Queen Yavara Ch. 59

All at once, the barrage ceased. The strobed explosions gave way to the subtle glow of fires, and the black veil became a translucent grey haze. I stood there and clung to the pole. I waited. I waited longer. The haze lightened, revealing the space around me. The bodies and rubble were all covered with a thick blanket of dust, obscuring the horror that lay beneath. As my hearing returned to me, I began to catch the low sounds of moaning and weeping. Carefully, I unwrapped my arms from the flagpole. I took one step forward, and then another. My boots landed softly and silently in the snow and dust. As I walked, I past indistinguishable figures that writhed upon the ground. The wounded were just masses of grey now, painted into the landscape of dust. It was only after I'd taken twenty paces, that I found someone standing upright.

Soraya was leaning against the remnants of a wall, staring into the hazy void. I touched her shoulder, and she turned her head slowly to me. She didn't appear to recognize me at all; she only acknowledged my existence, and then looked back into the greyness. I walked past her, unsure of why I continued my odyssey. Surely, a sane person wouldn't move from the spot God had deemed a sanctuary from the salvo. Soraya was the rational one.

After thirty more paces, I came upon another figure. This one was traveling from the west, and walking with a debilitating limp. It was only when it came within ten feet of me, that I recognized it as another hybrid. Furia Augustinia was using her sword as a brace for her leg, which was so mangled that it took five different turns before her ankle. I supposed I was glad to see she'd survived her fall. I wasn't sure if I was capable of feeling emotion at all. We just stared at each other for a moment, then continued on our path. I didn't know if we were walking together, or simply following the same strange compulsion that guided us toward... where ever it was we were going.

On our way, other figures emerged from the haze. Most were people I didn't know, but I recognized a few tribal faces amongst them. We walked like ghosts through the dust, lost and unsure, silent and grey. As we walked, I realized numbly that my instincts were guiding me toward the light. The greys painted a monochromatic gradient, and to the south, the gradient was the lightest. It didn't occur to me that the enemy was likely waiting for us there. Strangely, it didn't matter. I just needed to find the light.

The world began to clear. The shapes and outlines of Alkandra crystalized before me, becoming great stone columns that had been split, great towers that had been toppled, and immense boulevards that had become chasms. I didn't know where I was. Though I had likely walked through this place a hundred times, it was foreign to me. The skeletal buildings and structures suddenly vanished on either side of me, and I intuited that I must've walked into the pavilion. I looked to the west, and saw the hulking remains of the arena, the magnificent statues now rendered to rock and rebar.

My footfalls no longer padded softly in the snow and dust, but fell upon hard metal. The haze cleared, revealing a forest of iron. Thousands of wrought-iron shafts porcupined the pavilion, so dense that they created makeshift pathways. Between the twelve-foot missile hafts, lay thousands of Lowland dead. They were so numerous that the stones of the pavilion were blanketed with their armored bodies, and so ruined that I could not distinguish one man from another. They were simply indiscernible mounds of burst flesh and shorn metal, all stitched together with the missiles of their own fleet. Within the mass of death, I found a young mage woman still moving. Her arm was badly injured, and her face was mangled on the side, but she was still lucid. I extended her my hand, and helped her to her feet. When the dead so outnumbered the living, survivors were allies.

I journeyed through the iron forest, helping wounded as I came across them and ending the suffering of those too far gone. As I did this, little pieces of myself began to return to me. Fear was the first emotion to resurface. The enormity of death that surrounding me was incalculable, and the odds that I had survived were so miniscule. The danger had passed, and yet the terror only seemed to grow. I began to tremble with it. The fear was followed by a creeping grief. The losses were unfathomable, and so I could not measure the pain I was supposed to feel, but every step brought me deeper into despair until it brought me to my knees. Silent tears ran down my cheeks and splashed upon my quivering hands. The mage tried to help me up, but I would not rise.

Before me was a hulking mass of fur. I thought it was one of the many trolls at first, until I made out the figure of its head. It was a great bear, and it was surrounded on all sides by shattered iron hafts and crumbled boulders. The debris wreathing the figure bespoke a story of great defense, but the dozens of iron poles in his body revealed the end of this tale. Though blood flowed from his great maw, his eyes still shown with the vestiges of life. The great brown orbs focused on me for a moment, then looked distantly toward Castle Alkandra. For a moment, they reflected the gothic citadel, then they closed. An old staff was tied to his left shoulder, but the crowned skull of Alkandi that once adorned it was gone, shattered into a thousand pieces by the missile imbedded in his back. Encased in his great furry arms, and protected by all the damage that had been dealt to him, was the half-burned body of Yavara. She was curled into his body like a fetus, her breaths rattling from her. And though her eyes stared blankly at the sky, there was deep expressiveness in them. Tears cascaded down her cheeks as she held Zander's paw to her bosom, and muttered his name over and over. When I reached for her, she just curled further into his dead embrace, unwilling to move. I wouldn't force her.

I turned to the west to see Soraya and Furia embracing desperately and weeping. They must've learned they were the last ones. I felt horribly empathetic. The Protaki and the Terdini were gone. Brock and Trenok were gone. I did not know if I would ever see Adrianna again, and the city she had built was in ruins. There was so much lost, and so little left. Where had my future gone? I looked to the east, and saw the tall masts of the man-o-wars. A black Alkandran flag waved from the flagship.

LEVERIA

It had taken Alexandra two minutes to get me beneath the ship, and it had taken me an hour just trying to get aboard it. I couldn't very-well cut a hole in the hull, and it wasn't like there was netting I could use to climb. I had to learn how to fly all by myself, all whilst periodically lighting myself on fire to keep the hypothermia at bay. It was a painstaking process fraught with terror. I interpreted every shout and bell that rang out from the ships as a sign that I'd been seen, and I spent ten-minute stretches of paranoia breathing through Alexandra's mouth underwater. When I regained my nerves, I came to the surface and tried to remember what Yavara had taught me about flying. "It's not like you're soaring through the air like an eagle, Leveria. It's more like you're swimming through it. You're pushing yourself up with the mass of air beneath you.

Well, I couldn't fucking swim, and as I failed again and again at something Yavara had learned easily, I once again remembered all the reasons I hated my overachieving triathlon-champion little fucking sister. I became more and more frustrated with myself as the time ticked on, every precious second clanging in my head like a grandfather clock chiming the final minutes. I batted at the water like my arms were wings, I mimicked swimming like a mermaid, I even tried submerging myself and floating to the top in a vain hope that I'd simply continue floating into the air. Nothing worked. When I was at the very limit of my wits, Alexandra came to my rescue. She secured me in her soft arms, pulled me underwater, and wrapped her pretty little mouth around my brand-new cock. The gills around her neck opened and closed pleasantly as she took me down her throat, and her aqua-green eyes stared comfortingly up at me as she sucked all the anxiety right out of my balls. She grew her tentacular fingers inside of me, and penetrated my ass and pussy with both hands. As her digits squirmed into my pussy, her anally-penetrating tentacles laid their sucking nodes against my prostate, and milked me until I was thrashing in the water, screaming soundless delight into the depths, the bubbles from my mouth floating to the surface above. When my nectar flowed onto her lathering tongue, her gaze grew heavy-lidded and possessed, and she brought me all the way into her mouth so that she could drink me dry.

After that, flying came easily to me. With a clear head and a light heart, I grabbed my baggy, glided to the water's surface, floated easily into the air, and traversed the side of the flagship. I kept myself concealed behind the bow, then dropped right into the captain's quarters through the open window. There, sitting by himself, was King Arthur Dreus. A hundred hand mirrors lined the wall before his desk, many of them showing faces of people he was conversing with. Most of the faces were ship captains judging by their uniforms, and Arthur was issuing them orders as he watched the battle unfold from his window.

"Do we have any further reports from our ground troops?" He asked one of the mirrors.

"The enemy has been pushed out of the arena, and is mostly trapped in small pockets within the streets. They should be completely destroyed within the hour."

"And our own losses?"

"Only thirty-three mages are reporting, sir. Of the twenty regiments we sent, all but four are reporting near-total casualties."

"Good god," he grumbled, rubbing his eyes, "a pyrrhic victory indeed, gentlemen. Such a waste. This is why war should always be the last option."

"There's a lot of questions that need answering," one of the captains grumbled, "like what in the hell happened between the Tiadoa sisters."

"Only the devil knows. Did anyone manage to find Leveria?"

"She dropped out of our mages' perception once they engaged Yavara. After that, all we saw was Zander's illusion."

"She made a break for it then." Arthur sighed, "Goddamn it. Yavara was dangerous, but that kind of power in a woman like Leveria..." He shuddered visibly, "We'll have to cut off all her possible allies. Put a bounty on her head worth a kingdom, and even the Sea Serpents will turn against her. I don't like working with those rats, but we've got to be pragmatic about this. If any Balamora nation dares harbor her, we'll sanction them into oblivion. We need to make contact with our factors in Bentius as soon as possible. The Great Forest needs to be pacified once and for all. We can't risk another Dark Queen emerging from the wildlands."

"She'll have allies within our own borders, Your Highness. Most of the men we're fighting out there are Ardeni immigrants."

Arthur tapped his chin contemplatively. "I don't like where this is leading. Ghettos, concentration camps, and kangaroo courts? I won't let my legacy be that of tyranny." He shook his head, and let out an exasperated sigh. "But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's finish this battle before we begin the next. I'll leave you to it, gentlemen."

"Your Highness," they said in unison, and the mirrors went dark.

"If you're asking me, I would just round up all possible dissidents and kill them." I said from my corner of the room. Arthur froze. I smiled, and began to walk toward him, "Of course I'd have them tortured first just to make sure. Boil the children in front of the women, rape the women in front of the men, then crucify them all in the town square just to get your message across." I stopped behind the king, and smiled at our reflection in the hundreds of mirrors. "But then again," I sighed, and rested my hands upon Arthur's shoulders, "I'm just a bit more pragmatic than you are, Arthur."

He quivered beneath my touch, and hissed, "To what do I owe the pleasure, Leveria?"

"Hmm, the pleasure is mine, believe me." I chuckled, and slid my fingers around his neck. "Why don't you be a doll, and order your ships to massacre your ground troops?"

"Kill me."

"Oh, I'd love to," I purred in his ear, "but you're too useful a tool to throw away so fragrantly. First, I need you to order your ships to fire about two degrees to the south. That should solve my problem. Secondly, I need your fleet to hang around here for just one more day. I've got some Highland guests coming tomorrow, and the party would be really weird if it was just the two of us. Thirdly, I'm going to need you to put a Lowland heir in my belly."

"No, no and fuck no," he growled.

"Those were all the wrong answers, Arthur."

"You can torture me all you want, but I'll never break, and you'll never get into my head." He snarled, "Prestira trained me since I was a child!"

"Everyone flaunts Prestira around like she was some kind of goddess." I sighed, "They say she had a mind like a fortress. Funny; I had no trouble penetrating it." I reached into my baggy, and pulled out a syringe filled with purple fluid. "The way into someone's mind isn't through their skull, Arthur," I whispered, "the path between their legs is much, much easier." I stuck the needle in Arthur's neck, and depressed the plunger until the vial was empty.