Apologia

Chapter One - The Dead Queen

My last memory of me was the day I became a mother.

My stomach’s parasite pushed me towards sorrows I had never known. The warm afternoons that wilted, the morning kicks at my womb, the strange gluttonies I wallowed in; With each I cursed Polysys and the sweet god’s kiss of fertility.

A bedchamber was my cocoon. Countless days, careful agony and bitter sweat culminated in that moment I cradled Altosa. Only then did the months of winter’s frost on my soul give way to an exhausted spring bloom.

The loveless woman found herself loving.

She was Altosa from the moment I saw her, the name of my mother before her. It was an unspoken mantle, placed on the shoulders of an infant born too small to even shake her feet.

Altosa would have the world, and everything that world denied me. Peace, love, and dignity. My heart learned those words when I pressed Altosa’s soft head against it.

The casting of princess had been taken from me as a girl, and now I returned it to my child. With her cries, I became Kelena the Queenmother.

I would not allow anyone else to hold her. When her father came, I demanded that I hold her through the night. It was the first time that I commanded a king, and it was the first time Kolossius obeyed.

Heartbeat to heartbeat, soul to soul, I prayed to Hero, the mother of all mothers, that Altosa know her mothers. And, in the later hours of the night, when sleep came for me, I asked Nypheo, the handsome heir of dreams, if she might dream of those mothers. He took my soul into his kingdom of fiction and informality, so my body might rest under his mother’s starry sky.

The clouds came that night. The stars stopped glittering, and wind rumbled up the cliffs and through the halls of the palace, waking me to that dour time when all the earthy tones of the walls took a cold, silver hue.

Fear in the air, in the lonely flapping of the silk curtains and the shrill whistling of the stones. My bed was a ship in a sea of darkness and Altosa was asleep, gentle in my arms. 

“Kolossius!?”

I called his name, and there was an answer - The darkness turned like the face of a coin, shifting from black to a serpentine mask of gold. My fright awoke Altosa, and she began to brawl, and the mask began to move closer. The shadows seemed to sway from him like a shawl, slipping around the moonlight glint of a blade.

He slithered closer, impossible and ethereal. If I had not looked upon him, I would have thought he was as real as a rumour. He stopped at the foot of my bed, holding the dagger forward, spoke in a voice that slid across my skin slimy and rasping. “Hand me the princess, Kelena.”

“My husband will kill you,” I warned, and cried, “Guards!”

The serpent glanced through the curtain that led to the hall, and listened. The wind rose from a whistling to a wail, and he chortled. “It seems the guards are asleep. The girl, now.”

He held out his unarmed hand, pulling the dagger back.

I looked into his eyes.

“Craven peasant. You cannot have her!”

He coiled back like a cobra. It conjured in me the same animalistic instinct as when I had first encountered one. I pulled back across the bed, my body held by terror.

He lunged.

I turned, pulling Altosa in, and caught the blade in my arm. The blade parted flesh, and I felt its iron tip digging into my bone. The world went black and, for just a moment, I was nothing but fear. Darkness consumed me like the deepest night, until I saw a falling star. All the silver hues of the room waxed to red, and I screamed.

My arm pulled away, tearing the blade from the assassin’s grip, and I ripped the blade from my own arm. Blade sprayed, covering Altosa’s birthing shawl in red, spattering her face, and the assassin pulled away.

“She is Altosa, daughter of Kelena, daughter of Altosa, daughter of Treya!” I bellowed. I laid my daughter down upon the bed, “You will not have her this night or any other night.”

The assassin’s eyes twitched. “You can’t fight me, you upjumped whore. We won’t have a barbarian queen.”

I leapt for him and we went down, the dagger slammed into his shoulders. All I could hear was a thousand generations of screams. The assassin wrestled with me, but I would not be bowed or overpowered. I forced myself up onto one knee, still holding the hilt of his dagger, and he kicked me in my hardly-recovered belly, and I vomited over the floor.

My hand slipped from the dagger, and he jumped to his feet, pulling the dagger from his own chest. He made it two steps before my hand snatched around his ankle and he tripped. I pulled at him, across the floor, away from my daughter, and he kicked me in the face, twice, and I did not relent.

The assassin turned, raised his dagger high, and plunged it into my chest.

There was no pain, and I roared, embodied by a lioness. He stabbed me again in my side, and I mounted him. I could feel the warmth leaving me, pumping in blood down my body. Saliva was drooling out of my mouth and over my blood-and-bile slicked hands when they closed around his throat. 

All he could do was stab. My thighs. My gut. My neck. My limbs. I knew there was pain, but I felt none of it. I was experiencing only crimson and the awful euphoria of his murder. As I choked the life out of him.

When I unmade anything that would dare hurt my daughter.