The Broken Queen, a fractured tale

Linearity bears a strange relationship with time, a stranger one with people.

It is three thousand one hundred years ago, the fiftieth year of the rule of Queen Sabiha, no man-things yet walk the continent to necessitate the name Sabba. To speak a name of magic power bears no greater importance than to use any other name. A messenger of a defeated army kneels before the Fifth Queen. This year is important, more to the historians than to the queen, because half of the importance has yet to come to pass. The first event, the end of the last great war during the time of the Ghaniman empire, has come to pass within the past month. The envoy, a pale skinned-woman, smaller than the people of the elven court she stands in, bows low before the new queen. Her kind has no knowable name, the victory of the elves was so complete that history does not even record their foe's kind. The battle they fought against her kind was short but bloody. Their evil magic baffled the might Amazonians on many occasions, but they never stood a true chance of prevailing. The attitude of the court toward this messenger is contempt, she is seen as a herald of a people who claimed the lives of many friends, many sisters in arms.

Sabiha looks at her with curiosity, her kind's bodies remain small, even in adulthood. It would not be until the rise of the man-things that the sight would become normal to her. Her features are slight, but she seems unafraid of the dark beings that stand at twice her stature.

The ebony of the dark drapes in your personal chambers blots out the miserable sun. You have lost track of the hours, then the days, perhaps even the years. Your studies of magic have begun to make visible the linework, the rough drafting of physical reality. You see the shape of an elven amazon before you, you look through her and see the strands that hold her together, how they can be unwound to gain further power. Blood that is best heated to boiling, a skull that works for matters of flame, the muscles and sinew that contain those reagents. She is smaller, small enough that the name amazon clings to her as a mockery. The commoners have been shrinking, only the noble-born maintain the size your people once have. Multiple generations of interbreeding with outsiders have dulled the edge of the elven blood. She nods when you meet her gaze, the lack of a bow does not soothe your temper, but they have ceased bowing in the court long ago.

"My queen, a diplomat from the rebels."

The envoy is short, with the usual pale white skin of the man-things. They're female, the man-things send women even when men rule. Half of it is they know your kind to be matriarchal. They also suspect that the elves with the "royal gift" will use these envoys for pleasure. The legends of elven royalty and their hedonism are vicious among the outsiders... and not wholly unearned. The sight of her makes you grimace. In the present, you recognize a far ancestor of many of the faces that live in your head. In the queen's time, she sees the envoy kneeling before her. She remembers the day, she remembers the face, what was the envoy's name? She reminds you of people you've seen later. Time doesn't move that way, but you're experiencing it like that now. Nothing makes sense when seen as two straight lines moving in opposite paths. She reminds you of somebody you've seen before as well, an odd center point between past and future. Things change, people are the constant.

You, the you that isn't Sabba, are walking the path north to the former capital of the Ghaniman empire. The road is long, the castle tucked far from the main road around which the cities rose. You pass for a moment through the city of Leto. Three hundred years ago, it was a hovel. Two hundred years ago, a promising small city. One hundred years ago, the fastest growing area in the land. Now, a hovel again. In the alleys where once a duke dreamed of rising to king, only squalor remains.

"Even when it was lovely, it was always a mere stepping stone." He speaks within you.

It was always a transitory area, the brief jump in glory a result of the association with great men and the speculation of merchants. When the men fell into legend, when the merchants found a new spot to admire, it fell back into being just another transitory place. Now, one saddled with the costs and scars of former promise. A weight that places of low importance simply aren't built to carry. When every stone had been turned, every shop turned to a market, every hut turned to a home, it remained a transitory place. Now, one unsustainably expensive to transit through.

"In a hundred years, it may be lovely again." The Duke opines.

"And the people here would be less happy for it." The old woman harumphs, she remembers the increase in price, but no matching increase in ways to pay those prices.

"Perhaps one day, man may find joy in things which do not sparkle." One of the voices whines.

You shake your head, trying to quiet the quarreling voices. Sabiha in your personal chambers, the red curtains not yet giving way to the dark drapes of your later reign. The setting sun catches the drapes and paints the white room scarlet, accompanied by the warmth of a massive fire. There are tales that the conquered magicians can make fires, a hundredth as large but producing just as much heat, and never faltering come rain or wind. These tales interest you, but you've invited the messenger from the previous day to a private meeting for more reasons than that. There was something about the look of her... it was the first time seeing this foe up close. They were not ugly like the orcs had been, nor as strong, but they had cost you an order of magnitude more blood to subjugate.

The knock you've been waiting for comes at the door, causing you to set aside your work. This early alphabet, still little more than logograms and the early traces of what will become the Ghaniman ABJAD, are the second most important thing that will happen for you this year, but history will confuse the order.

The envoy from earlier enters, up close the difference in size between you is even more noticeable. You loom over her, almost like a spider to a fly. She is unafraid of you.

The rebel envoy enters, you pull the dark curtains shut to blot the midday light. This one is afraid of you, as most have been since that day. All who wish to reach you send a young woman of their race, some go as far as to make them look like she did, as though in doing so they will catch you on a sensitive side. It has long since stopped working. The magic you have learned has allowed you to keep the "royal gift" on a tight leash. That does not stop the rumors.

The young woman eyes the written characters on the table, the red light through the curtains painting her face with an uncharacteristic color. Her ivory skin compared to your own midnight-black, as well as the difference in your sizes, makes you seem like predator and prey. There's an electric excitement to everything she does, you like your sisters, struggle at times to restrain the royal gift. Still, in spite of everything, she sits near you and looks to you as equals, without invitation. It's a bold-faced insult, but it combined with the powerful magic she keeps within her both send the message that she will not be intimidated by you. Even in your chambers, she could see you dead if she so wished. You are the endangered at this point, not her.

"Why did you summon me?" She asks you plainly, with no hint of any intent in her voice. It's a uniquely flat way of speaking, magicless.

"My people, unlike yours, are strangers to the arcane." You begin. "I would like to change that."

The girl on the couch raises an eyebrow, but it seems like she expected this question. "I am no teacher."

"No, but you do interest me."

Fire, the simplest spell that the envoy knows, has remained outside of the queen's grasp for months now. She has struggled, as the days have passed into weeks and the seasons changed. In the time she has been trying, the envoy has become a personal companion far closer than any being of any other species. She has attended Sabiha in her lessons every day since their first meeting. In that time, temples have been erected, monuments to the destruction of the envoy's race. The simple characters Sabiha toyed with have evolved, with the aid of the unnamed race's own letters, to form the alphabet that the world now uses three thousand years later. The end result of a language created by a race that history bears no memory of, and a mad queen. The flame sputters on the candle for a moment, then fades. Sabiha flushes with rage again, but the envoy chuckles softly, placing her soft hands on the long fingers extending forward from Sabiha's palm. The touch fills the queen with unexpected warmth, a fluttering that makes her uncomfortable, like she doesn't trust herself around the young girl.

"Slower, fair lady, you are making a transfer, not willing it into being."

The flat tones of her voice have long since been replaced by the warmth of personal tones. The girl has a voice filled with song and magic, and she sings her song only for the queen. The stares of the court have turned from resentment, to pity, to envy. She who the queen devotes all of her days to. The more time the girl spends in the royal chambers, the more it becomes said that it is she who controls the queen, and no longer the inverse. The rumors start of the bond between them. For the first time, Sabiha is called the Broken Queen.

The moon paints the room in stark whites, a room otherwise dark than from the light of a small blue fire you keep bottled on the bedside table. It heats the room like a small volcano when you take the lid off. Right now, the bottle is capped, the room cold. The fire is too precious, earned with too many months of work and study to endanger with anything.

The Duke kneels in the King's Court, an unnatural blue fire burns in a bottle on the hearth above his fireplace. The fireplace remains perpetually unlit, at least since the bottle was delivered to him. To open the bottle for a mere second is enough to warm the whole castle. This gift is prized, prized enough to earn a lowborn man like yourself a Dukedom. The story goes that you won it in mortal combat from an elven Amazon, one of the last of her kind.

Five years earlier, a young man picks clean the corpse of an old woman. Her house is abandoned, her children live far away from this dump. In her possessions, a bottle of blue flame.

Fifty years earlier, a human monk sits among a smattering of elves. The remains of the noble houses, among them the last to carry even a fragment of the royal gift. All the pureblood elves that remain have become so inbred as to resemble some horribly twisted thing. It is those gnarled remnants and the human worshippers that remain. They offer worship on the altar of Sabba's fire, praying to the broken queen. Her spirit walks the night sky, laying claim to the last domains her empire did not come to rule. One day she shall return.

A year from then, the sky of the temple cracks at the calling of the queen's spirit. The fabric between the worlds of the living and the dead is the fiercest natural ****. To oppose it is an accident no mage makes twice. The circle shatters, bolts of light streaking between the members and hardening the dark skin until it forms as a cast of stone over them. The body remains there now, perfectly preserved. The souls and minds long since warped beyond recognition by the torment of years. Only the monk, barred from the temple on this holiest of days remains of the congregation. He will take Sabba's fire from the alter a week from now, then pass it on his deathbed to a daughter that will never know the true origin of it, or the true nature of her parent.

Where that fire now sits, you do not know. No water, no wind, no magic will ever fully extinguish it. It was the first of the elven magics. The first perfect spell.

The envoy of the rebels does not let herself in, and she does not seat herself without being given permission. If Sabba knew that it would become tradition for her to be sent **** young women, she would have smothered the trend in the crib. However, it is not often that we realize something has become a tradition until it is already too late to stop it. Like all traditions, the repetition sits in pale imitation of the meaningful first.

"Speak," Sabba tells the little thing, already bored of her.

"M-my lady... the republic of Genevere... wishes to be recognized as an independent state..."

You rise from your seat slowly, stepping over to the young girl. "How unfortunate then, for you to be the messenger of this news."

The young girl looks up at you from your navel, shaking in fear. The man-things have been getting larger, seemingly in time as your kind have been getting smaller. The well of pure blood is running dry, the truly immortal of the elder families are falling to ruin around you. Soon, you promise to be the only one left. The man-things grow in power, assimilating your language, making their own modifications and characters. You have to strain and train to pronounce some of them right. Even as vassals, you owe them the barest dignity. You would fear ****, to be martyred as the last of the deathless, but no blade nor poison may harm you. Any assassin who wished ill against you, you hold the power to reduce to atoms with a glance. The girl knows this, it is one of the sources of her fear. It is not the only one.

"Your people must have filled your head with horrors that awaited you, should you anger me." You taunt. It's purely sadistic. The only fun that the ones like this can give most of the time is seeing how much you can make them quake in fear. The "royal gift" would be wasted on them.

"Y-yes my lady!"

"And yet you still came before me."

"It was not my choice... I was told I looked the most like -----!"

Your brows narrow, in a moment the girl is kneeled before you, crushed under immense pressure. She begs for your forgiveness, her voice growing weaker and weaker as she does. She knew not to speak that name, and she has broken what was likely her only rule.

What was that name? You try to grasp at the already retreating moment of time, but it collapses in your hand, already passed and joining memories that break and shatter, only to be put back together incompletely, forming new images that are distinctly true but in the wrong shape.

The blue flame burns in the glass, uncovered, heating the room beyond the comfort of both inside. The envoy marvels at it, clearly beyond anything she's ever imagined possible.

"This is... impossible..."

"Remember when you spoke of your theory of life ****?" You ask her. A large wine glass in your hands, empty, in need of refilling. You get up, kicking a pair of empty bottles as you do. The envoy remains seated, her own empty glass.

"I suppose, but it was purely hypothetical."

"Well," You say, stepping over to your cabinet. It was full when the day started, now as the last vestiges of the day slip behind the horizon, it stands as a stark reminder that the wine has flowed like water since your success. "Suppose it were true for a moment. I, as a pureblood, do not age. I do not die. As it seems, there is no limit to my life ****. Is it possible that I may, by that measure, carry the potential no mage before me has?"

"Perhaps," The envoy mutters, still transfixed by the flame in the bottle.

You step back over to the couch, "Perhaps, in time, I may even throw open the doors of **** itself."

Her face immediately sours and she turns to you, "Sabiha, my friend, you must never even joke of the attempt. **** has no pity or mercy for those who toy with him."

"And yet, here I am, deathless. And here, in the absence of that dark one, I would see you walk beside me."

You pour both of you another glass. The girl's face goes flat, turning your words over in her mind.

"Life without ****... it would become easy for one to become lost in thought should they carry a hundred lifetimes of memories."

You reach out to her, first setting your hand on her own. She watches you do it and, while she doesn't stop you, she does blush and turn her face. You set your wine glass down and bring your other hand up to cup her chin with your long fingers.

"Then let us find something to be joyfully lost in."

You bend your face down and bring your lips to hers. Both of you freeze for a moment to feel a long-held barrier being crossed, but both of you quickly lose yourself in long poorly-restrained passion. Her arms slowly lift from the couch and pull around your neck, not letting your head go to break the locking of lips. For the first time since you took the throne, you are unable to keep your cock from bulging against your long dress. You slowly stand, straightening and taking her into your arms, placing her on your bed as you've dreamed for years. She looks up into your eyes, drunk in more ways than one. You slide the dress from your shoulders as she slips out of her almost religious-looking robes, the soft pale curves of your body only stiffening the already rising presence and heat between your legs.

"I suppose not many get to see that mighty rod of yours." She teases, her usual haughtiness strong even in the moment.

"And fewer still get to feel it, especially as I intend to make you feel it." You snarl back.

The room bakes in the heat of the magical fire, staining the sheets in sweat as you begin to entwine your bodies around each other. From the moment you slide the head of your cock into her waiting body, you're hit with a wave of uncontrollable passion like you've never known before in your life. The moments with you and your lover hang immutably in your mind, and yet, in the place of her name hangs a cloud that cannot be moved and cannot be seen through.

"So then, I shall show you the dark queen you were taught to fear!"

The rebel envoy bounces off of the bed slightly as you toss her apathetically onto it. She whimpers and whines as you stalk over and hike her skirt, tearing her undergarments from her behind without so much as a second thought. When one of your hands strikes her across the rear, raising a red handprint on the pale skin, she yelps, but doesn't dare to protest. She has likely been told that if you should **** yourself on her, she is to silently take it until you finish. Unfortunately for her, today you desire to make her squeal.

You unfasten the large waistbelt and let the scarlet dress swing open, cock rising on silent command to full alertness. Learning to have complete control of it was one of the first things you did in her absence, to use as you wish. You slap the rod down against the envoys back, letting her feel how deep inside of her she's going to get penetrated, letting her feel the full balls dangling against her, primed to pump her full when you want to.

"Does this compare to the tales you were forewarned with? Perhaps if they instilled greater fear in you, you would not speak the name ----- in my presence!"

"I'm sorry!" The young girl sobs as you swipe a finger against her delicate young slit. It's likely she's never been with a man before, not that it would have come close to preparing her for what you intend to do.

Within an instant of your motion, her pussy begins to leak, lips puffing up red and drooling. Her whines and protest turn half-confused, then ****.

"What did you dooooo-hoooooo?" She yells pathetically, waving her hips in the air underneath you.

"I just gave you the one mercy you will receive from me."

You quickly prime your cock against her slit and slide it in without much resistance. Her whining stops abruptly, the words seemingly impaled with her along your rod. She kicks her feet underneath her waist impotently as you slide in more and more of yourself, pressing her head down into the bed with one hand, a handful of her raised ass in the other.

"It's... itchy!" She grumbles, voice lethargic and pleasure-drunk. You smack her ass again, getting a far more giggly response.

"Animal," You snarl at her. "You are an animal to me."

"Yesh my lady!"

"And I have put you in heat, like an animal."

She whines, feeling you bottom out in her. She starts squealing as you start giving her harsh thrusts.

"For the next month, you will do all that you can to scratch this itch, throwing yourself at anyone and everyone. None of them will ever truly please you as I have, but that will not stop your trying!"

She grumbles happily underneath you, half-processing your words.

"And when that month is up, your heat shall subside, you shall be as you were before you came to me. However, you shall remember all of it."

She whimpers underneath you, pussy quaking as she experiences a sort of half-orgasm.

You lean down to speak quietly to her, "I can think of no worse **** to give you than memories."

The candle burns in the jar on the table, as it has for the past nine months. The envoy now lives with you, rarely leaving your room. The bulge in her stomach has surpassed noticeability and become almost horrifying. ----- insists that it does not hurt her, but you worry every day. It is the height of an era of peace and prosperity the world has never yet known, and will not know anything like once it ends. Despite this, every moment of your dreams is dominated by fears of what may go wrong. Some of your kind have bred with some of theirs, but never one with the royal gift and one of their females. The risk is always there, unknowable, imperceivable. Any day could be the last of the happy days and you would not know it until that day had passed. So you savor these days while they last, inadvertently darkening them with your fear.

"No matter what happens, we have left happy memories, beloved." ----- kisses you as she says it, lying in bed and resting. Carrying the weight of your child exhausts her.

It is the last thing she says to you.

You watch the rebel envoy stumble into the courtyard, taking wobbling steps as she does. Your lust has been sated, and her squealing soothed your soul for a time. You watch bemused as she stumbles up to the amazon guards and drunkenly leans against them, propositioning them with all manner of obscenities. Were they not under orders to let her go, to let her foul herself with public indecency, and to let her bear the memories, they might take her to the dungeon to enjoy her. As it is, they shuffle her through the gates into the town square, bound for the brothel or the stocks. A pang of guilt flashes through you momentarily. A single, punctuating thought.

"All because she looked the most like Marin."

It is two thousand five hundred years ago, the five hundred and fiftieth year of your reign, give or take. The walls around you have risen and fallen, temples to a defeated army now specters of a precursor race that no longer exists. All aside from a few holdout families of high elf have given up their pact of interbreeding, and the traces of the elven genome has begun to fade. You have become the last true immortal, the last of the deathless.

For the past year beyond your count, you have made no public appearance. None but your servants and court see you anymore. You have stopped giving input to regional conflicts, stopped saying yeah or nay to claimants of independence. The kingdom of the man-things sprouted quickly even larger than your own, resentful of your kind and with no conflict of complete extermination, were it not for the fear that you could fold their cities in upon themselves like playthings.

You have become absorbed entirely in magic, both writing the natural laws and reading any that other hands may write. You are driven singularly, devoted to the mastery of theory and practice.

You have become unpleasable, a being without laughter or passion. You have bedded nobody in more than a century, and the name the Broken Queen carries a multitude of meanings now, even five hundred years after it was first given to you. You have long forgone the poetry and tapestries for lower art, crass and ugly. You keep one jester around at the behest of the rest of your court, who find him unimaginably odious. His songs, even those that commit nothing short of heresy against you, amuse you and you alone greatly.

"Sing me something," You snip at him, painting runes onto a great stone in the center of your room.

He starts:
"Oh, there once was a queen with a body divine,
But she indulged not in pussy or flowing red wine
The people they whispered that she had gone mad
They said that her leadership was really quite bad!
But I know a secret that I dare not tell!
Because really she's opening portals to-"

"Rhyme scheme is off," You grumble. "Syllable count too."

"It's more of a freeform thing," He scoffs.

"Well, it sucks."

He laughed, playing his instrument tunelessly purely to make obnoxious sounds. The jar of fire has been missing, missing for a long time now. She wishes she knew where it was, to have it back. Partly because uncorking it under the jester's nose might shut him up permanently. Partly because... it's all that's left.

It is a week later, the intervening time marked by fiendish feats of sleep and work. There is so much still to be done, but when it is finished, she can rest comfortably for as long as she wants. She waves her arms about, remembering the slow-motion of conversion, preparing the dry run, speaking the words.

"Sabba, would you get them off my case?"

The door burst open, the jester flanked by two amazons, now only a head taller than his human body. The amazons always especially took issue with his performances, soldiers are often a very joyless lot. It was improper to say that they simply disliked the songs of the queen's favorite jester, so they took to tormenting him, coming up with conspiracies to accuse him of.

She stumbled over one word, a borrowed phrase from the human vernacular, one that she had trained herself not to stumble over.

The eyes of the party bursting through the door opened in panic as the queen became wreathed in blue flame, lifting from the ground and seeming to shimmer from existence.

The fire did not hurt. She could feel herself splitting apart, carried away on the level of strings by the power of the natural currents. She had time, not enough to undo her mistake, but time enough to understand fully what was going on.

**** took no mercy on mispronunciations.

It is three years prior. Her advisor, an ailing half-breed, warns her that it is imperative that she leave an heir. It need not even be a pureblood, but simply an heir. She is too old, the chain of inheritance too hard to track.

It is two years later, she attends the funeral of the advisor, one of the few she still attends. She is no longer moved by ****, it is out of guilt of undone duty. She has left no heir, and never will. The aide's last thoughts were likely on the line of succession, and she has robbed him of happier final thoughts.

She is filled with flame, pushing the strands of her apart and dispersing them into the room. She is able to watch herself go up, consumed and destroyed as she watches with interest. She thinks of Marin. It had been worth the risk. She would have done nothing differently, save locking the door.

"Sabiha!"

The voice of her jester cuts through the serenity of her final thoughts, dominating her mind. No greater sin could he have committed than to be a human and to say her true name. For the amazons, in absence of a queen, the chance is seized to deal with a meddlesome problem. The Broken Queen's last thoughts are for the wellbeing of a man she has never even learned the name of.

The town of Marigold is one of the transitory places imbued with artificial importance along the royal road. It is impossible to say if the current state of polish and wealth it finds itself in is a temporary ascension from the muck, like Leto before it, or if this place carries an importance unique to it. What you do know is that your body has not yet adjusted to the nightwalking nature of the elves, and you arrive near midnight exhausted beyond comprehension. The second you find a barn to sneak into, and a patch of hay to collapse into, you drop out of consciousness.