A/N: A Nuada/OC fic, yay! Let me know what you think.
UPDATE: I have changed the Lestari's name to Maria. I was told Lestari sounded too elven and I am inclined to agree. Something more human is much moresuiting.
Disclaimer: I don't own Nuada or anything else related to Hellboy.
After the victory of the Golden Army over the races of Man, Prince Nuada ascended a new thrown. Not that false throne from which his father presided on the day of his death. That seat had once been a place of awe and reverence. But it had become a wretched thing, demoralized by the advance of human avarice and the diminishment of the Realm. This was not the throne of the King of the Unseen Realm. This was a throne for the King of a new world. A New Aiden.
In the months following King Nuada's ascension to power the genocide of the human race took place. The world did not fall in a day, it took months of battle to subdue and eliminate the human opposition. Millions of people died, not just soldiers, but families in their homes, school children, the elderly. The Golden Army showed no mercy. After the final battle the Army was decommissioned. The human race had been reduced to a more manageable size, now it was left to the Elves, the highest in the hierarchy of magical creatures, to sift through the survivors and decide their fate.
Nuada was a warrior king. Rather than don the tradition royal garb of his father, he chose to retain his battle armor. He led the Golden Army in battle and presided over the raids following the war. After the war ended, humans were required to report to stations set up by Nuada's army. There they were registered and assigned work placements. They were slaves. Rebels still hid deep within the fallen cities of Man. The wilderness was slowly taking back the land which had been dominated by mankind. The cities which were once the buzzing metropolises of the planet were now abandoned and the elves and other magical creatures inhabited the wilderness. After a few months most of the rebels were discovered. They were either enslaved or killed.
It was during one such raid that Maria Black and her family were uncovered in their hiding place, the basement of a dilapidated skyscraper. Normally Nuada would not be a part of a mission as routine as a raid, but he felt it his duty to audit the performance and effectiveness of these raids. He approached this raid as he did any other, with an air of indifference and boredom. Compared to the action of war, a simple raid was nothing. In these later days they rarely found anything.
Nuada set out from his palace compound, located in the heart of an ancient forest, on the back of his noble horse, Nimrael. Nimrael shared the immortal blood of the Elven race and had been Nuada's constant companion in times of war and peace since the King's coming of age. His gleaming coat of silver-gray hair was dazzling to mortal eyes. Nuada rode from the palace to a military outpost on the outskirts of the forest where he met up with the team assigned to raid in a nearby city. From there they traveled together and thoroughly scoured a sector of the fallen city. It was not until late in the day when the elves approached a building with the sense of foreboding that told them they would find something there. Once inside the skyscraper it did not take the elves long to locate the hidden inhabitants. Their heightened sense of intuition aided them in their search.
Since the war began the Black family had fled from village to village, and finally city to city, searching for a safe place, somewhere the monsters could not find them. In their current residence they had been settled for nearly four weeks, and were beginning to feel that it was either time to move on, or time to settle in. Unfortunately for the Blacks, they had remained in a state of indecision for too long, and now they were out of luck.
Maria sat with her mother and father around a makeshift coffee table. During the day the family stayed inside, fearing the raids which they knew to take place. It was late in the day, though the family had yet to take their meager dinner of bread and canned vegetables. The shapes that appeared from the shadows at the other end of the basement were unreal. It was like a dream to see the tall, pale, glowing forms of the creatures they had most feared. Maria noticed them first. And then everything went black.