Blood Moon Knight

Prologue and I

Prologue

From her place of concealment, the mewman queen surveyed the scene before her. She had tracked this group, part of the conspiracy of would-be usurpers, to the Earth Dimension, where they searched for an ancient artifact.

The queen looked over her shoulder. She felt regret, and anger, at what she saw; a group of terran archaeologists had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the diminishing glow of twilight, she could see their blood seeping into the sandy ground. One had attempted to escape, but was caught before getting very far; his body lay unmoving a short distance from the other victims. It had taken all her willpower to not jump in and save them, but she had to make the regrettable decision that a kingdom full of lives weighed more in the balance than a few terran lives.

Turning her attention back to the usurpers, the queen watched as they entered the cleverly disguised, and badly eroded, Pylon of a temple. The temple was hidden within a tower of rock jutting out of the badlands. She had seen a similar rock feature in a terran movie about close encounters with alien visitors to Earth, although the name of the film escaped her. She smiled; she so loved Earth entertainment. She enjoyed the movies, sitcoms and cartoons, especially the ones with lots of action and romance. She grimaced as her heart ached with a sudden pang of loneliness, never having found her true love before ascending to the throne, just five years prior, when her mother was assassinated.

The prior queen, along with her king, had been murdered in a failed coup. It was pure luck that the current queen, at that time the crown princess in her twenty-fourth year, had stumbled upon the assassins before they were able to continue their murdering-spree by assassinating her and her sister. She defended herself like the warrior princess she was, but it resulted in no beings left alive to shed light upon the conspiracy.

Over the next five years, as she ruled Mewni, the queen sent many a spy to try to root out the corruption, but none returned. She finally, surreptitiously, took on the search herself, using her magicks in her bid to discover the perpetrators.

The queen was powerful; scary powerful. She was a warrior queen, trained in many forms of combat, and was the strongest magic-wielder ever in the history of Mewni. In a bid to counteract this, the conspirators began looking for long-lost magical relics from Mewni's past, that they might use to gain the magical advantage needed to depose the queen.

The queen managed to torture a small piece of information out of a being, using a dark mind-invasion spell, before he committed suicide. She learned that the cabal believed they had found, in the Earth Dimension, the most powerful magical object ever created, lost for centuries. How it had come to be hidden on Earth, a dimension the mewmans had abandoned millennia before, they did not know, nor did they care; they simply saw the end of their vile quest.

The queen smiled derisively; the amateurs had left no guards outside the entrance. She slipped out of her hiding place, quickly entering the rock formation behind them. She caught up with the group inside a large chamber, hollowed out of the rock. She wished she could stop to admire the statues and read the inscriptions, but she had work to do.

"Stop, in the name of the queen of the High Kingdom of Mewni! Bow before your queen, and beg her forgiveness!"

"Never, usurper!" one of the beings responded. She, and the rest of the conspirators, pulled bladed weapons from their sheaths, moving to surround the queen.

The queen smiled grimly, fuming at the nerve of them calling her the usurper, as she pulled the family short-sword from its scabbard. It pulsed as she channeled magic into it, making the wickedly-sharp blade all the more lethal.