Overwatch
By Michaela
My post content
Dark Angel Chronicles — Overwatch (Age 16)
As told by Princess Aureilia
The sun sat behind my wings as I jumped.
Speed was my advantage, silence my cloak. I needed 5 seconds and I would shout if I needed to buy time.
There’s a space just above a whisper where sound hasn’t yet remembered it exists. I stayed there—silent, fast, the updraft cupping my feathers, pulling at my hair as I drew my blade.
Blades are usually loud when they win. Mine weren’t. The first brute had the decency to crumple onto rocks; the second went down on his knees before he understood kneeling was not something he wanted to be doing. I finished what they had asked me to start— my cross cut severed his throat spraying me with his hot blood - clean, quick, a promise to the pool that no more of its water would hold this story.
I feel no remorse.
The girls saw them and their playful giggles became shouts of warning ..... good, that suited me, the sub humans fed on their fear and stopped to enjoy it.
The first brute roared in the moment before I severed his throat, he never learned who had taken his life. My blade cut deeply and at that moment their plan fell apart.
The second turned toward the splash of blood, mouth opening, feet slow to tell him how wrong this day had become. I arrived in the space between realisation and terror his balance had just abandoned him and I let my steel teach his ribs a new shape. He wheezed a word that didn’t find air.
For a breath the jungle forgot to move. My heartbeat did not.
I turned sixteen at sundown, but duty doesn’t keep a calendar.
Mother dressed me for the celebration and strapped me into a corseted black—more buckles than armour, more silk than sense and the heels, let's not mention the heels.
My choice would have been bare foot and a battle harness but I guess my blade was still real.
The sky poured gold over the pillar maze and the canyon beyond; every ridge looked dipped in honey. In the distance I could see the relic of the old fallen statue of the ancient race.
From the high ledge I could see the pool where the maidens bathed, steam rising like small prayers. My charge was simple: overwatch until the horn, then wash the dust from my feet and try to remember how to be a girl at a party.
I felt them before I saw them—the wrongness in the leaves, the hush that wildlife makes when a bad idea enters the clearing on two legs.
Sub-humans, muscle knotted to bone, lips already curled into theft. They broke brush with the confidence of creatures who have learned the world rarely tells them no.
The maidens didn’t see them. They were laughing about garlands and music. It was a good laugh. I wanted them to keep it.
Then I turned to my maidens: wide eyes, mouths like small O’s, wings lifted without thinking. They looked very young in that moment. I do not know if that is because they were or because I am not anymore.
“Happy birthday,” I said to myself, privately enough that only the birds could hear.
Aloud, I sheathed my blades and smiled the way you do when something heavy has just remembered how to be light. “Ladies,” I asked, “are we ready to party?”
They laughed again—the same laugh, intact—and the jungle remembered its music. We climbed from the water, shook the drops from feathers, and flew toward the torches that marked the start of night. I flew behind them, counting breaths out of habit, listening for the next wrongness that would need a name.
People think overwatch is about vigilance. It is. But it’s also about permission: giving your people the right to be unafraid for a little while. If I did my job well tonight, no one at the celebration will notice the blood on the undersides of leaves. They’ll notice the lanterns, the sweet bread, the way the drums lean forward into the dark. They will dance. I will, too, if the horn stays quiet.
Sixteen feels like this: dressed for joy, ready for war, and choosing, again and again, to keep the world gentle where I can.
Tomorrow I will clean my blades, run the ridge, and return to the ledge before dawn. The sun will rise before my wings the same way it did today.
I am the blade that they forged — and the shadow that lets the light linger. I am The Dark Angel.