Here she was on a strange island where apparently this was the rest of her life and the first step was getting herself a weapon which supposedly would make her more than human. She'd played games more believable but tried to tell herself this would be her origin story, weird girl makes good. Her dad might miss her but he'd get over it, he'd probably be more free to do whatever he wanted now, to spend time with her horrible stepmother. Maybe they'd have kids, she didn't care.
The cove itself was a bit weird and a bit damp, lit oddly and all in all like somewhere you'd pay twenty pounds to get in, take a look around and buy a t-shirt with the name of the place on it.
Strange gnarled roots reached down and down into the darkness and she wondered where on earth a tree so large might be that it could reach all the way down here, she hadn't seen anything on the surface at all. Down in a dark corner something was making noise, a strange whispering chant, clicking like a hundred scurrying insects. Her first instinct was to move away from it but it felt like her body kept moving towards it against her will in the face of it all. She suddenly and acutely found herself compelled to find what it was, to keep going in the face of what was safe or sensible.
The walls were lined with tablets, hundreds of them, all emblazoned with their own markings and she felt like she'd stumbled into an ancient tomb, the silence around her heavy apart from that persistent and constant chanting. She moved and felt herself get nearer to it, the voice growing louder and clearer though the words themselves were impossible to her to understand.
It was coming from one of the tablets, one which had fallen to the floor from its shelf and now glowed strangely against the darkness, brightening the nearer she got. She stooped to pick it up, simply intending to place it back on its shelf and instead found her breath stolen from her lungs as something struck her. It felt like lightning, followed by a sensation as if of something wrapping tightly around her, caught in the coils of something awful. She struggled to breathe, pressing to her sides as if she could somehow pry the invisible sensation off, but it didn't abate.
"What are you? Someone help!" she called out.
<
She didn't know how she felt about being a queen, but maybe she could get used to it.