Даниил Зверков – The Last Queen Of Noctyra: Awakening Of Aronella (страница 2)
she felt powerless.
The alchemists began to speak. Their voices intertwined — not words, but patterns. Symbols ignited across the stone, light climbing the walls in thin, precise lines. You will not die, the alchemist said.
You will remember. Stone crept across her body. Slowly. Inevitable. Her mind remained clear.
She still heard the battle. Still felt the world. And then— one last memory surfaced.
The ocean. A boat. Seratiel.
For a single moment— pain flickered in her eyes. Then it was gone. Silence. Wind. Stone. Where she had stood— now stood a statue. A queen of stone, her gaze fixed upon the horizon. Below, the city burned. But the war— was already over. Centuries passed. Rain fell. Wind carved the walls. The citadel crumbled. The world forgot. But deep within the ruins— the statue remained. And within it— a heart still beat.
Chapter I
Awakening
The silence here was not merely the absence of sound. It pressed down. Thick and heavy, like the water of an underground lake, it filled every corner of the chamber, every crack in the stone, every empty space between the dust motes that had settled onto the floor over centuries. No wind. No drip of water. No rustle. Only silence. And darkness. So dense it seemed almost tangible. It clung to the walls, spilled from the ceiling, lay across the floor in a heavy, impenetrable layer. There was no above, no below, no time here—only stone and emptiness. At the center of that stillness, upon a platform of black obsidian, stood a sarcophagus. A long, smooth monolith covered in carved lines. Once, they had depicted the Tree of Blood and the symbol of the Mother of Life. Now the patterns were almost worn away, visible only as shadows where there was nothing left to cast them. The centuries had laid a thin crust of dust over the stone. The sarcophagus did not move. Nothing around it moved. So it had been for centuries.
And then—a sound.
Soft. Almost imperceptible. The kind of sound that should never have existed here.
A crack.
It appeared across the surface of the stone, thin as a web, barely visible in the dark.
But it was there.
Then another.
And another.
Dust drifted slowly from the ceiling. Somewhere deep in the heart of the tower, a tremor passed through the stone—so faint it was almost imagined, as though the earth had sighed in its sleep after a long paralysis.
The lid of the sarcophagus shuddered.
Then, in the next instant, split apart.
Stone burst outward with a dull, heavy crash that rolled through the underground chamber, ricocheted from wall to wall, and vanished somewhere high above in the ruined upper levels.
A hand rose from the sarcophagus.
Pale. Cold. Long, fine fingers that slowly curled into a fist—a gesture more instinctive than conscious. A test. Does the body obey?
Then—a breath.
The first in seven hundred years.
Air rushed into her lungs with such violence that the woman arched inside the stone coffin. Her eyelids quivered, flew open—and for one fleeting instant, a cold, almost silver light flared in the darkness. Long lashes. Pale skin. Eyes that seemed to hold eternity itself.
Then the light was gone.
And all that remained was darkness again.
Her lips parted in a voiceless cry, but no sound came—only a dry, ragged rasp, like old cloth torn in the wind.
Her heart struck.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Blood that had frozen in her veins centuries ago began slowly to thaw, to find its rhythm again, to fill her body with life.
The woman blinked.
The darkness around her was just as dense as before. She could see neither walls nor ceiling, not even her own hands. But she could feel.
The cold stone beneath her back.
The weight of centuries settled upon her shoulders.
And the strange, terrible emptiness inside her—where there had always been a voice.
She tried to call out.
Not aloud. Inwardly. To the one who had always been with her, from the first instant of her existence.
Mother
Silence.
No answer. No hint of a presence. Not even the faintest echo she had known for millennia.
Only emptiness.
Only cold.
Only her own heart beating alone.
For the first time in her endless life, she felt not merely fear, but a deeper panic—icy, soul-numbing panic, the terror of a being who suddenly understood that it was truly alone.
Something had happened.
Something terrible.
The world had changed.
And she did not know how.
She tried to move. Pain answered—dull, aching, almost forgotten. Good. Pain meant she was alive. This was not sleep. Not death.
She had to rise.
Had to understand.
Had to learn what had happened to the world while she had lain trapped in stone.
She tried to sit up—and nearly choked on her own cry.
Her body would not obey.
Muscles that remembered millennia of strength now felt alien, flooded with some heavy, viscous metal. Every movement demanded effort she did not have. She braced herself on one elbow and froze, feeling her fingers tremble—small, ugly tremors, almost human.
How long?
The thought came from somewhere far away, cold and unfamiliar. She tried to remember what had come before this moment. Her mind was wrapped in fog—thick, opaque. Images surfaced only to sink again before they could join into anything whole.
Blood. Fire. Faces looking down at her. And a voice—calm, almost gentle, the kind of voice that made something inside her collapse.
She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the memory away. When she opened them again, the darkness no longer felt as absolute. Somewhere far above, through cracks in the ceiling, a dim light had begun to filter down—grey, sickly, nothing like the soft moonlight that had once filled her chambers.
She forced herself upright.
Slowly. Carefully. Listening to every movement of her body as if it belonged to an enemy long forgotten.