More Backstory

The cobblestone streets of the capital were full of the debauchery, she had come to expect after such an ****. The wine flowed as freely as the bloodletting on every corner and she knew it was dangerous to even be near the acts of depravity, she suddenly found it impossible to look away from. She had frequently wondered how discipline was maintained after nights such as these. This is what they did to celebrate. To congratulate each other for another city fallen. Alexandra stared with a worrying nonchalance as the city’s town crier was pulled from his home and into the street by a gang of young recruits, their battle cherry popped after the siege, who kicked and wrestled the man to the ground. The blooded youths took turns to spit in his mouth before they gouged out his larynx with a standard-issue infantry knife.

As her eyes darted between the gruesome spectacle and the distant, flickering shadows of the city's towering architecture, it dawned on her that her libido was stirring, an unusual reaction to such horrors. She couldn't ignore the twisted allure of the scenario unfolding before her.

Her heart began to race, her breaths shallow, as she watched the drunken young soldiers' grunts and involuntary flexes, each one seeking dominance over the hapless town crier. The violent contest she'd stumbled upon was a spectacle of primal urges, a macabre stage for the most profound human instincts.

Alexandra did not even wince as the crier’s vocal cords tore and his low burbling screams became high pig-like squeals, a sound she found more bearable than her father's speeches the day before.

Great field kitchens had been erected in the market district of the city roasting trunks of meat turned on giant spits, the skin crackling and oozing rich sticky juices onto the sizzling coals below. With her stomach empty a handful of carved meat was thrusted into her palm. It smelled divine of exotic spices that she had only dreamt about tasting in her lifetime. She hurried like a scavenging rat into an unlit alley loosened and lifted the iron mask away from her mouth and began to devour the meat with a crazed grin, she licked the lining of warm grease from her thin lips before closing her eyes savouring each succulent bite and swallow of the tender fatty meal. All that mattered was filling her starving belly, especially when the food tasted this damned good. She didn’t even notice the pair of ‘cooks’ carrying the limp body of an overweight dog, probably some pampered pet of a rich merchant’s wife, past the alleyway entrance and heaving the corpse onto the field kitchen table. The body was stripped. Beheaded. Quartered. Stuffed with spiced vegetables and rammed onto another spit pole.

Alexandra emerged fat and happy from the narrow alleyway, she continued to traverse the winding streets of the ravaged city, thinking nothing of taking a long woollen grey coat from the smashed window of a tailor and sweeping it around her blood-strained frame. She reached through the shattered doorway of the next broken store face and picked a large bottle of hard liquor, paying with an imaginary coin that she flipped to the elderly owners of the shop who lay motionless in each other’s arms, dried bullet holes through their heads and a handgun by the old gentleman’s side. The bodies had been left to rot by the bandit fodder used to bolster the attacker’s number. ‘No fun if they’re not screaming.’

She took a swing of the fermented fruit ****. It warmed her throat, it had started to take effect a warming glow rising from her stomach that numbed her hands, face and mind. She had to suppress a drunken giggle when she stopped to watch a soldier desperately attempt to fornicate with a statue of the city’s staint. Rutting himself bare on the granite legs of the enormous effigy. She took another sip from her drink, immediately spitting it out with an uncontainable laugh. It all seemed ridiculous like some elaborate joke, her laugh turned into a mirth-filled howl. The copulating man looked over and started to laugh too. They laughed together until the soldier finished consummating with his stone lover. The world was spinning now in vomit-inducing angles and colours the smell of **** in the air and strong **** on her breath the sounds of monsters and the whales of civilian agony echoing through the streets. The ground seemed to tilt suddenly through her intoxicated eyes like a rocking boat heaving on unsteady waters failing to write herself she tumbled over a slack cobblestone the last thing she glimpsed was the raw recruits that killed the crier from before.

It was a baptism of blood, coated in blood her golden hair turned copper from the added red as the first man’s face turned to mush, from the hammering of her fists as she now mounted a corpse yet her hands still met the dead just in case, and it made her feel better. Her prized bottle littered the road with thick shards of glass and the other cherubic face recruited lay dead with his throat torn out and the last fleeing. Alexandra had killed soldiers on her side, she knew why fighting drowned out the madness if only for a second longer.

Alexandra returned to the church-turned-mocked throne room, hell it even had a ‘jester’ a lovely fellow named Edward stung up from the rafters with several arrows sticking out of his body, he may have been dead but he sure got a laugh from the drunk soldiers. With a whore on each arm sat her father playing a game of chess of all things with a third whore who was surprisingly good at the game. The game ended abruptly after the guard who denied Alexandra entry was kicked onto the board game, scattering all the pieces. “Alexandra? You look like shit.”