Pride and Arrogance

n a forest long devoured by silence, where roots whisper secrets to bones and stars forget to shine, a girl was born wrong — or perhaps, too right. They once called her nothing. Then they called her Lovecraft, for what she became defied form. Now, in song and ruin, they call her Pride. She is not divine, not truly. But she remembers being a god. And she remembers choosing to fall. Her school stands crooked among the haunted trees — not to teach, but to test. The weak feed the soil. The strong feed her dream. Her students are offered no lessons, only sharpened pain — and if they survive, they bloom into something monstrous and beautiful. She gathers the forgotten: The discarded, the broken, the meek. She gives them death or transformation. And from their suffering, she weaves worship. Magic is no longer a system. It is a voice. A presence. A lover. It coils around her like a serpent of starlight, speaks her name in every tongue that ever existed, and some that never will. And she listens. “Don’t bow,” she says with a smile like a blade. “Die. It’ll make my ascent prettier.” From nothing to sovereign, from mortal to myth, from a nobody to a heresy that walks — Elenai rises, cloaked in eldritch hunger and gilded in arrogance. She will not inherit the world. She will remake it. And when she does, even the stars will kneel to kiss her roots.