Royal Guard

Royal Guard (RG) is a visual short story set in the Elsaverse. It was released on June 1, 2016, as a monthly perk for Tora Productions' patrons, and publicly released on November 24, 2016. In 2021, RG was ported to Ren'Py and added to the Elsaverse Omnibus Vol.1 bundle. The story takes place some undetermined time after the events on Dreaming with Elsa (2015) and it's advised to be read after playing Redemption for Jessika, as that's the title in which Xara is properly introduced in the Elsaverse saga. Royal Guard has no sexual content, and it shows the burden Xara has to endure every night.

Plot
As Xara walks down a corridor in what looks like a middle ages setting, she forces herself to look confident and brave in order to give some hope to those who are watching her, as they need that boost. It's all a facade, as the woman is severely injured and hates herself for being putting on a show, but she hasn't been trained to show weakness, or her true feelings at all. Meanwhile, she's hearing in her head a telepathic communication between a troubled soldier who's asking for a retreat, and Axis, their General. Axis denies that request, as the small detachment led by the soldier is protecting a fortress where the King is staying, but their enemies are about to get there and slaught them all. Then Xara walks into the control room, a fantasy place where Axis, an old woman, is surrounded by people who help her to keep telepathic communications. Upon seeing her, Axis asks Xara if she's okay, and Xara nods laconically, lying again in spite of herself. Then Axis tells the soldier that she's sending them some reinforcements, and orders Xara to go there: a caster opens what looks like a magical gate in a stone arc, and Xara is teleported to somewhere else.

That's when Xara is shown in the story for the first time, dressed as a mythic warrior: she is a Royal Guard, albeit the soldier has just said that all Royal Guards are dead. She's not blind either, and launches herself towards a bridge where her enemies are. Those enemies, called Draegor, are a nasty group of voracious and bloodthirsty giant lizardmen, that stand no chance against the Royal Guard: she enters in a hyperawareness state called "The Flow" and just annihilates them with her spar. Then she gets to the King's fortress, where she's welcomed by the soldier who was talking to Axis. The man leads her to where the King is, taking her spar for security reasons.

Xara enters a big throne room where the King is completely alone and kneels before him. She's the only survivor of an ambush in which all her partners have died that same morning, and the King bitterly scolds her for being alive. Then he orders someone else to teach her a lesson, making it the last thing she sees. Suddenly, while Xara is realizing she's been betrayed by her King, a female assassin appears from thin air behind Xara and runs a blade through her chest. But then the setting changes abruptly and a purple dome protects Xara from the assassin: Elsa is there, and says that she wouldn't bear to watch that woman ripping Xara's eyes again. Elsa tries to heal Xara's wound while telling her that she's been summoned to Xara's nightmares every night since they first met in their dreams (in the Dreaming with Elsa post-credits scene), and has witnessed several variations of that same dream: all of them end with that assassin blinding Xara with her claws. She then tries to make the grotesque assassin disappear from the dream, but she can't, and Xara explains to Elsa that this is not a nightmare, but a punishment she has to endure, so there's nothing Elsa could do to help. But Elsa doesn't quite agree with that and orders Xara to wake up: for one single night, Xara doesn't need to relive once again the moment when she was blinded.

Miscellaneous

 * In a new example of foreshadowing, the King is actually Morland, and his assassin is Crow. Both characters are properly introduced as the Elsaverse's main villains in Finding Miranda (2016), the third game of the saga, that was released some months after Royal Guard.


 * Axis appears later on as well, in a dream in one of the non-canon, Xara centered paths in Saving Chloe (2018); but also in the text-story Demon Guard (2019), which means that she is also a real character in the parallel universe, and not just a dream byproduct.


 * Always according to Demon Guard, Draegors also seem to be real in the parallel universe, being Xara's race enemies (and Morland's protectors) in the ongoing war in that world.


 * The soldier that talks telepathically to Axis and then welcomes Xara into the castle is depicted as Vince, the bouncer at El Cuerpo. It's still not clear whether he's actually from that parallel universe, though.


 * In Royal Guard, Elsa mentions she has witnessed several variations of the dream's setting, watching Xara fight in spaceships, in the Nazi-occupied France, on the back of a flying giant dragon, and even in a business environment where she's a lawyer and Morland is her CEO. According to Demon Guard, though, the first setting seems to be the closest to the actual nature of Xara's universe.


 * In Demon Guard, it will be explained that only the Dream Master who inflicted that punishment can lift it, and that's why Elsa wasn't able to do all that she wanted to do for help, like making Crow disappear.


 * In one of the non-canon paths in Saving Chloe it's implied that Chloe Reyes saw this punishment dream too, as it lures anyone who has some dream control abilities, which Chloe had thanks to the "Morpheus" fragment she was using in Dreaming with Elsa. That's how Chloe and Xara got in contact for the first time.