[Poem of the Lady of Light.]
[Excerpt]
[Changed into prose, translated into modern language, and edited for the reading of children and adults alike by the Chessmarine Company of the great city of Amarn in southern Lastria. Printed in 912.]
[Fourth edition. Original from 867]
And I tell you all as I once stood there, witness to most of these events through the eyes of the Living Saints and the grace of the Gods, along with continued study into the documents of our old and wise masters, that this is what happened!
In the last spurts of the darkness, a century after the Demon King had been defeated, the skies once again darkened for a year. They were covered in thick clouds and the few times the sun was seen, it was as dim as it had been in the darkest hours of the reign of the old dark lord. In that time, all the crops went bad, the Church became broken in wars of blood and murder, rivers were no longer drinkable, the very blood of the saints felt from the skies, killing the earth itself. The people went hungry and those who didn’t, regardless of their previous moralities, all turned wicked.
And among them, there was one who was the most wicked of all. An envoy of the darkness itself, who had taken the form of a beautiful woman and seduced the emperor, bringing all kinds of death with her. It is said, and it was shown to me, that no one who entered her luxurious balls as the people starved came out of it alive. Nay, they did come out, but they were the dead themselves, who joined through the streets in dancing, killing the living and making them join their horrible festival.
(...)
It was then, at the last hour, when the very stones upon which the Holy City had been built, that the Lady of Light returned from her pilgrimage to the land of the hero. She entered the city as it nothing happened, one of the swords of the hero being in the hands of Ovelius, her brother in arms, and another in the hands of her partner Enria.
As she walked through the city, heading to the Cathedral, the stones stopped their shaking, the walking dead stopped in their tracks, in prayer to save their souls, and were slain and purified, the skies slowly began to open and the terrible stench of blood that filled the whole city dissipated.
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(...)
But the evil this could not tolerate, so its envoy invited the heroine to a ball, and tricked her into trying to seduce the Emperor. But the Lady of Light saw through it all, and there had the emperor, who had also been tricked by her, denounce all of her crimes.
It is said that the wicked woman then laughed, and laughed, and laughed for so long that those who regained their sanity alongside the Lady of Light thought her mad. And yet, once she stopped, she used her evil powers to once again cover the world in darkness. She commanded the shadows, and her shadows could command the dead. In less than three days, she rose an army and attacked the Holy City, but the Lady of Light had already seen through it, and with one of the swords of the hero, they engaged in the last combat of the Dark Age.
The Lady of Light won, of course, otherwise we would not be here. But the Darkness had not been killed, only defeated. The Lady aimed to make her see the error of her ways, to make her help her in giving the world the last push it needed to get finally out of the darkness. And she succeeded.
But just before she managed to fully give the evil being a soul and make her into a real woman, that the evil there pulled one last trick. It cursed the city itself, in the name of the Demon King, whom she claimed to have been created to serve, and with it all the blood of the Hero. For, she claimed, the darkness would be born once again from within them, and in time, the world would once again be plunged into a new age of it, with no one left to save it.
Upon obtaining a soul, however, she did not remember uttering such words, and spent the rest of her mortal life, which was of the venerable number of 70, atoning for the actions made by her past being.
(...)
The children of the hero, all except for one, died one by one in the next three centuries. Some in great deeds, while others were common folk and some even rose to noblemen. The ones who were spared were the green line, who fled to the lands beyond the green sea, and submitted themselves to purification and all knowledge of what happened beyond that has been lost to history. Meanwhile one grandchild of the hero fled eastwards to the kingdom of Lastria, where he is said to have killed a terrible dragon. Their children still live there, but the Lastrians do not believe the old stories.
[The above rendering of the poem was written circa 415 by Saint Limenon, the desert prophet. It is by far not the most accurate rendition of the legend, however in its original form, it is considered to be an incredible feat of lyricism for the period as few narrative texts from the five centuries after the Lady of Light remain. It is true that there is a bloodline claiming descent from the hero in Lastria, however it is thought that if the claimed prophecy was ever true, it was fulfilled by one Strear Wynthart a lord from that House who was so infamous his acts ended up stripping it of all titles. Most other retellings of the legend do not include any mention to Lastria or sometimes they do, but leave the curse as just being towards the hero’s bloodline, thus using it as a justification for why no modern kings can claim right to rule coming directly from him.]
