The Courtesy of Kings | ☑ Queenkiller, Kingmaker #2

[Short Story] The Amethyst Blade

sub-genres: romance, mythology, tragedy, betrayal
content warnings: none

This short story is one of many from the world's Holy Anthology and recounts the mythology behind the Ametjas dynasty, which Kiet briefly refers to in the last half of The Courtesy of Kings. This is a sample of the full story, which is free for my tier 1+ patrons to download, or available as a pdf e-book through the link in the in-line comment.

★ THE AMETHYST BLADE ★

In the later years before the first of the gods chose to depart, a great force had begun to sweep across the east. It rose like a sandstorm under a blistering sun: slowly at first, but steadily growing, thicker and thicker until the whole land was choked under its heat. Village after village, from one hamlet to another, it gathered without purpose or plan; like balls of snow rolling into one giant power down the slopes of a vulnerable mountain.

Greed, Envy, Fury ... the spirits had bred beyond immeasurable control, for the humans loved and fed them just as much as they loved and fed the humans, and so they lived and prospered whilst all that surrounded them withered slowly into a wasteland.

These spirits had every right to the land as much as every deity and every human and every other thing both living and dead; so the gods allowed them, for they were necessary, even while their numbers grew.

But Ranyu was few of the first to notice.

Her Purpose was to maintain balance over the earth, so every day she felt the weight of their deeds on her scale. Where there is love, so must there be apathy; where there is wealth, so must there be scarcity.

But in those days, her scales would tip heavier and heavier to one side, until one day she awoke from her slumber with a vengeance burning in her jii.

She found its source quickly, a few thousand miles away from her home. It was the remnants of a village, left burning for days. But even as she walked through it, she knew this atrocity alone would not have been enough to wake her. She walked a few miles more and found another village, and even further yet and found the relics of another; and as she walked, the amethyst chains she wore around her upper body grew longer and heavier, until finally upon the third village they had grown long and heavy enough for them to smite.

She whistled up at Sky and waited, until finally a shadow swept over the light of Sun, sweeping the lands in a darkness that only abated once a horned rukh landed in the charred remains of the village before her.

'I am filled with hunger, my dearest Grhāna, and I long to eat,' she said to her guardian, 'something that smells of ash and flame, that tastes of blood and burning flesh, that echoes with the ghost of pain and fear.'

So the great rukh lowered his head and Ranyu climbed up the branches of his horns until she stood upon his crown. And there she sat, caged between the outswept curves of bone that stemmed from just before his ears; for Grhāna was large—large enough that when he spread his wings, all three villages disappeared under his shadow, and when he lifted to the sky, all the dust and ash and smoke burst like a storm into all four corners of the wind.

And just as he was large were his senses so as keen. He could see iniquity in the hearts of men, hear injustice as they were performed, smell guilt as it passed through the air. His talons could sever spirits from their host, just as his beak could reach through flesh and pluck a rotted jii from its human.

The pillagers and murderers were rotten to the core, and their scent took Grhāna all the way back to their own village. Sky brought in her clouds, thick and grey, and above them the mighty rukh swept. A feather drifted down into the heart of the ravager village, smoke trailing from it as it descended. It swirled and thickened as black as night, and from it did Ranyu emerge, her feet brushing the earth just as the feather should have landed in her stead.