[h3]Giselle de Farry[/h3][i]Undead Princess, de Farry[/i]

[hr]
Her eyes opened to an unfamiliar ceiling. 

However long her slumber might have been, the fall to her was just yesterday. 

Just yesterday that she had failed her most sacred duty as a sovereign, to that of her people—to protect and lead them in their time of need. Just yesterday were those darkest days, in which every safeguard, carefully cultivated and shepherded over countless centuries, came crumbling to an end as the men of the hundred paladins finally came thundering through the mountain passes, the rivers, the fields, the trenches, and finally, the city walls. 

For all of her overtures of peace, to gain an understanding, to bridge the gap to a… careful coexistence, with a deft blow, they had shattered what she had so carefully built.

In doing so, in their ignorance, they had doomed the last sliver of land untouched by war and the blight of a dying age. 

By not stopping them, she had damned the people of her land, humans, vampires —her friends-- to a shattered, pitiful end.

She had made a last, futile stand in the field. As a vampire and a great lord, she would not debase herself to selfishly await death in a throne room, long after her loyal subjects had expended themselves in her name. No; they had come for her, for who she was, perhaps what she represented, but not, perchance, her cause. 

It was a fight she gave, and if her end gave her enemies a reason to spare who remained, or to even allow them to escape, then all the better to die with a sword in her hand. 

Yet the bitter regret of failure remained. It could have all turned out so differently.

Giselle de Farry had died, along with those that she had failed to protect. Yet now, she existed once more, within this elegant, but poor substitute for a proper bed. Why, then, had her goddess deigned to grace her with undeath once more? 

She remained still for some time, staring up at the carved lid above her long after she had awakened, a single teardrop falling from her eyes and down the pale skin of her face.

It was only then that she rose, somberly, lifting the sarcophagus lid aside so that she could figure out where she was. 

Devoid of light, and ruined as it was, she was in some manner of courtyard garden. She could tell, once upon a time, that it had been a grand and beautiful one, a fitting sepulcher for a vampire lord –or lords, for who else could lie in tombs as elaborate as her own had been?—to lie in state. That this place existed at all, with those dying, awful days, was a complete mystery to her. By the very end, there was precious little to give respect to the lords of the undead, let alone their desecrated remains in the aftermath of the paladins.

Yet, as she examined herself, running her fingers over the cold, pale, and unblemished skin that she knew from unlife, it was clear that this was not the broken body that she had left in her last hour. Even her favorite dress, woven by her own hands, remained untouched, something surprising but welcome, considering such artifacts would likely have been put to the torch after her death. Would it be that the same could be said for her maids and loyal friends…

It was obvious that some manner of sorcery had happened, but the magnitude and manner of it, she could not yet fathom.

Standing up, she took in the rest of her environment. A dead city greeted her, emphasized by the lightless world that she found herself in. How much time had passed? Yet this place remained familiar. She was in Alavaris, with its cathedral in its rightful place in the northern skyline. She even remembered a familiar voice as she gazed upon it, though she frowned as the vague feeling coalesced enough that she could recall the curt form of address that she had been given in that memory. She had to make a wry smile at that. She gave her goddess her due respects, but they hadn’t always seen eye to eye philosophically. 

Giselle replaced the lid where it belonged, before taking a seat atop her sarcophagus. Hungry and melancholic as she was, she was not alone, after all, as she watched the nearby lids of her counterparts open.

It seemed her counterparts for this lovely evening was to be a certain annoying cleric, and the Rime-winged Angel. Unfortunate, perhaps, especially given the presence of the former, as she had wished to be alone with her thoughts for longer, but she was glad all the same to see former allies and compatriots in this new undeath.

[b]“Greetings, and good morning. It seems we have been summoned once more, for better or for worse.” [/b]