[Estimated reading time: 11 minutes]
It had started from within. Counsellors moving in secret behind the walls of her golden court; faces seen less, yet names heard more often. The queen's ideas were met with more enthusiasm, yet slower action was taken on them. Suspicion soon began creeping up her spine, and she answered it, dispatching her own most trusted to debunk it. But they never returned to her with anything but impassive news.
Strange shipments began arriving along the diamond roads and opal seas, signed off with her seal, though she had no recollection of doing so. What was in them? The conversation was always changed to something more pressing.
Then, counsellors began to vanish; her most trusted advisors, loyal men and women, and some who were more quiet and stoic, stopped presenting themselves or attending the meetings. And when she asked why, she was told that they were dealing with things in other states. Which states? They had answers, but again, the situations were unfamiliar.
Something inside her, an angel or a demon, told her she was being paranoid. She could see that much. Why, after all, would things begin to crumble when her queendom was finally flourishing? When the walls she had built, the people she had welcomed, the skies she had created, were so strong and bright at last? It didn't make sense. She must have been wrong. Looking for problems where none existed, or confusing her reality with dreams once again.
But with every meeting in the silver council chambers, her glittering court floor, even in her muted private quarters, the ears around her seemed to grow only more deaf, and the voices rose louder over her own. Where before they had listened eagerly, her fair and honest words seemed lost in the wind, as if nothing she said mattered any longer. Or, maybe, she had said them so many times and obtained so little reaction that they had simply stopped listening altogether.
So she tried a new approach, and she continued to trust, in her own way. She used different words, allowed more emotion to flow through them on some occasions, and none on others. But, in a time far too short for her liking, all words ceased to reach them entirely. Her orders and plans, heartfelt and stern alike, were received as thin as a spider's web.
A frown creased her bronze brow most days and nights, etching deeper and deeper into her skin. Thoughts began to circle, ideas and stories, truths or lies - she couldn't tell truth from fiction, and her court, bathed in gold, silver, leaves and silk, began to feel unfamiliar. A shadow was moving through it, growing, and it had already crept into her bones.
Words of counsel seemed less in line with her ideals, less in line with who she was, and in her loneliest moments, it felt as though a fight had begun within her soul. Was she wrong, she wondered? Was she misguided? Was this her doing? Had she become too old, too stagnant, too slow and deluded by her own power to know any longer what was best for her land? Her world? Her people or herself? Had she finally gone completely mad?
Dissent, dissatisfaction - her walls, her floors, her flower beds, her skies...everything reeked with it. Her subjects beyond the castle continued to smile as she passed in her carriage, but something within their eyes was empty. Desperate. Broken. And she couldn't decide if she was imagining it.
And so she continued to do as she was expected. She worked harder, faith solid in the certainty of her world as long as she existed and continued to try, and kept a close eye upon herself throughout. She consorted with the correct people, she listened and applied counsel where it fitted, and trusted their good intentions where it did not. She cared for her people, treated her servants with respect, responded to the missives her remaining counsellors brought her from those who had gone abroad. She did all that she could, even while she grew sick and thin and poisoned by her own air.
And it was then, after too many sleepless nights and vague days to count, that something finally switched.
The queen had awoken one morning to shouts and clatters in the dusk, and within minutes, civil war had broken out like an unstoppable tide.
Quickly, she had gotten dressed and attempted to find some way to quell it, but how could she when she couldn't fathom where it had come from? And no one would see her, or hear her? Here, in her own world, it felt as though she suddenly didn't exist. And it was suddenly crashing down around her.
And so, defeated by her own weariness, she sat upon her diamond throne, her heart weeping, confusion pumping her blood, and cast her bleary gaze out across the barbaric fights inexplicably playing out in her own court. The swords, the blood, the screams, the agony. And she felt every part of it. Every cut, every slip, every stomp, each compressed her soul even smaller inside of her until she was a prisoner in her own bones.
She had done this. It was her own frailty, unreliability, her constantly getting things wrong. They had seen it, brought on by the musts and needs that she had sworn were correct, and decided that now was the time to enforce their own corrections while her power, worn down by her own servitude, her own madness, her own dedication, was at its weakest.
But she had trusted them. She knew that her goals and morals were the same as theirs, they must have been; people and life stood at the centre of it. But her ways weren't good enough. They were wrong, in their eyes.
But...how was this carnage right? Instant solutions, instant change, that was what they wanted, yet time had shown her over and again that that simply wasn't possible, not if that change was to last. Was that really what they expected to happen? Couldn't they see that that was wrong?
Swords clashed closer. Her guards had been drawn into the scuffle. Fear pierced deeper into her stomach. And yet, amongst it all, she suddenly realised that, somehow, she was untouched.
A new frown marred her face. No one aimed at her. No one charged her way. It was like a game, somehow; take out as many of the opponent until there were too few left, and claim victory by default of resources. She would have to give up. It was as if she was the prize. She was immune.
Then the frown fell. The revelation hit and slackened her every muscle.
Of course she was immune. This queendom, this place, this world and all the people in it...it was all her own creation. She couldn't be destroyed literally here; she wasn't like them. Without her, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everything they fought for would vanish, and themselves along with it; all they could actually do was darken it. Darken, taint and poison it. And that...that, was far worse than death. Anything they did to her world, they did also directly to her, but neither would be eradicated and put at peace, only broken in suffering; it was hers to rule, hers to feel, hers to protect and nurture, and right now, right before her pathetically tired eyes, they were poisoning it with no means to truly take it away from her.
Because, without her, there was nothing.
And with her, there was everything.
Her fingers tightened into the arm rests, and her jaw clenched, paining her teeth. But she felt it.
Glory. Satisfaction. That was the point of all of this. To make real an idea that she could be broken by their hands, in a world she had created. In a world where she was immune, a world where she belonged, utterly, truly, and fundamentally. Just to prove that they could.
Unbidden, her sharpening gaze dropped to the floor. She saw, beneath the skirmish, the stone chips fallen from the ceiling. She saw the flakes of tarnished gold, the dried leaves and those wilted along the walls. And through the murky windows, the cotton clouds darkening and fraying around the dripping light of the morning sun.
No. This was not her doing. This could never be her doing.
'Why now, when the queendom was finally flourishing?'
'Because,' the thought sent a bitter grin across her glistening lips, 'it is simply ripe for the picking.'
They had succeeded in making her believe she was insane. But that was as far as they would get. And they would learn why she had the power to build this, where they had merely leeched.
She would remind them exactly why this world was hers.
The piercing song of axe and sword rang among the columns. Blood sprayed. Yells and cries of pain and fury ricocheted hollow across the walls. And her glittering eyes had turned black.
The queen rose from her throne as the walls crumbled behind her, her gossamer dress full and glistening, and barely noted that the dizziness of the last weeks had vanished from her body.
She raised a slender hand from her side, and flicked it lazily. Lightning froze the hall. All descended to silence beneath the deafening, godly crack of thunder but for the thuds of collapsing bodies, and nothing but the flashes of light moved jagged across the walls. Not a sound came, not a flinch made. Like statues of flesh, every soul within her sight and beyond lay pinned to the ground by wrath.
With haunting grace, she moved forwards and down the dais, her slow steps ringing maliciously, and cast a vague eye across them all. She knew who to look for. She knew where this had started. She had always known: with those she had given a chance to, and had abused it. Abused it, and her, in her own world. And made her feel like she was going mad.
On she strode, past the pinned guards and attackers alike, until the odd flick of her hand raised one robed man limply to his hips, and dragged him across the floor behind her.
Then another followed from an alcove. Then another from near the door. Then another from the balcony above, tumbling silently over the balistrade like a ragdoll to half-drift along with the rest.
Bones cracked as she walked. Fingers broke. Jaws dislocated. Knees cracked. And not a peep of pain. No hands, voices or manners would ever be raised against her here again.
Broken, the betrayers flowed out from the court in her furious wake, through the halls, through the doors, and out into the sun-dripped city. She didn't look back at them. They were there. She looked instead at the people and carnage that had spread out across the city. Not a soul had been spared from her mistake. And this, she would remember.
Fires, frozen, reversed themselves and shrank to smouldering husks as she passed them. Fallen stones rose and returned themselves to their places in walls and gardens. By her will alone, the city rebuilt itself, just as it had in the Beginning, while the ones who had refused her, had overlooked her, had tried to twist and steal away the world and life she had created, were dragged roughly through it, witnessed silently by the civilians, soldiers and misinformed alike as they lay paralyzed and fixed to the ground.
Hours she marched and endured, punishing herself with the images, holding her heartbroken tears back in her eyes to take in as much of the destruction as she could, voice and self pity restrained in her throat.
Then, finally, the grand city gates rose into view.
They swung open at her arrival, and here, decisively, she stopped. But the choice few she had dragged along with her did not. Floating on past her, she watched them go, tracking every micrometre they made clear from the city until, with another final, bitter gesture of her hand, force collected and thrust them mercilessly out into the dark and tangled wilderness.
Without a word, she turned her back to their colliding bodies. The gate closed firmly, and she marched again, back to her shattered home.
Slowly, her world returned to life; the flames died, the buildings stood solid, and the people, wide-eyed in awe, rose wearily to their feet. Not a sound was uttered for days, by them nor herself.
Weakness had come from within. And she had let it happen. She had let her world, her morals, her ideas, and her identity fall to influence that even she believed had known better.
But that would never happen again. For when her world was invaded, she had not run. She'd reminded them of why it was hers.
