rarely glowed. Beneath her the castle shuddered violently as the Red Bull turned and paced in his hidden cavern. She wondered absently what disturbed him on these nights when she kept silent vigil with the sea. She supposed she would never know.