The coffin had been knocked askew in the wagon bed by all the commotion of Chey't's entrance, thrown half off several wrapped bundles of fabric to slant diagonally across most of the wagon's offered space. It apparently had once been wrapped snugly in a large stretch of rough, worn fabric, but in the jostling most of the upper half of the coffin had been partially unwrapped, revealing a wooden case, ornately carved and rubbed to an almost glassy finish with age, and an actual glass lid. The catches that held the lid in place glinted in the light--on closer inspection, a practice eye may realize that they were Sylverite, a metal rare in the current age, and once used exclusively, so the stories said, by the Faerie Courts.
Within the coffin, at least what could be seen of the inside with the cloth still covering roughly half of it, a figure was visible, seemingly lying in repose. Perhaps the first first detail of note was the tattoo that framed her cheeks and brow, the white design a stark contrast against her pale blue skin--and to those who recognized the old scripts of the Unseelie Fae, it was clear that the design both channeled and augmented power.
Her hands were crossed just beneath her breast, resting on the head of a rather whimsically carved staff of deep ebony wood, with a large, perfectly round blue gemstone inlaid in the center. Her clothes were finely made, if clearly archaic, and as pristinely preserved as the body itself. Even her deep aqua hair had been flared perfectly around her face and shoulders, not a single strand out of place despite the battering the coffin seemed to have taken.
It was...eerie. The coffin and the woman inside seemed almost as if they were out of sync with the world around them, existing in a strange no-place just half a second before or after the current moment. Magic thrummed through the air around the wood-and-glass box, subtle but strong: not easy to identify, and almost impossible to break.
If one got close enough to look, they would see that the carvings around the base of the coffin were not merely decorative, they were the root of the magic that surrounded it. A spell, an ancient spell, pulsing with a magic as old as the Stone and the Sky and the Fae. Spell and warning both were carved into the sides of the coffin; twined around the curving, looping script that tied the spell itself to the wood was another script, a stylized version of Old Sylvan.
The second set of writings was surprisingly simple and clear for a relic clearly of faerie origin. It stated only two things--that the contents of the coffin were dangerous, and for the safety of both Faerie and Mortal Realms must be sealed at all costs. And, should the wardings and bonds fail, that whomsoever released the coffin's prisoner would trigger the last failsafe that her jailers had employed, and the Arcane Warrior would be bound to serve at the whim of the Righteous.
Darkness. It wasn't even sleep, this stasis, not really. Sleep was restful. Even a dreamless sleep was at least oblivion, nothingness. This was...
Darkness.
And then, at the very edges of her consciousness, a flicker, just the barest trace of something new, something different, something other than the endless blackness in which she floated. For the first time in centuries, Neria's consciousness shifted, curving and twisting in her bindings like a restless animal.
Free me...
