Twice Was She Forsaken

"Why are you crying, Vionna? Isn't this what you wanted?!"

The pain at her throat jolted Vionna Valebright awake.

She gasped, eyes flying open—then froze.

She'd been reborn.

It was the day Theron was drugged. Again.

In her last life, she had loved him. Foolishly.

They met during the royal hunt, held once every three years. He rode beside her father, King Aldric—his sworn brother-in-arms. Tall, sharp-eyed, ceremonial robes drawn tight at the waist—Theron Thornefell commanded the field without a word.

When assassins struck and took the king's daughter hostage, it was Theron who loosed an arrow through the captor's throat and caught her mid-fall.

Vionna, wrapped in his cloak, gave him her heart.

At her coming-of-age, she confessed her feelings to Theron—nine years older.

He turned cold. Said she'd confused gratitude with love.

The next day, he requested to leave Crownspire for Stormrest, his stronghold in the North.

Vionna, stubborn to the end, knelt at the palace gates till King Aldric gave in and let her follow.

At first, everyone at Theron's estate in Stormrest treated her with deference. But for a full month, she never once saw him.

So she cast off her gowns for roughspun, took the name Viona Vale, and slipped into his army as a battlefield physician—just another common girl.

In her third year, Theron was drugged by a traitor.

She stepped into his command tent and offered herself as the cure.

By morning, they were discovered—by Marzella Morwynne, his deputy commander and childhood crush.

The girl fled the camp in tears.

On the road, ambushed and cornered, Marzella threw herself from a cliff.

Theron changed after that.

He built a chapel within his estate in her name, posthumously named her Heroic Commander, and later petitioned to marry Vionna.

By the time the royal decree reached Stormrest, the damage had been done.

They called Vionna shameless. Said she'd seduced and drugged the Warden of the North. That she'd murdered Aurenza's finest female commander and used her bloodline to force his hand.

By her wedding day, Vionna was already visibly pregnant.

She'd spent the months before stitching her gown in silence, thinking only of the child.

Only that day did it hit her—Theron despised her.

From then on, the radiant, beloved Princess Vionna was gone.

Only a woman remained—trapped in a distant house within Theron's estate, wasting away day by day.

In three years of marriage, Vionna lost three children.

The first slipped away before the third month. The physician blamed the tonic she'd taken to conceive—said even if the child had lived, it might not have been whole.

The second, lost in the fourth month. She'd spilled the wine in Marzella's chapel and was punished—three days kneeling, wrists bound, bleeding into the dirt.

The last reached eight months.

That winter, a storm came—the worst in a century. Every house on the estate was reinforced. Except hers.

The snow fell through the night. By dawn, the skies cleared.

Stormrest stood unscathed. The townsfolk had prepared.

But Vionna and her unborn child were buried in that storm.

After death, her soul lingered above.

She watched Theron clutch Marzella—miraculously alive—tight in his arms.

Theron's household rejoiced. Their lord had finally gotten what he'd begged the gods for.

And her?

She was the villain who'd stood in the way.

No one mourned her.

Better off dead.

Maybe the heavens took pity. She had saved many in those three years in the camp. Somehow, she was reborn—on the very day Theron was drugged.

In this life, she had only one goal—

To bring Theron and Marzella together.