Princess Coral forced herself to watch through tear-filled eyes as her best friend and eldest sister was led to the stone altar of the temple's inner sanctum. She stood next to her older twin sisters Saphire and Opal, who even now gripped each others' hands tightly in mutual support. As she was led past the royal family, Coral's condemned sibling planted her feet and pulled against her bonds, straining to address their parents. Both stood tearless and grim-faced, lines of regret etched deeply in their haggard visages.

Malikyte's cries of disbelief and desperation echoed loudly in the chamber. "You would let them do this? To your own daughter?!"

The King's face hardened. "You know as well as I, Malikyte, why none can be permitted to touch the sacred relics, especially someone of royal blood. The chances of disaster are simply too great - which is why the deterrent must have no exceptions."

"If you give the priests this sort of power, they won't stop! They won't stop until they take total control of the kingdom! Mark my words, they'll destroy you all!!!" Malikyte's wild eyes searched their faces, but found no hope. As her captors pulled her away, she looked to her sisters in despair. Saphire and Opal hugged each other, hiding their faces in each others' shoulders.
 
Coral alone gazed right back, tears streaming down her cheeks while her hands covered her muzzle, sobbing audibly. It was contrary to everything she'd been taught as a princess, but between her love for her sister and her duty as a royal, her heart was the stronger influence by far.

Upon seeing her open display, Malikyte's expression changed suddenly, a sort of madness mixed with hope. "I'll remember you, dear Coral - the only one who shed a tear! THE ONLY ONE WHO SHED A TEAR!!!"

"Let me go, you mongrels!" The priests hauled the raving silver vixen off her feet and carried her to the altar. Once there, the tattered rags of her once-immaculate dress were torn away, leaving her without the dignity of a single scrap of clothing. It took three well-muscled jackal priests to subdue her thrashing as a fourth bound her body in an intricate harness of jute rope from head to toe.

Coral winced and bit her lip as her sister yelped and squirmed, the lengths of rough cord being yanked tight into the junction of crotch and thigh, threaded between the swollen petals of her flower, coiled around the base of each breast, even gagged by it as they cinched several thick coils between her jaws and around her snout. By the time they were finished, Malikyte's head, torso, and limbs were woven into a sheath of countless diamonds and triangles. She had to admit to herself that, were she able to forget about who it was, she might have even found a sort of artistic beauty in the horror of it all.

"Your Majesties, dearly assembled, neither I nor the other priests wish to prolong your understandable suffering of these lamentable proceedings, so I shall endeavor to be as brief as I can." 

The aged jackal had been standing silently off to the side the entire time, but with his ankh-tipped staff punctuating every shuffling step across the marble floor and his distinctive pattern of speech, he now drew their attention like a magician away from the drama occuring right behind him. The four jackals set upon her sister viciously, beating the fight from her until she was unable to resist them tying her harnessed body to the stone edifice.
 
"The facts of this matter are indisputable: the princess Malikyte was discovered in the temple vault, having obtained entry through a hidden emergency escape shaft long thought collapsed. There, she was witnessed handling the shards of the Jade Mask, sacred relic to Tenebra, deifex of demons and shadows. Had she incited his wrath, everyone in the kingdom would have been absorbed by their own shadow and made to serve his bidding." The elder priest turned slowly, gesturing with his gnarled hand at the squirming silver vixen as he mounted the dais. "It gives me no pleasure to pronounce sentence on one so young and spiritually troubled, lost in delusions of conspiracy and treachery...but as the High Priest and Keeper of the Sacred Relics, I have no choice."

As the elder approached, three of the jackal priests retreated from the altar. The fourth, the one who had tied the vixen's body, knelt at the foot of the altar, bowing his head as he lifted a burning torch before him. Unlike any torch Coral had seen before, this one flickered with an emerald flame.

With every step the High Priest took, the vixen struggled more fiercely against her bonds. With every step, the air around the altar seemed to energize, vibrating with the intonations of his voice. As he took the offered torch in his free hand, dust even began to shake free of the vaulted ceilings, raining down upon Coral and her sisters in the otherwise vacant alcove.

"Malikyte Exceltia Corundum Lapisundi...for your transgression...I hereby banish you...to the realm of shadows...where you shall make amends...as a wife of Tenebra!"
 
With his last step, with his last word, he touched the torch to the ropes that bound the vixen to the altar. In seconds, the flames engulfed her, filling the chamber with muffled screams. All but Coral looked away, and because she did not, she was the only one to witness that the flames did not blacken her pelt or char her flesh - rather, her body simply faded away beneath the roiling inferno.

And she was gone.

Coral shot up in bed, a scream barely caught in her throat. She sat like that for a minute, bedsheets clenched tight in her hands, panting and assuring herself that she was in her two-level tower bedchamber and nowhere near the musty temple. Her night-candle flickered in the breeze coming through the arrow slit windows above, its feeble flame dimly illuminating her bed, vanity, and prayer mat. She hated that dream. Every time she had it she was reminded of how much she had lost. Four years after her sister's banishment, the queen's caravan had been ambushed by desert raiders while on a diplomatic mission. The caravan's priest alone survived to bring word of the horrific event. The King's regal heart failed him mere days after. Evidently, he felt his end approaching, for a royal decree found by his body ceded royal authority to the high priest. 

The dramatic shift in the balance of power was well on its way to triggering a full-scale upheaval of the kingdom. Many believed the venerable church leader would seize all power and authority in the kingdom for life. Instead, he surprised everyone with his very next public appearance - officiating the burial service of the former king.  

Coral remembered that day vividly. Sitting in numb misery beside her sisters in the royal balcony, she recalled trying to imagine how astoundingly robust and vital the high priest must have been in his prime - especially since, according to most, his health had been failing him longer than she herself had been alive. Even he admitted as much when he delivered the eulogy! Contrary to the expectations of some, however, the priest lavished praise upon the dead monarch, calling him a close friend and ally of the church. Reaching the end of his monologue, he paused to clear his throat before announcing that, despite being entrusted with the welfare of the kingdom by its most enlightened ruler since the monarchy was founded, he could never be anything but a servant of the church. Because of this, he would instead appoint himself a steward until the two eldest princesses reached maturity, at which time they would marry the finest specimens of the priesthood and rule the kingdom with the blessing of the church. Following the announcement, Coral couldn't help but notice Saphire and Opal clasp each others' hands tightly, out of sight from the rest of their attendants and onlookers.

Coral looked about her present surroundings glumly. Circumstances had effectively made them all wards of the church. They were allowed to stay in the castle, but they had been moved to the top of the two tallest towers, separated from each other. Their personal possessions, their dresses and jewelry, books, dolls, and toys - all were sold off and the proceeds funneled into the church's coffers. When she tried to protest, the jackal priestess who served as her governess chided her selfishness, reminding her to think of all the poor children the church could now feed from the sacrifice of her meaningless luxuries. Sniffing softly, she messily wiped the tearstains from her cheekfur with the back of her hand. The rest she could do without, but she still missed her bookcases filled with lessons, philosophy, mysteries, and romances. The priests allowed her only one book now, a thick tome they called 'The Truth' which sat on her nightstand. She stared at it for a long moment, wiping away the last of her tears on her bedsheets before retrieving it and setting it open on her lap. She fussed with the mirrored reflector of her night-candle until the light focused upon the faded parchment and began leafing through one of the last chapters in the hopes of inviting sleep back to her troubled mind.

She had re-read the same paragraph three times in search of its meaning before she noticed another source of light dancing across the page. Lightning? She looked up toward her windows as another silent green flash lit up the vertical sliver of sky she could see from her bed. The Truth fell forgotten from her lap as she tossed her sheets aside and slid from her mattress to the cold stone floor. Her clawtips clicked softly as she mounted the steps to the upper level for a closer look. Looking out over the castle walls, she saw a strange stormfront blowing in from the west and converging on the temple complex. The clouds were unlike any she had ever seen before - they were a sick, swirling palette of black and green, like the colors of an angry ocean. As the vixen watched, bright forking strokes of green lightning flashed within the clouds and lanced silently against the sloped walls of the temple. Along the curtain wall, jackalguards were assembling from all over the castle, pointing at the storm and shouting to each other. Looking back to the temple, Coral saw why: priests and acolytes were pouring out of the structure in a panic, leaping and falling over each other down the stone steps. The silent lightning began to strike wildly among the scattering jackals, casting them into the air and knocking them to the ground where they lay convulsing.

Again the wind picked up and the storm resumed its approach toward the castle. Coral couldn't help but notice that the stormfront was oddly shaped. Rather than a flat bank of clouds, it looked more like a wedge plowing through the sky, shoving other clouds aside. It was the tip of that wedge where Coral's eyes were drawn, an area where the green flashes appeared to intensify. Squinting, she thought she could see something drop from it: a crackling, gaseous sphere of green light that drifted lazily ahead of the storm, wandering down from the sky like a recently-paid guard weaving his way home from a tavern. The sphere was about the size of a ten-pin ball when it reached the walkway above the castle gate. A knot of jackals surrounded it, waving their arms under it and around it and exclaiming excitedly amongst themselves. It took the sight of the guards stroking their forearms for Coral to realize it was making their fur stand on end. One of them reached out to it with his spear.

Suddenly, she remembered her books.

"DON'T TOUCH IT!" She screamed from her window.

But it was too late. Even without the storm and the wind, they were too far away. What happened next, however, shocked her as well. The sphere burst, knocking all the guards to the ground. The eerie green light dispersed among them, flowing like liquid fire down their throats. They thrashed in apparent agony as their white linen tunics blackened and crumbled, a fine dust of embers falling from their bodies. Eyes bulging, fingers stiff and distended, the guards clawed helplessly at their muzzles and throats as though suffocating. Coral covered her muzzle in horror, the scene before her interspersed with flashes of childhood memory. Rather than fade from view, however, the sandy tan fur of their naked bodies was turning black. Wait...it wasn't _turning_ black...it was...

The door to her tower suddenly unbolted and flew open. Three jackals charged in, searching the room for its occupant. One spotted her silhouette against the window before she could announce her location and leapt with surprising dexterity up the steps to grab her arm. Half-dragging her behind him, he threw her to the bed with the same care and effort one might use to toss a sack of potatoes. "Foolish whelp! Stay there!" he growled, shaking the index finger of his metal gauntlet in her face, "it's headed toward the twins' tower, but I doubt it'll stop there!"

"Wh-what is it?!" She squeaked, "I-I just saw it k-kill..."

"Quiet!" he roared, moving to rebolt and secure the door alongside the other two. Coral's ears swiveled back, cringing from the rebuke. Without another word, she reached over to refocus the mirror of her night-candle at the door, trying to help them see. In the light, she saw the insignia of a Watch-Captain and two priests. The Captain knelt before the bolted door as the two priests darted up the stairs, whipping out pieces of chalk with which they began to scribe runes beside each of the seven windows. 

"Airtight, Captain," they offered as they came back down, "short of Tenebra himself, nothing's getting through."

The Captain rose to his feet again, appearing less sure as he kissed the ankh hanging from his necklace. "There's a space under the door, get it too."

The priests set to it with vigor, starting on the bottom of either side and working along the stone frame. Picking up The Truth, Coral flipped through to one of the dozen appendices and attempted to match the runes to their descriptions. When she accidentally blocked the light with her book, the Captain tore it from her hands and threw it against the wall with enough force to split the spine, sending leafs of parchment flittering haphazardly to the floor.

"That was my only book," Coral pouted under her breath.

The Captain was grimfaced, fixing his steel eyes at hers. She was about to look away in submission when he broke gaze first, looking toward the door and the priests hurriedly marking the wall. He opened his muzzle to speak, stopped, then grit his teeth, sniffing the air. With a snort, he started back for the door. 

"It's coming."

When he reached the door, the two priests were both straining to reach the top to complete the final rune at the apex of the entrance. The tips of their chalk barely touched the stone when there was a sudden 'SNAP!' A wide, flat silver knife darted through the milimeter gap between the top of the door and the stone frame, neatly shattering both pieces of chalk just above their wielder's fingertips. Pushing past their shock, the priests tried again, but were defeated as the silver blade bent 90 degrees upward and slapped itself back against the wall, shielding the stone from the placement of the last, crucial rune.

The priests stumbled back as a woman's laughter began to drift through from the other side of the door. One by one, their reinforcements and barricades clattered to the floor or shifted aside. The captain lifted his sword as the doorknob twisted, preparing to land a mighty strike against whoever was about to enter. 

He never got the chance; a painfully bright flare of green light was the only warning as the door itself exploded in a blast of splinters and twisted iron.

Coral sat for several seconds before lowering the arm she'd raised to shield her eyes. Faint stars still danced in her dazzled vision as she observed a solid curtain of glowing green fog where her door had been. The Captain was sprawled out on the floor of the far wall. He was trying hard to gather the strength and coordination to sit up or roll over, but was failing at both. One of the priests had simply been knocked off his feet in front of the door. In obvious pain, he cradled his head, not yet aware of a trickle of blood staining his earfur. The other priest was nowhere to be seen at first, until Coral noticed his tall ears peeking above the footboard of her bed. Launching onto her knees, she leaned over the edge to see him clutching his leg where a sharp fragment of the door was impaling his thigh.

Coral looked back up as the green mist began to pour into the room, obscuring the floor to a depth of several inches. A dark figure appeared moving toward them, backlit by the ghostly internal light of the mist. Stepping gracefully past the foggy curtain, a naked vixen revealed herself without fanfare. Her pelt bore an odd, complex pattern of thin black stripes that criss-crossed her well-toned body in such a way as to produce a symmetrical design of diamonds and triangles. Several of the lines converged at the corners of her muzzle, giving her head the vague semblance of a bleached skull. She knew instantly who it was, the image having been branded on her childhood memories for all time.

The vixen scanned the room aloofly before directing her attention to Coral - whereupon her emerald eyes lit up with similar recognition and her black lips curled to form a warm smile. She seemed to almost float across the ground as she walked toward the bed, her arms spreading as if to welcome an embrace. As she drifted past the first priest, however, his hand lashed out to wrap around the vixen's ankle.

"Filthy, cursed WITCH! By the power invested in me by the church and the deifex of Order, I command you BEGONE!"

The vixen rolled her eyes as she turned to look down at the jackal. Crooking her muzzle, she blew a short, exasperated sigh through the corner of her lips which quickly turned into a wisp of green smoke. The smoke flowed over her face, transforming before their eyes into a solid, stylized mask of jade. The eyes of the mask radiated the same green lights as the cloud, only this time they focused like beams on the horrified face of the priest.

As Coral had witnessed before, the jackal's clothes turned to ash without burning. Coughing green fire, the jackal's tearing eyes bulged, searching blindly for help. His hand released the vixen to join the other in clawing his arms, legs, throat and chest. This was the point where Coral's witness had been interrupted before. This time, it's when she found her voice.

"Mal! Please stop, Mal! Don't do this!"

The vixen who had been her sister spoke with an echoing, disembodied voice an octave lower than the one she remembered.

"Dearest Coral, the only one who shed a tear... I do not take their lives, but for their crimes, my forgiveness demands their eternal servitude."

Coral stared, frozen as the jackal continued to wheeze in panic, looking over himself as an eerie blackness began to flow over his legs and up his arms. Where the blackness washed over, his fur vanished and his body itself became translucent. 

That's when Coral understood. The guards had been consumed by their own shadows.

The shadow devoured his face last, the jackal's silent scream powered by lungs that were no more tangible than the rest of him.

"Mal..." Coral hung her head in disappointment, hardly noticing as the now-softened emerald gaze swiveled toward her, "what have you done?"

"I did what they did to me: I banished him to the Realm of Shadow. There he will serve Tenebra willingly or as a slave; his choice. No need to let a perfectly good shadow go to waste, though." With a beckoning gesture from the jade-masked vixen, the rapidly dissipating shade returned to sharp clarity and took on a faint greenish glow of its own. It rose up from the ground beside the vixen and stood rigidly at attention, as though awaiting a command. 

"Great Maker!"

The vixen didn't wait for the question before explaining, trailing her hand along the smokey black chest of the shadow-jackal. "In this realm, shadows don't normally hold together long without something to cast them, but as easily as I expel the person, I can just as easily transfer any of the countless demons loyal to Tenebra into the vacant shadow."

Coral stared at them, absorbing the information. Then a terrible thought occurred to her.

"Is this what you did...to Opal, to Saphire?! Is this what you did to them?!!!" Her voice broke with a hoarse, high-pitched whine as she scrabbled to climb off her bed and confront her sister. Mal, however, stood her ground, holding out a firm but calming hand to the younger vixen.

"Opal and Saphire are fine, dear sister. I'll show you." Mal looked toward the door, waving her other hand dismissively. Through the fog curtain stepped two figures, but aside from being identical and vixen in shape, there was nothing about them to recognize as her sisters - aside from the way they clung to each other with such desperate affection. Before her stood two figures covered head to toe to tailtip in shiny silver skins. Like living statues, the finer details of their bodies were hidden, blurred away and softened by overlapping and interwoven layers of what looked like metallic bandages. Their feet (or what she could see through transitory gaps in the fog), lacked toes - appearing to be thick but flexible booties. Their hands were spongy silver bulbs with just the barest hint of bumps where the knuckles would be. As her eye drifted up along the rounded, buoyant mounds of their breasts to their faces, her slender maw gaped in shock to find no trace of mouth, nostrils, or even slits through which to see from. But despite the fact their faces were as featurelessly smooth as the rest of them, they approached as if they could still see perfectly, going so far as to step around the shredded remains of her bible on the floor.

Coral moved her lips, but the words formed without breath to project them. Mal turned to face the new arrivals. "Now, my dearest slaves, show Coral how happy you are to be reunited by your older sister."

Slowly, their mittened hands began roaming over each others' bodies. The one on the left moved her tail in a way that led Coral to guess it was Opal. She watched as Opal moved her head to nuzzle the mitten brushing her cheek and neck, caressing her own mitt tenderly along Saphire's shoulder, following the gentle slope down her chest to rub at the button-sized nub jutting from the crest of her gleaming breast. Saphire's head tilted back with a mournful 'mmmmmm', moving herself to nestle her leg between her sister's, lifting her knee with a soft crinkle to wedge her upper thigh against the soft silver mound of her sister's pelvis. Opal was next to moan, but instead of rearing back, her head dove forward to mash the tip of her snout to Saphire's, both twisting and tilting their heads as through sharing the most passionate kiss Coral had ever seen. The shiny, smooth surfaces of their bodies squeaked and squealed almost loud enough to drown out their moans, whines, and whimpers of need.

Coral was transfixed by the display, but eventually managed to pull her eyes away to find Mal watching her intently. There was something even more...unsettling...about the way the mask's glowing green eyes were studying her.

"What are they...covered in?"

"Surely you don't think the Jade Mask was the only sacred relic I touched in the temple?"

"V'Ki's Tape of Eternal Restoration?"

"Indeed. A single touch and one is forever restored to their apex of health and vitality, to the point they are loosed from the mortal coil completely. Those to come...who prove themselves to be my most loyal of slaves and subjects...will all be gifted with it."

"Our sisters...your own blood...are now just your slaves?" Coral tried to read the face hidden by the jade mask, but without success.

"Yes, and above all my most treasured. They both will love and serve me unconditionally." Malikyte paused, reaching out to place a hand gently on Coral's shoulder. "Still, the tone of your question is not unmarked. Look, all I've done is replace one slavery with another. They would never have been happy as monarchs. They'd have had no real authority, and no real purpose aside from bearing heirs fit to raise in the church's interest. Here, I've freed them to be as they are, to love each other openly and publicly in the way their hearts have always longed for."

By now, Opal and Saphire were slowly descending to the floor, silvery vixens in a feral heat. "And what of me, Mal?"

Mal's green eyes flared again, this time with utter rage. Coral stumbled back, only to be firmly rooted in place by the hand still on her shoulder. She cringed, expecting a swift smiting. She nearly jumped out of her skin at the noise of a large sword clattering to the ground behind her. She turned just in time to see the Captain lifted up by an invisible force and slammed against the wall. His body turned dark and transparent before his clothes even had time to incinerate. In the next instant, the glowing black shade drifted back to the floor, retrieving the fallen sword and kneeling with its arm folding firmly across its chest in a gesture of allegiance. 

Mal's eyes returned to normal, and the jade mask once again dissolved into a ghostly vapor which the elder vixen inhaled. "You, dear Coral, were the only one to show me kindness in my darkest hour. You have proved yourself most worthy. Indeed, there is no one else I would trust to rule at my side..." Mal's hand lifted from her shoulder then to brush knuckles along her youngest sister's soft cheekfur, her next words a tempting whisper against twitching ears. "...or at my feet, if that's what you desire."

Coral's maw suddenly went dry. Looking away, her eyes fell upon the torn book, the shards of her exploded door, the slender silver statues fucking in front of her, and the three shadowy ghosts who, mere moments before, were living jackals. "Is this what becomes of the kingdom, Mal? Honestly, I used to think that maybe a takeover by the church was the disaster and punishment father spoke of when he warned us against going anywhere near the sacred relics, but now...all this power you have...that you wield so casually...I can't help but wonder if the disaster is...you."

Coral turned back to see the look of sincere sadness on Malikyte's face. Her heart ached to see the pain and despair. "I do not believe the church's dogma, and I would do almost anything to restore the balance of power that used to exist between they and the monarchy, but your intentions seem to be born more of hurt and revenge than any desire to help our people. I'm sorry, Mal. I am so, so sorry...for what happened to you, for what they did...for what we allowed...but I will not join you."

Both vixens, youngest and eldest, wiped away the shimmering tears streaking down the others' cheek. The smallest hint of a smile played at the blackstained corners of Mal's lips as she drew her into a tight hug. Both began to sob quietly into the other's soft fur, pouring out a decade of pain and anger - both at the situation they'd been forced into, and what those circumstances had made them become.

Coral sniffed back her last volley of tears when she noticed Malikyte had stopped crying. That's when she felt it: something looping around her waist. 

Mal's voice again tickled her ear. "I love you, Coral, my dearest sister...but that wasn't one of the choices."

She stiffened, simultaneously knowing what was rapidly growing around her torso and begging it not to be so. She struggled her way out of Mal's arms to watch in horror as a dozen sticky strands began to coil, knit, and wind over her pristine white fur like flat silver snakes.

Mal continued, "don't worry though, I can only imagine how conflicted you must be after all the years those jackals have had to turn you against me."

Coral writhed where she stood, whining as the tape enveloped her body in layer after layer, leaving nothing below her chin exposed to the chilling night air save her hands and beautiful tail. She begged and pleaded desperately, knowing it would do no good. The fact she was no longer forced to pause in the middle of her begging to breath was evidence that the magic was already unleashed. When at last she sat  crumpled and defeated on the floor, crinkling softly as she shifted her legs beneath her, two sets of green-rimmed shadows resembling hands clasped her wrists and wrapped a thin metal cuff around them. A commanding voice delivered instructions to her captors as they hauled her up to her feet once more.

"Take her beneath the temple, to the royal tombs. You'll find the sarcophagus made for her propped against the nearest wall. Prepare her for a long stay and seal her in it. I imagine a few weeks of meditation will bring her around..."