How do you cope with learning that your mother was murdered before you were born, your father is a fairy hitman, and you wield the power to raise an army of devoted love slaves... except you haven't the least idea how to control it?
Tom Corwen's di...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The cold, dead throne of Queen Mab of the Unseelie sat quiet on its dais at the end of its once great hall. Its occupant remained as she had since reports of Caratacos' death had reached her: rigid, still, and staring.
None dared disturb her, and they did not need to. The mortal fears of Perias and Nictis, weak as they were, could be counted upon, and if not, they were easily replaced. Within her darkest parts she hoped they would fail, giving her an excuse to exert her strength, to extract their desperate screams for her pleasure. To feel something.
What were mere days among the eternity of her years, even in the millennia since the world bereaved her of her son? The beat of a heart? The blink of an eye? Could time be said to pass when nothing changed between moments?
She could almost hope for the Moriae's prophesy to bear its fruit, to tear open the veil and fly once more into battle against the goddess of salt. But the dragon was long dead by the hand of her husband, the man who had saved this wretched world but let perish their only child.
Though Caratacos was less than nothing, an insect desiring to be a god, the curse of his blood had been enough to keep even her great majesty at bay, for what good was a kingdom without a people to rule? But his considerable strength, hoarded over many ages, had been eclipsed by his darkling son in mere months. How long before he rose to stand against her.
As she sat, thoughts marching through a mind filled with endless memory, she reflected on the words of the Moirae and her own approaching doom.
The prophesy was not new. It was, in fact, the first among many reasons the seer had been chained, but as centuries passed, its likelihood dimmed until it became an afterthought, a minor threat made by a desperate enemy. Now the shadows had begun to lengthen, and one way or another, Mab's rule would soon end, for the Moirae could not lie.
She had once believed that her doom had been fulfilled the day the druid king Máele imprisoned her in the heart of a great oak, but those that remained faithful to her, who saw her as their salvation, had freed her after a mere two hundred years. The druids had been purged in the fires of her revenge, and the remnant served her court.
Then came the betrayal of Orlandria, and her cursed human lover. The Glim and the Nain had both been lost, along with the greatest treasures of the Magi, but the undoing of the Brotherhood was nothing, nothing against the child. Her mighty Left Hand, the last Morrigan, had defied her queen and chosen a mortal with whom to bear a son in defiance of all law, mocking the queen's own endless sorrow. That her son should live while Mab's sacrifice lay cased in stone had made her betrayal complete, cleaving the remains of her heart and driving her to madness.
By Mab's decree, a dozen of Orlandria's offspring were hunted and slain through the intervening years, but always one of her line lived on to scorn the Queen of Air and Darkness, until two decades past, with news of Janet Lane's death. No one survived the love of a gean canagh, and the agony of the last of Orlandia's seed had soothed Mab more than anything in a thousand years. She had even forgiven the gean canagh for his pathetic coup and offered him exile over death.
It had been a lie, like every other joy this blighted world had given her.
As she sat that night beneath the dark, starred sky, Queen Mab began to wonder. She had been fighting against fate, but perhaps the prophesy was a gift. The druids had vowed to breach the veil, opening a door that would send her finally home. Their help had been a vain hope, but from their ashes, a seed had taken root, one planted by a herald of death. Now, poisoned by false love, it had produced an impossible darkling boy, a native-born chthonian, impossibly able to contain its own infinite chaos.
If that power could be contained, it could be controlled.
"Perias," she spoke softly, but her voice carried the length of the hall. The hogboon scrambled up long steps and ran, gasping desperately toward her throne.
"My queen?" he choked out the words and bowed deeply.
"Tell Nictis to find the abomination."
Perias glanced around, puzzled. "He seeks it still, my queen. The blood of the son will soon be spilled—"
"He is not to harm him. Capture the darkling alive and bring him to me."
"Do as I say." she said and stood, oddly at peace. "And tell Mortas Vesh I have a project for him." She gave her servant a rare smile. Perias bowed again and scrambled off, summoning ravens from the trees around them to deliver her message to Nictis and his hunters.
Mab retreated from the great hall to her garden, feeling neither cold, nor hunger, nor stiffness in her limbs, and for the first time in many generations in this decaying human world, she did not feel despair.
"My great warrior," she spoke, approaching the effigy. "My dear son. You may yet be avenged."
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
