Peleus had set down Lord Ethirus’s Claw, and yet he remained unutterably furious. Blood loss had rendered him unconscious for only a brief few hours, and already his Empire had come apart, the cravens and the corrupt gnawing at everything he had built the instant he shut his eyes. He would have to remind them that the Emperor was stronger than that. He was going to remind them all!

The rebel army was retreating, no doubt demoralized and scattered by the death of their leader. And yet the defenders had not pursued, their cowardice showing for all to see. That was the first order of business: every commander who had remained loyal to the cause and continued in pursuit of the rebel army was to consider those who had not done so to be enemy, and hunt them down as traitors. Once Peleus’s attendants, fear in their eyes, had been sent scurrying off to deliver that order, he lurched out of his sickbed and ordered himself be brought to the Palace.

Ever since the beginning, ever since he had put on that damnable ring, Peleus had known that his own home was a hotbed of insurgency and betrayal. Even after only a few hours out of the picture, he had no doubt that such motions had begun. He rode bareback to the palace amidst a storm of fury, and at once rushed forth to return all to order. Floor by floor, sometimes even room by room, he ambushed the slaves and sycophants of his household, demanding loyalty from each in turn.

But the traitors had hidden their betrayal well, and no matter how fervently he searched, Peleus could find no sign of what was being planned against him. Terror began to soak into the haze of paranoia and anger, fear that he was too late, that some secret machination had already been set off. As the frenzy began to fall from his eyes and Peleus once more began to feel the impact of his wounds, he settled into his private chambers and asked to see his wife.

Then, and only then, was the true horror revealed. She was gone. Two of the palace slaves were beaten to death before a third revealed the truth: someone had ordered a wagon to be loaded up with enough supplies for the Empress, her daughter, and a small entourage to survive on their own while they fled the city to places unknown. The Empress had decided that she no longer needed her husband, no longer had to be constant beside him, that it would be better for her to abandon everything and flee into the hinterlands. A betrayal; indeed the ultimate betrayal. For not only had Athalan betrayed her husband, she had betrayed the very institution of marriage and the office of Empress which he had so graciously bestowed upon her.

The response was obvious. She was to be found and brought in at once, brought before Peleus so that he could… He didn’t rightly know what he would do to her. But a punishment would be meted out in proportion to the magnitude of her crime, that much was certain.

Peleus stood upon one of the high balconies of the Imperial Palace, watching the city fight for its life, a stream of slaves and bureaucrats coming and going through the archway behind him. His rage had cooled into a vicious thing, sharp-edged and cruel. Each new piece of bad news—and there were many, an endless list of fatalities and betrayals amongst those who supposedly served him—could no longer inspire the same blaze of fury as before. It was simply another note in the ledger, another body to be hoisted aloft and added to the forest of crosses that would have to be erected when all was said and done. Peleus’s soul had been emptied out of everything besides revenge.

His position on the balcony served two purposes. Firstly, to supply the Emperor with fresh air, the better to soothe his wounded flesh. Secondly, to overlook the whole of Chrysopolis, Peleus’s domain, to place himself where he rightfully belonged and to reinforce, in his mind, the potency of his kinghood. It also had a third effect, unintended: giving Peleus a perfect view of Lord Ethirus rising up into the air and blasting Chrysopolis with an unstoppable torrent of flame.

Peleus was a learned man. He had to be, for reading and writing were crucial parts of his duties. Thus, Peleus knew much of the gods, of how they were worshipped and in what forms. The vast armored body which arced above Chrysopolis, the huge crocodilian head which scanned the streets in search of flammable targets, the ten claws which seemed to grasp the very clouds, all these signs left no doubt as to the nature of the beast, that this was indeed Lord Ethirus made manifest to spread wrath and spite unto the city. So, too, did Peleus know Lord Ethirus’s purpose within the hierarchy of the old gods. He was a punisher of sins, a manifestation of divine wrath. Hubris attracted Lord Ethirus in the same way carrion attracts birds. Peleus came to recognize that fact, that the myths were all true, that the gods really could appear to punish mankind’s sins, and furthermore to recognize that the people being punished were his own. And Peleus broke.

Chrysopolis, after all, was his city, the Macarians who dwelt within were his people. He had always loved Chrysopolis, and thought it the best city in the world; and yet now it seemed that Chrysopolis had been so hateful and heinous that the very gods wished it brought to ruin. He was the Emperor, the shining example; so was it not his failure which had allowed matters to degrade so fully and so spectacularly as to bring about this great firestorm?

Rationality dictated that everything Peleus had ever known was a lie, that he had been the sinful Emperor of a sinful nation, that his hubris had brought down the wrath of the gods upon him, and his only hope for survival—nay, for a pleasant afterlife—was to cast himself down in supplication and remorse. But that would mean that Peleus was nothing, worthless, less than the dirt he walked upon. That Peleus was an evil man, evil down to the root. And so, forced to choose between self-image and rationality, Peleus discarded rationality. With a howl that was half laugh and half agonized scream, Peleus ran from the balcony and into the bowels of the palace.

Visions assaulted him, memories of guilt and of triumph. Athalan caressed his cheek, Hector berated him for his sins, Aissa pronounced his doom in her shrill little voice. There were enemies all over the palace, and Peleus still had Lord Ethirus’s Claw at his side. He fought them with tremendous vigor, slaying the soldiers who had come to drag him away, and did not care what his visions hid.

In the grand tragedy of Peleus’s charred mind, his own doubts had taken on the form of besieging forces. The palace was surrounded, under attack. After all, did he not hear the screams? Did he not smell the smoke? It was the duty of the Emperor to defend his throne to the very last, and so that was what Peleus was going to do. He rushed down to the grand throne room and prepared for his final defense.

A thousand battles were fought behind Peleus’s eyes. In some, he stood his ground at the very doorway to the chamber, battling until he was nearly out of blood, only to be rescued by some faceless allied force. Other battles involved Peleus being surrounded and torn apart before he could so much as swing his blade. In a few, Peleus was surrounded by his guards or by mirror images of himself, and that terrible army fought so long and so brutally that the enemy horde was slain to a man. Death and victory danced across Peleus’s vision, even as his nostrils began to burn with the overpowering aroma of smoke.

And then, suddenly, a lone figure disturbed Peleus’s vigil. None had dared enter the throne room since the onset of his madness. And yet a single woman stepped through the cracked-open front doors. She was clad in Macarian dress, albeit with the cloth dyed unnaturally black, and she held a sword in one hand.

“Halt!” Peleus said, throwing himself to his feet. “Who are… oh. You.”

For indeed, in the moment of surprise, the veil of madness was cast aside, and Peleus identified the intruder correctly. The Witch-Queen of Trabakond had returned.

“Hello, Peleus,” she said.

“Well? What are you here for? Have you come to fix this?”

Shirrin giggled. “Fix this? No. Quite the opposite. I have come to finish this.”

Peleus glanced at the sword. It looked familiar, somehow, but he didn’t bother to consider where he’d seen it. “So, you come at last to slay your master. How cowardly. You wait until I am weakest to strike me down.”

“Oh, far from it,” said Shirrin, and at last she could hold back the broad grin no longer. “Did you think all of this was coincidence, Peleus? Did you think that I had meekly accepted my defeat at your hands, content to serve?”

“What did you do?” Peleus scoffed.

Shirrin’s voice was as cold as ice. “Everything.”

“What?”

“Who do you think let that letter out into the public, hmm? Who do you think arranged things just so, such that you would believe that your loyal right hand was plotting to steal your beloved Athalan? Who do you think encouraged the war-weary Abderus to march upon this city? Who do you think has been serving Lord Ethirus all along, and brought him forth into the world to let vent his wrath upon the city!”

Shirrin’s eyes were aflame with rage and triumph. Peleus’s stomach boiled with a hate so intense that words could not describe it, a hate so intense that speech nearly fled him, so intense that his muscles shook with exertion and his heart throbbed.

“I’ll have your head, your pig-sty blood spilling across my tiles. And you stole my sword!” As the two of them closed together in the center of the throne room, Peleus at last recognized that Shirrin held Bladethorn, sword of the Macarian Emperors.

“Your sword?” Shirrin hissed. “Your sword? Your sword!”

Her voice rose to an echoing, almighty shriek that reverberated off of the high ceilings of the throne room, as Shirrin’s eyes blazed with thirteen months of suppressed hate.

“You mock me? Yes, northerner bitch, it is indeed my sword. Are you so blind and mindless, so consumed by lust for revenge, that you fail to recognize the thing you carry as Bladethorn, sacred weapon of the Macarian Emperors?”

“If you knew what this is, you would never have let it out of your sight. But thank you for leaving me to seize what is rightfully mine.”

“Rightfully yours?” Peleus said, incensed.

“Of course,” Shirrin said, her voice gone soft. “Oh, but you don’t recognize me, do you? Allow me to make it clearer.”

With the hand not holding tight to Bladethorn’s hilt, Shirrin reached up as though to claw out her own eyes. But her fingertips passed them by, and her eyes had changed, no longer brown but instead an ugly and unpleasant red. She gripped her hair by the roots, then ran her fingers down the strands, sucking out the wholesome black and leaving behind nothing but grey. As the enchantment faded, Shirrin’s already-pale skin grew as pale as paper.

Peleus could not have helped but recognize the long-haired albino standing now before him. Did it make sense? He was too far gone to care, let alone to properly analyze. Somehow, his long-dead brother Hector was the same person as Shirrin the Witch-Queen.

“Hmph. You always were a catamite, brother; glad to see you’ve carried that trend out to its natural ending point.”

“And I am quite glad to see that you, too, have remained so reprehensible an individual that I shall feel no compunction whatsoever in cutting you into pieces.”

They circled closer, neither sibling willing to go into melee range just yet. “If you had just abdicated the throne like I had asked you to, none of this would have happened. Look at you. Is this pathetic charade befitting of the true Emperor?”

“Is this childish tantrum befitting the true Emperor? My manipulation could never have brought Macaria to its knees without your feckless wrath and unceasing vanity.”

Peleus had had enough. He darted forward, aiming a killing cut with Lord Ethirus’s Claw at Shirrin’s skull. She deflected in turn, raising Bladethorn up and around in a massive arc. At the moment when the two swords clashed, there was a flash of light and an explosion of noise and heat. Peleus stumbled back. When the glare finally cleared from his eyes, he saw that which he could not comprehend.

Bladethorn was enshrouded in flames, a halo of burning brilliance that clung to the blade. This was magic in its purest and most obvious form, akin to the power of Lord Ethirus’s Claw but magnified. Why had Bladethorn never shown its power to him, Peleus briefly wondered; again there was an obvious answer, and again Peleus ignored it for the sake of his own pride. The Witch-Queen was utilizing sorcery against him, that was the obvious answer, wreathing Bladethorn in illusion and sorcery in order to make up for the same obvious weakness in direct combat that had allowed Peleus to defeat her before.

“And lo, Bladethorn shows its true power in the hands of the rightful Emperor. Though I repudiate the throne into which I was born, I shall nonetheless use its power to strike you down.”

The two closed once again, and battled to the brink of exhaustion. Peleus knew himself to be the superior combatant: he had practiced with the sword regularly since childhood, and his skill was far from superficial. Shirrin lacked his strength, but moreover she lacked his endurance, his reflexes, his knowledge of advanced technique and the raw killer cunning that developed only in those who had rushed headlong into the maw of death and lived to tell about it. The only reason he did not destroy her utterly and immediately were the twin weaknesses of his wounds and his madness.

With Lord Ethirus’s Claw lending him inhuman strength and his madness rendering him heedless of mortal peril, Peleus threw himself at his sister again and again, assailing her with thunderstorms of powerful blows, each one of which could have cleft her in half given the chance. Shirrin was forced to fight on the back foot, nimbly parrying and sidestepping his rapid blows.

In the end, what allowed Shirrin to fight Peleus on equal standing was Bladethorn itself. The flames enshrouding Bladethorn had a will of their own: sometimes they would act like ordinary torch-flames, but other times they would grow bright enough to blind. Whenever the two swords clashed, Bladethorn would flare, physically blasting Lord Ethirus’s Claw away and forcing Peleus off-balance. The crucial second that followed would give Shirrin time to regroup or press the attack.

So it was that, after more rounds of exchange than either could count, Peleus stood bleeding from a dozen tiny wounds. Exhausted and blood-spent, Peleus briefly wrested control away from his rage and spite, retreating to the far end of the throne room. Shirrin advanced to follow, but she did not dare to run, exhausted as she was, and that gap gave the Emperor a few moments to consider.

One of Hector’s many, many flaws had always included a severe weakness of the lungs. From childhood he was easily winded, not to mention completely intolerant of any impurity in the air, such as smoke or incense. The air in the throne room already stank of woodsmoke from the burning of the city, smoke which grew thicker each second that passed. And yet, even with all the smoke and all the exertion of their duel, Shirrin seemed only winded. She should have been on the floor, choking to death.

And then Peleus got an idea in his head. It was a frequent belief that there were enchanted charms or amulets which could ward off disease or improve the physicality of the wearer. Being a rational man, the Emperor had always dismissed such ideas; but if the Witch-Queen was capable of other forms of magic…

When the two mortal foes returned to their exchange of blows, Peleus had a specific objective to his cuts and thrusts. He avoided parrying Bladethorn as much as possible in favor of ducking and dodging away from Shirrin’s comparatively-clumsy attacks. Several times he struck for her throat, and each time she avoided the blow. But she only had to be unlucky once, and eventually that luck ran out. Lord Ethirus’s Claw swept out in a broad arc that threatened to separate Shirrin’s head from her shoulders, and she threw herself backwards to avoid. But her momentum had an unintended effect, as the bone-charm necklace she always wore stretched out before her, failing to catch up. With the very tip of his sword, Peleus caught the necklace.

There was a split second before the executioner’s axe of Shirrin’s doom fell down upon her. Just long enough for her to realize that her brother was not so far gone to madness as she had assumed. Peleus met Shirrin’s eyes, and felt a surge of pride and hatred as he saw the quiet desperation and defeat flash through her pupils. Then he cut the string, and with a practiced flick of the stout blade sent the bone-charm spiraling through the air, to shatter uselessly upon the floor.

The change was as instantaneous as it was overwhelming. Shirrin’s shoulders sagged and her eyes bulged. For a handful of moments she tried to hold on to some semblance of competence, to keep Bladethorn held firmly in front of her, but it was to no avail. She collapsed onto her knees, choking and sputtering in a desperate attempt to keep her lungs well-supplied with precious air.

“You hide your weakness under witchcraft,” Peleus said, “but now it is exposed to the open air. Die.”

A single downward stroke should have done it. Peleus had enough strength in him to cleave through the roof of Shirrin’s skull and slay her instantly. But once again, instead of accepting her demise, she fell back on sorcery and tricks. With a flickering of her fingers, Shirrin suddenly produced another charm, this time a tiny glass ampoule, sealed from without. Even as the blade was already coming down upon her head, she snapped open the ampoule glass, unleashing a burst of hurricane wind that blasted Peleus back.

Shirrin tried to stand and run, but even to maintain consciousness was a struggle when her airway was so badly obstructed. All she could do was crawl backwards, postponing her doom by a few seconds.

The pattern repeated a few more times. Peleus would rush forward, ready to strike a killing blow, but always something would defeat him. Sometimes that was Bladethorn, seeming to leap up to intercept his blows of its own accord, for surely Shirrin herself no longer had the strength for such a thing. Other times the Witch-Queen would produce some little charm or enchantment to stave off Peleus’s wrath. She turned invisible, conjured forth swarms of illusory birds, transmogrified a segment of her robes into a shield and back again.

Peleus, for his part, was not dissuaded. If she had any magic which could actually stop him, she would have already made use of it. His delight only grew the more tricks Shirrin employed, the more obvious it was that she was at the end of her rope.

“At long last, I have found out what you really are,” he growled. “A purveyor of tricks and distractions, lusty for your own continuation no matter how obvious it is that you’ve been beaten.”

Shirrin glared at him, unable to speak.

Just as Peleus raised Lord Ethirus’s Claw for what he felt in his very soul was the final, killing blow, he was interrupted by the sound of the throne room’s doors opening. For the briefest moment, he slipped back into his earlier fugue state, imagining intruders rushing in to slay them both. As he turned, baring his teeth against them, he recognized the new arrivals, and regained his senses. They were his own men, the elites of the Trabakondai Guard.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“We could ask you the same question.”

“I was in my throne room, as is just for an Emperor in a time of crisis such as this. And while you were off making a mess of yourselves, look who came in here to kill me!”

The Trabakondai Guardsmen filed into the room, spears in hand, and without needing to be ordered they all circled around Shirrin. Peleus retreated a few steps. Perhaps it was unbecoming of an Emperor to slay his enemies with his own two hands.

“Shall we dispose of her?”

Peleus nodded. “We’re far past the point where a trial would be necessary. She tried to kill me with my own weapon.”

The Trabakondai Guardsmen made various gestures of assent, then slowly closed in for the kill. Peleus narrowed his focus upon Shirrin herself, ready to see desperation or, perhaps, resignation. He found neither. Instead he saw only the eyes of a hawk, keen and intense as they flickered from place to place. She had a plan, clearly. Peleus took Lord Ethirus’s Claw in both hands and made ready to react.

Sure enough, moments before the spear-tip was ready to pierce Shirrin’s flesh, she reached into the pocket of her cloak one last time, producing a vial full of translucent fluid. She drank it rapidly, before Peleus could intervene, then sucked down several deep, panting breaths. A temporary antidote!

“I am the Witch-Queen of Trabakond, ruler and defender of the Trabakondai for seven long years,” Shirrin announced, her voice now clear. “Decide, men of Trabakond, who you serve!”

Peleus scowled. He should have seen this coming. “She lies, she’s always been lying. Did you know that your queen was of Macarian stock all along? Compare the wretched albino before you to the busts of my supposedly-late brother Hector, and consider the meaning of it.”

These men had served as Peleus’s personal guard for years; he knew that they were all aware of Hector and what had happened to him. Several of them sneered with disgust as they realized the implication.

But Shirrin did not give up so easily. She rose unsteadily to her feet, and looked at each of the men in turn.

“Macarian I may be, but I have served well as Queen of Trabakond. Have not the rumors swirled of how I swayed Peleus to favor my people? Did I not bring an end to the war? Consider. Do you serve a foreigner, merely because he gives you gifts of silver? Or do you serve your queen?”

A pathetic speech, drawing upon notions of loyalty which these men did not have. Peleus’s sneer turned into a triumphant grin, that this truly was Shirrin’s last possible hope. And then that grin faded.

His guard was hesitating. The men looked at each other, uncertainty in their eyes, several of them even going so far as to retreat away from the Witch-Queen. When one of them, realizing what was about to happen, attempted to lunge forward and impale Shirrin, his neighbor quickly intervened, parrying the spear-shaft aside with his own. Peleus retreated in growing horror. A few of the guards dropped their weapons, instincts telling them that they were outnumbered by those who had chosen the opposite position.

The others, eight or ten men with long spears, turned about and advanced on Peleus.

“Traitors! How dare you! I am your Emperor, kill the usurper at once! You will be damned for this!”

“You are not our Emperor. But she is our Queen.”

Peleus fled to the foot of his throne, caught between fear for his life and the knowledge that he would never give up what was rightfully his. He never spoke another word. The guards caught up with him. Peleus, last Emperor of the Macarian Empire, died screaming.

SaffronDragon

Two chapters remain. Click the link below and subscribe to Patreon at any tier if you want to find out Shirrin's fate, now that her fratricide is complete.