A vast trail of refugees stretched away from the burning ruin of Chrysopolis. Even miles outside of the city’s walls, the air still stank with smoke, and all around could be heard the coughing of the elderly and the wailing of children. But they were all alive, which was far better than could be said of those who had not been able to escape in time.
Even from so many miles away, Lord Ethirus himself could still be seen. His vast body arced through the air over the city, spreading flame and miasmatic smoke, sometimes dipping down to smash some poor victim on the ground, other times soaring up to rage and roar and rain down fire. The knowledge amongst that ragged band of survivors that it was divine wrath they’d escaped could not help but have an effect.
Indeed, as night slowly turned to dawn turned to day, the great stream of poor and destitute souls spilling out into the hinterlands, Athalan witnessed a transformation slowly take hold. Faith always flourished in harsh times—it had been a trite observation during Athalan’s grandmother’s grandmother’s time—but the faith taking root here was different. Prayers that Athalan had never heard before were being spoken into the air. All up and down the caravan, loud and musical chants replaced the soft and poetic prayers that she was used to, led not by uniformed priests of the Golden Lord, but by rag-clad madmen with bulging eyes and bloody feet.
At first, the former Empress was afraid that the extremity of circumstance had caused a great outbreak of madness amongst the refugees, with violence sure to follow. She was disabused of that fear by the arrival of an old woman, walking down the line with surprising vigor in her step as she handed out tiny clay figures to each person she passed. What Athalan saw was not madness, but the old faith, that which had been superseded by worship of the Golden Lord. The sin which Lord Ethirus had come to punish was being corrected, one prayer at a time.
Observing her surroundings was far better a pastime than considering her own circumstances, for Athalan was having an absolutely miserable day. Her feet were sore from walking so long without a palanquin or a horse to support her, the dust of the road had formed a woefully unfamiliar crust underneath her dresses, and she was desperately hungry and thirsty. Not that she had no food, of course; but she knew she had to stretch things as much as possible.
Worse still was the fact that so few of the other refugees recognized this. Athalan had no vast coffers, no army or bureaucracy at her back! Certainly, having a cart and a handful of assistants made her luckier than most, but this was a narrow gap indeed.
And yet, despite the fact that there were surely others within the vast caravan who were just as fortunate as Athalan had been, perhaps even more fortunate, her fellow travelers were strangely resistant to recognize that fact. There had been a brief period during the night and early morning when it seemed that Athalan had faded into total anonymity. But it soon became clear this was a temporary factor brought about by the dirt on her face and the plainness of her dress. Once her neighbors got a good look at her, the news that the Empress was among the refugees began to spread. And as it did, people started to look for her as a source of guidance.
Despite Athalan’s preconceptions, a walking fleet of a hundred thousand refugees—or more, possibly much more—was not something that could go without leadership and direction for long. There were disputes to be settled, scarce resources to be allocated, and questions of broader direction. All up and down the line, hundreds of local leaders sprang up, some because of wealth, some because of prior connections, and some because their sheer wisdom shone through.
But many turned to Athalan. Too many. She tried to resist at first, insisting that she had lost her throne at the same time the rest had lost their homes, but such complaints fell on deaf ears. Had it not been her coin, after all, that allowed for the organization of this vast escape from potential carnage and death? Was it not she who had, when the Emperor had gone mad and destruction loomed, been the one to take command and make the hard choice to do what had to be done? No, it was right and proper that Athalan led.
Already there were questions being asked. Many of the refugees had places to go, relatives spread throughout Macaria who could take on the burden, or distant homelands to seek out in the case of foreigners. At mid-morning the refugees came to a crossroads, and there a vast Trabakondai contingent split off to go north, bubbling with talk of unifying Near and Far Trabakond into a single country now that the Empire was gone. Amidst those who had nowhere else to go, rumors were flying that there were lands beyond the borders of Kyrenia where the land was yet untamed, a place where a homeless folk could make a home. Would they follow that distant rumor, or remain within the bounds of the known, hoping those bounds could swell to hold them all?
A prayer formed on Athalan’s lips as she sat atop her horse-cart throne. “Lord Ethirus, God of Justice, grant me the clarity to be a better leader than my husband was.”
The seismic shift had not ended with Chrysopolis’s fall. Athalan, against her will, was at the center of it. She gathered advisors to her side and, reluctantly, began to make decisions.
…
The border between Macaria and Philgeonia was normally quite the subtle thing. Certainly, the two countries possessed different characters, Macaria being wetter and more verdant, while Philgeonia was dryer; more drab; and as its name suggested, rockier; but there was nothing to distinguish the western end of Macaria from the eastern end of Philgeonia. Not under normal circumstances, anyway.
As it was, however, the border between the two countries was marked by mile upon mile of abandoned military encampments. By the time the Eunonian army passed through, they’d been abandoned for at least five or six days, leaving the wreckage thoroughly looted but otherwise intact. Ever since the beginning of the rebellion, the Empire had been building up troops along the border in preparation for a counterattack. Then the Empire had collapsed, all the soldiers had realized there was no pay forthcoming, and promptly deserted their posts.
With the changeover from Macaria to Philgeonia, so too was there a changeover in in the way which the retreating host was met. Though Helen had little intention of continuing the violence, it was a simple fact that the Macarians were not going to be friendly. The villagers met them with fear and suspicion, and even though they had goods with which to trade for supplies, many times they were nonetheless refused, and had to resort to theft.
On the Macarian side of the border, meanwhile, the army could scarcely march two hours in a row without being met by delegations of celebrants. The Macarians were gone, the yoke of the Empire removed at last, Philgeonia was free! Food was suddenly available in abundance, entire supply depots sitting pre-built in the army’s path as it went.
With the final obstacle overcome—that is, logistics—Helen’s reign over Philgeonia was assured. Already she had been concocting plans for it, burning her candle at both ends in order to bring about the circumstances for relaxation in the future. The truth was that she knew she could not be a conventional Queen or Empress or what have you. Her skills weren’t in the public acts of legitimacy-building necessary of a monarch, and they certainly weren’t in military matters. She could keep a bureaucracy running, and although philosophers might have preferred it otherwise, more than that was required for a state to maintain itself.
Having had only a few days, Helen’s planned solutions for this conundrum were still in the infantile stages. There were other models of governance to be drawn upon, after all, city councils and Senatorial models to distribute the load of legitimacy while still allowing room for a controller. Shirrin had been right. Helen really was cut out for this, and she had never felt so strong in her life.
There was just one final matter to be taken care of. An issue had come to light, something Helen had realized in the days after the beginning of the retreat from Chrysopolis. If she’d been smart, Helen would have figured it out two, maybe three weeks earlier, but she’d been far too distracted by both her own guilt and the matter of the war to notice what was happening. But she had noticed eventually, and though the initial realization had led to several hours of panic and sobbing, Helen’s superior instincts had eventually taken over.
Resolving the issue was more difficult, of course, especially with the added consideration that it had to be done in utmost secrecy. Slipped into the pigeon-letter sent back to Eunon, in between lines about the rebellion’s victory and Abderus’s death, was a request that an apothecary be sent out to the nearest town to the border, and an insistence that said apothecary be a woman. Helen could only trust female apothecaries, after all. A thrum of anxiety vibrated in the back of her mind for the entire journey up to that point. What if that part of the message had been ignored?
On the second evening after crossing the border, the Grand Army of Eunon (name subject to change) stopped in the town of Pasirna, briefly doubling its population. With the granaries stuffed to bursting in preparation for their arrival, the air was one of a massive party. Looted silver flowed freely, the townsfolk gaining massive wealth in exchange for every drop of alcohol, every fanciful bit of decoration, and the services of every attractive woman that they had.
Helen used the celebrations as a distraction while she put herself in disguise and went out to make the appointed meeting under Pasirna’s temple to Sokaro, the Philgeoniai god of healing. Finding the old woman was a challenge, as was convincing her that Helen was who she claimed to be, but nothing Helen was unused to. Helen explained her problem; the old woman knew exactly what to give her. The herbs traded hands in secrecy and shadow, accompanied by whispered warnings and apologies that the princess of Eunon had been forced to this resort. Helen assured the old apothecary that she would be alright before paying her for her services.
Helen took the herbs alone in her private tent. She knew that what was coming next would hurt, and hurt for a very long time. But after a day, maybe a few more, it would be over, and every trace of Abderus’s legacy would be erased for good. Helen had no intentions of starting a dynasty.
As her stomach began to roil and her belly to seize and cramp, Helen cast her thoughts back to what she missed. Not Abderus, not really; the Helen who wanted him around was very different from the one who could live without him. But Shirrin. She’d heard nothing of the Witch-Queen since the fall of Chrysopolis, no sign of her presence nor clue as to her fate. She wondered what had happened to the woman who made her.
…
Shirrin lay in the burning streets of Chrysopolis, watching her master carry out the final stages of his awful cleansing. Her throat was nearly sealed, her nostrils were clogged with ash and dust, and her body was so weak that she could barely even turn her head. Instead she stared up at the sky and watched the embers rain down. She had made a mistake. A fatal one. Except, she hadn’t really had any alternative choice.
The simple fact of the matter was that the Trabakondai Guardsmen had deserved better. They had chosen her as their queen, saved her life, finished the fight that she could not. While it would have been easy to use the few minutes of clear breath granted to her by that elixir to transform into the swiftest bird she knew and fly for the city’s edge, doing so would have meant leaving them all behind to perish. So she did not. Instead, once she was finished stomping her brother’s corpse into a bloody mess, she had gathered her troops about her and led them out into the city.
That brave leadership had lasted only so long as the elixir had. As it wore off, her breathing rapidly worsened, and as the smoke had grown thicker with time, her nadir was far lower than she had ever suspected. She was being strangled, the life squeezed out of her, and she wondered whether she would even live long enough to burn.
When she could walk no longer, the guardsmen, her men, had lifted her up onto their shoulders and carried her through the wreckage and the ruin. They had chosen to slow their own escape to save her, just as she had them. And for that self-sacrifice, all of them were going to die together. She supposed that they had volunteered to do just such a thing by becoming bodyguards; but nevertheless it was so dreadfully unfair.
It hadn’t even been their fault, really. They had done the right thing, and despite the heat and the smoke they were still strong men in good condition, quite unlike Shirrin. Even Lord Ethirus recognized the righteousness of their escape, for his destructive attention turned away from the palace and the poorer districts which separated it from the nearest of the city’s walls. Fate simply turned against them. Morthan, god of death, had decided it was Shirrin’s hour, or perhaps some other god had intervened to declare that her many crimes were too much to be forgiven. No matter the cause, a wind picked up from the west, and a firestorm which Lord Ethirus had ignited swept in to intercept.
As the troop moved, building after building went alight all around them, new fires touching off with terrifying rapidity. Then they found an entire city block that was all ablaze; they dared not even turn to the left or to the right, for coming close enough to turn would have scalded their skin on the immense radiant heat. They turned around, seeking to retreat and find a new path upwind, but the fires behind them had grown into raging conflagrations. They fled to the left flank and to the right, searching for gaps in the all-encompassing flame, but no gaps were to be found.
One by one, the Trabakondai had fallen, some of them dying in screaming agony as burning timbers collapsed upon them, others falling unconscious as they attempted to slip through gaps and were overcome by smoke. Soon there were no gaps, and the smoke encroached on the central boulevard in which the troop had become stuck. Shirrin was passed from hand to hand as the weakest soldiers became too weak to carry her, then the stronger ones, then the stronger. At last, even the strongest could not bear the weight, and she was set down on the ground.
Strangulation was not the most pleasant way to go. Shirrin’s brain surged with terror and agony, but no amount of struggle could escape the closure of her own throat. She had never been more terrified, and in her terror, all coherency was stripped from her. Tears streamed down the Witch-Queen’s cheeks as though she were a newborn babe. She thrashed and strained, wrestling with doom. She had repented, she had saved so many, and this was her reward? What a damnably miserable reward.
Then, all at once, peace came. Shirrin’s thoughts turned, for a moment, to prayer. She begged Lord Ethirus to save her as repayment for all she had done in his name, begged Nerathon to sweep away the smoke and flame with his winds, begged Xalia to save her, not for her own sake, but for that of Athalan. There were no responses, no miracles to be found. And Shirrin realized that she accepted that. She had had her revenge. Athalan and Aissa were safe and sound, somewhere far away. Helen was just beginning her reign as ruler of Philgeonia. Frasalu and all the rest would get to live out the rest of their lives as wealthy women and men, free from strife and struggle.
The smoke opened up. Shirrin gazed heavenward, and saw an infinite dance of stars.
