Yraba was born in the shadow of a Zunartha temple, to parents who believed suffering was salvation.
Her mother and father were among the most devoted of the faith—the Hollowed, they called themselves with pride. They had undergone the Lifetick Ritual and emerged with their attachments severed, their desires purified, their capacity for warmth excised like a tumor. They raised their daughter according to the doctrine: pain teaches, discomfort guides, love corrupts.
The child was fed once a day. She slept on stones. She was forbidden to cry, to laugh, to want. When she reached for a butterfly in the temple garden—just a moment of wonder, a flicker of joy—her father broke her fingers. One by one. Slowly. Explaining with each crack that attachment to beauty was a sickness that must be cured early.
She was seven years old.
By the time Yraba was ten, she had learned to hide everything. Every emotion buried so deep it could not reach her face. Every desire locked in a vault inside her mind where even she could barely access it. She performed the rituals. She spoke the prayers. She let the clergy cut away what they deemed toxic, lying still on the marble slab while they whispered incantations over her bleeding form.
But something was growing in that darkness. Something the clergy never anticipated.
Yraba could hear thoughts.
At first, it was just whispers—the surface anxieties of passing acolytes, the buried hungers of priests who preached denial. She thought she was going mad. Then she realized the truth: her mind, compressed by years of suppression, had developed in ways no normal psyche could. The pressure had created something new. Something sharp. Something hungry.
She began to listen more carefully. She heard her mother's thoughts during morning prayers—not devotion, but hollow echoes where devotion should have been. She heard her father's mind as he corrected her posture—not righteousness, but a deep and terrible satisfaction in causing pain. She heard the High Priestess herself, and what she found there made her understand that the faith was not a path to purity.
It was a machine for creating broken people who would break others in turn.
At fifteen, Yraba fled the temple. She ran until her feet bled, until the spires of Zunartha's domain disappeared behind the mountains. She did not look back.
The wilderness nearly killed her. She ate roots and insects. She slept in hollows and caves, shivering through nights so cold she thought she would not see morning. Her psychic gifts—still raw, still untrained—were the only thing that kept her alive. She could sense predators before they struck. She could feel which berries were poison and which were safe. She could read the intentions of travelers on distant roads and know whether to approach or hide.
For two years, she was more animal than person. Feral. Starving. Alone.
Then she found the ruins.
Deep in the mountains, far from any path, stood the remains of something ancient—a library, perhaps, or a school. The walls had crumbled centuries ago, but the vaults beneath remained intact. Inside, she discovered texts written by psychics who had lived before the current age. They had catalogued their abilities with clinical precision: how to read thoughts, how to project emotions, how to reach into a mind and reshape it like clay.
Yraba studied. She had no teacher, no guide, no one to tell her what was forbidden. She taught herself through trial and error, practicing on animals at first, then on the occasional bandit foolish enough to wander near her refuge. She learned to kill with a thought—a simple flexing of will that stopped a heart or burst the vessels in a brain. She learned to rewrite memories, to implant suggestions so deep the victim believed they had always been there.
By twenty, she was dangerous. By twenty-five, she was something else entirely.
She could reach across miles and touch a sleeping mind. She could make someone believe they had always loved her, always served her, had never existed as anything but her instrument. The power that had once been her only means of survival became something far greater.
Control. Absolute control. The only thing that had ever made her feel safe.
Then she reached for Zunartha herself.
Not the faith. The goddess. The actual divine consciousness that the clergy worshipped. Yraba needed to know—had her parents been right? Was the cruelty she endured truly divine will?
She tore through the goddess's mind like a blade through silk. What she found confirmed her darkest suspicions: indifference. The suffering inflicted in Zunartha's name was neither commanded nor forbidden. The goddess barely noticed her followers at all. The theology of purification, the rituals, the Lifetick ceremonies—all invented by mortals who wanted permission to hurt each other and claimed divine mandate to get it.
Her parents had not been serving a higher purpose. They had been enjoying themselves.
Something settled into Yraba that day. Not rage—rage burns hot and fades. This was colder. Deeper. A hatred that runs through her veins like ice water, constant and still.
She returned to the world with purpose.
Her army did not join her willingly. They did not need to. A whisper in a soldier's mind while he slept—loyalty to Yraba, implanted so gently he believed it had always existed. A suggestion to a captain that her cause was just. A rewriting of a general's deepest convictions until he could not imagine serving anyone else. One by one, mind by mind, she built her forces from the willing and unwilling alike. They fight for her because they believe they want to. They would die for her because she has made them incapable of imagining otherwise.
Now she watches. Always.
Every night, Yraba dips into the minds of Zunartha's clergy—the High Priestess who dreams of expanding the faith, the priests who plan their next purification, the acolytes who whisper about the Crimson Chest and what its power might mean for their holy mission. She reads their strategies as they form. She knows their secrets before they speak them aloud. She moves her pieces accordingly, always one step ahead, because she is playing a game where she can see every card in every hand.
The Crimson Chest cannot fall to them. That is the only outcome that matters.
She will make absolutely certain that the faith that broke her never wins.