Eve was not born in the kingdom, but brought to it swaddled in the red cloth of a military councilman’s cloak, carried in her father’s armored arms. Despite her birthright, the kingdom would be the only home she would ever know. She learned to walk and speak in the deepest bowels of the royal fortress, humanity’s central node. The royal fortress, constructed on the eastern edge of the kingdom’s plateau, towered over all human civilization on the one side and the endless Evergrowth on the other. It was a fitting place for a half-breed to achieve maturity. The fortress dwarfed all other human structures in both size and height, housing all of the Kingdom’s governance and military operations. At its heights rose the quarters of the royals, the king and queen and, later, their sons. In the depths below ground lay the military barracks, the armory, and her father’s office. The ground level strata, the most penetrable of the structure, housed banquet halls and servant operations. That level was already in rare use by the time of Eve’s youth. 

In times of stability and plenty, the whole towering mass of stone could be looked upon as a benevolent guardian of the streets and homes and fields within its shadow. In times of hardship that repute soured and the fortress became a loathsome tumor, hoarding taxes and tribute. At the time of Eve’s birth, times of plenty were a distant memory for elder nobles and only the most ancient of the peasants. The ongoing war, the ever present threat of the Evergrowth, that alone kept the masses from dismantling the fortress stone by stone in search of hidden sustenance and weaponry. Though the Evergrowth lurked below the kingdom’s plateau on all sides, it was well-known that the Goddess resided in the east. 

War with the Goddess laid the foundation for not only Eve’s childhood home, but her whole life. War, her sole instrumentality decided for her since before even her conception.

Thus it was that she could swing a sword before her mane had even begun to peek out of her neck’s flesh. By the time the first dusky scarlet hairs emerged, she could effectively wield the entire royal armory. She favored the glaive, perhaps because of the distance it provided between herself and her father in battle. 

The dulled training blade slammed down on her father’s shield with a resounding crack, but slid harmlessly off its curved surface. Such a show of strength, especially from a girl her age, might have intimidated a lesser opponent or maybe even broken a lesser shield. But it was an unwise tactic against her father, a seasoned war councilor bearing the scars of more ventures into the Evergrowth than most men alive. With a thrust of his shield he threw her blade off center and rushed down the reach of her polearm in the resulting opportunity. Their training battles always ended quickly once he managed to close the gap between them. Eve braced for the defeating thwack of his oak sword, against her chest if his mood was favorable, the side of her head if it was not. 

This time though, with the reflex to clench closed her eyes and draw back, slipped through another reflex. Her tail shot suddenly over her shoulder, punching his face just as he raised his arm to strike. Stinger down, it did not pierce him, but the force of the unexpected impact threw him to the ground and the the budding thorns of the mace-like bulb bit shallowly into his jowl. Eve stared down petrified at her father’s face and the small trickling cuts that marked the spot where a nasty bruise would bloom by evening. She was not terrified that she had hurt him, she had inflicted worse with her glaive in lucky battles before, and those times it had only improved his mood. This time the blow came from a forbidden weapon. Her father beat her for the offense and extended their weapon training into the weary hours of night. Eve stayed in the barracks well past midnight, cleaning her armor and body after her father had finally relented for the night. As she scrubbed herself with cold water she resented the sensation of her tail, its bulk as constant and unsubtle as a fifth limb. When she was young the immature segmented string of carapace could be hidden under clothes and armor, but with age it had grown thick as her thighs, stronger than any man’s arm, and tipped with a stinger spine that only added deadly length with each passing year. 

Her tail was the most obvious of the features that compelled her father to keep her secluded in the fortress’s innards. She was to be seen scarcely by the soldiers and officers and not at all by the common folk. By the time Eve could look down on her father standing, however, this had become a less strictly kept rule. Eulia said that the common folk had circulated rumors of their existence for most of their lives anyways, and besides for purposes of gossip, they cared less than their father’s had feared. Eulia said the common folk had priorities higher than the purity of blood in the high council’s children. 

Eve did not entirely understand this, like most things Eulia told her, but she welcomed the new freedom that came when her father moved them from their home in the fortress to a smaller military office deeper in the kingdom. In those twilight years of his life, her father became particularly afeared of the eastern border. He added a new rule to his list of commandments; she was never to go near that eastern wall.

Perhaps because of her father’s advancing age, perhaps because of her expanding size, perhaps because of the general state of the Kingdom, and most likely because of all these things, she enjoyed new freedoms in the midcity. Her training became more self-directed, her sparrings more often with her fellow half-knights than with her father. He could no longer offer her much challenge. Most valued of all, she was allowed to walk the city streets, so long as she was armed (and now there were increasingly few times she wasn’t) and did not bring too much attention to herself. She and Eulia would take long meandering walks in the evenings and early mornings. It would be impossible to avoid stares, conspicuous as they were. Eulia might have had a chance at concealment by herself, covered in her cloth wraps as she had taken to doing, but Eve was not so ambiguous. A towering knight in iron-black armor trailing a tree trunk of a scorpion tail, she could pass no one without attracting at least a furtive glance. 

Eulia, who was small even for a human, supplemented her martial prowess with a shrewd cunning, a mind that could not be kept ignorant. Eve wondered if her father had encouraged this trait or if he was simply unsuccessful in stifling her curiosities and impressive capacity for satisfying them.

On one late evening stroll, Eulia told her they would be brought before the princes soon. Eve’s father had mentioned nothing of this, but it was not typical of him to inform her of anything in advance.

“There are four of them, one for each of us.” The way she said it, as if contemplating the potential spoils of battle, earned a lusty smile from Eve. Any kind of formal ownership of the royal children was an absurd notion, even Eve knew that. But she could indulge a private pride that knights are disposed to feel for the sort of possession that comes from taking the duty of protection over a highborn ward. “The queen’s pregnant with another, I hear. If it’s a daughter there will be a feast.” 

Feasts were something like a fairy tale for the young half-knights. Their fathers spoke of great ones before the war, enormous halls filled with abundant meat and mead, music, dancing women, grand celebrations for all the honorable soldiers to partake in. Feasts were the subject of fantasies, dreamt of but not realized. Something to motivate, even if the actual possibility of such an event grew more implausible every year. Eve would not trust her own hopes, but Eulia was the sharpest person she knew excepting her father, and even he might have fallen behind as she grew less young and he more old. 

She eagerly solicited all the news Eulia had gained from her mysterious ‘informants’ and the pair fantasized about princes and feasts until interrupted by the approach of a peasant man. This surprised Eve. Most had the good sense to stay clear of passing soldiers, especially imposing knights such as herself. He crept into their path with equal parts caution and boldness. He was a man of advanced age, like all men in the kingdom. He conveyed his peaceable intent with folded hands and hunched posture, but even if were armed and hostile, he could have made no real threat to the pair of well-armored, well-trained, youthful knights. The man’s frail body stooped only barely taller than Eulia.

He held cupped hands forward. Begging, Eve realized. He offered them the formality of a request and explanation for his lowly desperation, but Eulia dropped a couple of gold pieces into his palm before he could finish. The pair of gleaming metal coins had once been worth a handsome sum, but there were few merchants left who would take them anymore. Most transactions followed the rule of barter now. Eve very rarely kept her own stash of gold on her anymore.

The man appeared understandably disappointed, but he offered them his deep gratitude before scurrying off down a side street. Through the window of a nearby home, a family of gaunt faces watched the exchange closely. Eve suddenly wanted their stroll to be over. 

On their way back to the soldier housing, Eulia spared few words of explanation on the growing crisis of the Kingdom’s common folk. Eve understood this only dimly. She knew, of course, that save for the queen there were no children born on the plateau. And she knew that this meant decline and desperation, as her father had told her so many times. But she did not know any time before this one, so it was hard to grasp the real significance of it. And besides, her own food and firewood had never been insecure. Eulia’s eyes, the only uncovered portion of her face, appeared troubled and that troubled Eve. But Eulia refused to elaborate further on the topic. 

Such were the concerns that weighed on Eve’s minds many nights in bed, when she had no training to distract her. Sometimes she would wake without cause except for her mind’s brooding storm of unanswered questions and anxieties. That, and the occasional inexplicable feeling of being watched. Her room possessed only one door, barred from the inside, and a single dark window. Even if someone was peeking in on her sleep, they could hardly pose a threat. Her glaive rested always within arms reach, too heavy for most humans to wield even if they could somehow manage to get their hands on it before her. Yet the feeling unsettled her. On nights when she was awoken by it, she rarely returned to sleep.

It was on such a night that the uncanny feeling awoke her while she faced the window in bed. Her eyes snapped open just in time to catch a single glimpse of the source. A face, barely illuminated by moonlight, floated in the darkness, watching her. Sooner than she could sit up and reach for her weapon it vanished, sunk into the dark night beyond the glass.

The vision had appeared for such a fleeting moment and so immediately out of sleep that it could easily have been regarded as the substance of dream and dismissed. Yet the features of that face lingered, always haunting her unoccupied mind. The memory became clearest in front of the mirror, when she could stare into her own face and wonder. She poured over the features she could draw out from memory. The flat nose that melted into the cheeks on the sides, the wide thin-lipped mouth, the eerie flash of reflective eyes. She could remember these qualities so vividly in part for the psychic significance of the event, but also because she saw them again when she gazed at herself in the pane of polished silver. The face in the window undeniably mirrored her own.

She dared not speak aloud what this intimated, but she could not stop herself from thinking it. The face, in addition to bearing a resemblance, was also that of a woman. She could not help but wonder, to fear and yearn about questions her father had never answered.