cover by the talented ellis ( @rubyruins )
❝ is this what i have bred in the shah's harem? a girl that disregards every precept of his law and presumes to bring him to his knees with nothing but a smile? ❞
| IN WHICH A GIRL AND A CROWN AND A THRONE...
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NAQSH-E ROSTAM
AUGUST, 465 BC
AV, FROM THE CREATION OF THE WORLD, 3296
THEY THINK HE IS a god.
Even as the Immortals follow the train of his caravan down, down, down to the rocky grave that he is to be entombed in, they think he is a god—and if not the incarnation of Ahura Mazda himself, then he is no less of a god than any mortal that they have made legends out of.
His people weep over him even now, mourning the loss of a man who ruled Babylonia with an iron fist, who chained the sea when it did not bend to his whims, who scattered the Macedonians like a winnower scattering chaff.
They think he is a god, and while I stand here today with my back towards the East wind, that is all they would remember him as.
They call him many things, even in his death.
They have called me many things, as well, but those things are only half-truths and I am not dead yet.
To answer the first, two lies do not make a full truth.
And to answer the second, falsehoods do not hurt the dead.
Only the living.
And if they do hurt the dead, there is only comfort in knowing that the dead never know what their enemies say from split tongues.
They have called me a murderer, a woman thirsty for blood like a flock of sheep thirsty for water. They say that when the days of slaughter had begun and the Jews were defending themselves against their enemy that I stood upon the precipice and drank sangria the color of crimson life. They say that when the cup departed from my lips a lioness smiled back through eager teeth. They say that claws sprouted from my fingertips and that I gouged marks into the metal, then wrote the ineffable name of God upon the surface before casting it into the streets below.
Some who are more superstitious than others have called me a Lilith, a daeva who seduces men in their sleep, sends their blood hot and feverish through their veins, fanning the flame of their arousal until they reach out and take it when it is soft and ready and it leaks with the nectar of temptation.
