Lys

Her dreams were not peaceful. Many times she awoke suddenly, thrashing and covered in sweat, kicking and clawing at enemies imagined and remembered.

In this world, control over the element of Spirit allowed a wielder to reshape emotions and minds. The guy-whose-name-didn’t-even-deserve-being-said had used this as a weapon, forcing others to obey his every whim. On the bright side, though, at least she was able to use her own paltry power to slowly, laboriously, heal from the trauma.

The Demon Queen--or Aurelia, as Lys had come to call her in more recent days--had kindly offered Lys a place to stay as long as she needed. She felt bad impinging on Aurelia’s generosity, but on the other hand she did kinda get mind-raped and then saved the queen’s life by killing someone, so maybe it was only fair.

This bed was sinfully comfortable, with thick, velvety purple fabric covering every square inch. She languidly batted a bit at a low-hanging part of its canopy. At first she had worried that her catlike behaviors were another stale leftover of the “””hero’s””” abuse, but Aurelia assured her that such things were perfectly normal for a young Beast.

She’d also learned more about magic in these weeks with Aurelia than she ever had from him. Sometimes she’d zone out during the demon queen’s lectures and then feel too guilty to admit she’d missed it, but she’d always been a little ADHD. She at least caught that the only two groups who could control all seven elements were “outworlders” and demons. In fact, some people thought demons weren’t native to Ascriel at all, but so far no one had found a portal to their home plane.

As an outworlder herself, apparently Lys might be able to learn at least a bit of the other elements’ magic. This wasn’t uncommon--contrary to what he had claimed, many beings had at least a little bit of outworlder or demon blood, so the seven races didn’t really map neatly. The traditional association between race and element was really more of a statistical tendency than an absolute rule.

She couldn’t help but wonder what else she had wrongly believed. Before her reincarnation into Ascriel, she’d always wanted a body like this… but now, she was plagued anxiety and disgust. It was hard to even look at herself without remembering what he’d done. Made her feel like throwing up.

But, she had to admit, things were getting better. Not quickly, not easily, but they were getting there. Rather than waking up each morning and feeling like life was suffering, she now only felt that life was pretty bad.

And she’d made some friends! It turned out, thank Fera, that the demon queen’s control over the physical elements allowed her to repair bodies, and her control over Spirit allowed her to bring back souls. And it turned out her seven generals were pretty nice!

...Well, most of them, at least.