VERY DARK THES; READ AT YOUR OWN RISK
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The cry of a baby flailed in the closed room. tal sang. Screams shredded the air. The city vomited itself into the streets with red.
She pressed her back to cool wall, hands white on the dagger at her waist. Her knees trembled. Her breath ca in frantic, small pulls, as if the world might shove him into her chest and she would suffocate on the next heartbeat.
Once she had eaten from the finest plates and slept beneath the heaviest silks. Once she had walked where servants parted like reeds and n bowed like trees.
She had learned of the firmiest of love.
She had soared.
Now the wax lted and she fell.
The room had shrunk to the width of her terror. The child’s cries clawed at her ribs; they sounded impossibly far away and too close, like a bell struck inside a tomb. Her heart beat its own language.
DAD—RUM.
I am going to die.
DAD—RUM.
Everything we were will die with .
DAD—RUM.
Only a spark will remain.
The last brought a bit of reprieve but not for long...
The door did not open. It was ripped from its hinges by a man who moved like a falling mountain. He did not step through; he poured. Red ran off him in sheets: blood, oil, sweat, slls that belonged to drowning and slaughter. In one hand he held sothing obscene: the useless head of one of the Unkillables, held by the pointy head of the helt. Now that Shaa looked closer she realised it was the Head of the Guards, now just a literal one.
In the other hand, an axe with a lip like broken moonlight, its edge nicked, its bloody throat drying into black.
He was not a man. He had none of that anymore. He had a hunger.
Behind him the chorus rose, soldiers chanting, the city’s bones cracking like brittle pottery, the winds of screams rising behind. They were a flood, and the palace was a cliffset to be washed down.
Who would have thought that the sounds an empire makes when falling aren’t wailing but the hails of its destroyer?
She rocked once on the heels of her feet. It was useless. There was no ground. She had no fight in her. The dagger at her waist was a toy, what was she to do that half a hundred of Unkillables could not? Her hands shook; the tal bit into her palm, but she could not lift it.
They had told tales of the last sultan,how he had t death with courage on his lips and a sword bright in his fist; how he had ridden the last charge against the Khan of the steppes until their arrows fell him. She had rehearsed that courage in quiet hours, thought it like a hymn she could learn.
Now she could not even make the hymns form on her tongue. Only a small sound left her, a whimper and then the weight of the world folded her shoulders.
She sank down until her back hit the floor. THer arms covered her face, her blade held up and straight , weakly .
Hot tears leaked between fingers, wetting the air she breathed. She was no longer the Regent of the Sands, she was that poor famished child that wondered the street of the Sun’s city.
The child kept crying, a thin, furious spool of sound, a thing that had not yet learned the world’s cruelty , a world he would not ever understand.
The man with the head paused at the threshold. He cocked his head like a beast slling a new thing. His eye found the woman curled on the floor.
She closed her eyes and did the only thing she could, she prayed.
But no one would answer.
There was only the room, the child, the red man and the empty sky beyond the window. The last warmth of the world gathered in her throat and fled.
The man’s head tilted, the gore-slick hair of the severed commander brushing against his side.
For a mont his eyes fixed on the child. He moved with an awful casualness, like it was no heavier than a chicken to be plucked, his axe clattering to the floor.
His hands, huge and blackened with dried blood, wrapped around the baby’s legs. Tiny limbs wriggled, the shrieks rising higher, higher.
Until it was no more.
The sound that ca in its place was worse than any scream.
Wet. Flat.
How could the simple sound of at on a surface be so chilling?
Bone shattered, brains bursting in a spray of red . The wail stopped mid-breath, cut like a string beneath a knife.
Blood painted the wall in dripping ribbons, gray matter sliding down in clumps. Fragnts of bone clattered like porcelain shards on the floor. A piece of jaw, small, delicate, skittered across the tiles until it hit her sandal.
Amongst the fear there was the light of knowing that that, was not her child....he was safe, away from that beast.
The beast dropped what remained into the bed. It did not thump. It sagged, slack, like an empty sack of offal. No form. No child. Just pulp.Just at. Just a thing.Just a sacrifice. Just a doll.
His gaze then found her, pinning her like a spear. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t blink. Heat spread down her legs , hot urine soaking her gown as her body admitted what her mouth could not. She whimpered once, low and broken, her face crumpling beneath her hands.
She had drank poison, but it would do nothing against her, why of all powers only that now remained?
The red angel advanced, each step leaving a wet trail of blood across the marble, footprints that glistened like fresh paint in the dim light. The palace floor had once been polished for sultans and their families.
Now it was a butcher’s block.
He lood closer, and with every step, Shuaa felt the heat drain from her body, the marrow in her bones turning to ice. By the ti he stood above her, towering like a mountain over an insect, she was already hollowed by dread.
And yet,sothing in her broke against that terror. For the first ti she moved not behind but forward. Her dagger trembling in her grip struck against his chest.
It barely scraped.
Gone. Every ounce of hope. Every ounce of will.
His red-soaked hands closed around her wrists, crushing the bones beneath his grip until the dagger fell from her fingers. He wrenched it from her with the ease of a butcher taking a toy from a child.
For centuries, the wise had debated whether n were born good or evil, whether civilization refined or corrupted the human spirit. As Shuaa looked up into his eyes, she saw no argunt, no ambiguity, no philosophy.
There was nothing human left in them. No pride. No thought. No spark of creation.
Only hunger. Only the blind, gnawing will to take, to consu, to destroy.
And in that mont she understood: hers was not a people destined to endure, nor a city ant to rise eternal. They had built their pyramids of marble, their gardens, their courts of song and wisdom, but all of it, everything, was clay before the fire.
Her race was ant not for building but for breaking.
All that they created was made with the purpose of being destroyed.
She thrashed.
Her legs kicked against the marble, slippered heels scraping uselessly, her wrists jerking madly in his iron grip. The dagger was gone, but she clawed with her nails, twisted with the panic of a trapped animal. She knew what awaited won when the walls fell.
And now it was her turn.
The red angel’s shadow swallowed her. His breath reeked of iron and rot as his hands pulled at her silks. She writhed harder, her sobs breaking into sharp cries, the daggerless weight of her resistance flailing against a body carved from war. Threads snapped.
And then, his hand touched her flesh.
The beast recoiled.
His palm smoked where it had t her skin, scorched red-black in the shape of his grasp hissing with the sound of water dropping on hot tal. The reek of seared flesh cut through the copper stench of blood.
Shuaa froze, her chest heaving. For a heartbeat she could not believe it,then tears ran anew, not from terror but from relief. Her god had not abandoned her.
He did not.
Even at the fall of her world, even as Azania crumbled beneath the boots of devils, her god’s hand still lay upon her. She was not forsaken.
She cried out, sobbing thanks into the roar of the slaughter, knowing that it ant her child was still protected.
But the man before her did not cry in pain. Did not look at his hand in horror. Did not stagger back in confusion as any mortal would.
No. His face did not change. His eyes, empty, bottomless, only bore into hers, with angers?
He was the one thrashing now.
He struck his fists against his chest, against the chain and bone of his own body, leaving fresh welts on top of old wounds, screaming in so guttural tongue that was not Azanian.
And then Shuaa saw it.
Between his jerking limbs, as he reeled and shouted, sothing leapt and clinked, a familiar glint of bronze and silver.
All hope she had the knowledge she was not forgotten was lost.
The fist ca before she could scream.
Her head cracked against the marble. Stars flooded her vision. Another blow,her cheek split. Another, her teeth rattled, copper flooding her tongue. He struck with rage, each punch heavier than the last, yet with every impact his body shuddered worse than hers. His hands smoked where they t her skin. His veins bulged black. His breath ca ragged, more tortured beast than man.
Three tis he tried to force himself upon her, and conduct her due of victory upon the defeated. Three tis he fell back, howling, seared as if by holy fire. His body convulsed, clutching his scorched flesh, but the madness never left his eyes.
At last, shaking with fury, he abandoned his hands. He turned, stomping across the chamber evading the carcass he had made of nation to retrieve his axe. Its chipped head dragged sparks against the marble as he swung it back into his grip. And then he lood over her again, blotting out the flicker of torchlight, the butcher’s shadow swallowing her whole.
Shuaa’s blurred eyes caught the glint again.
What a horror it was.... dangling from the devil’s neck, tangled in blood , was the holy symbol of her god.
Beside the ruin of bone that he had made of an empire, swayed the small carved figure , once set high in her chambers, now desecrated for her murder.
Her scream never left her throat. Not that she had any
In that last mont, pain and faith disappeared together, leaving only doubt. Doubt in her life’s work. Doubt in herself. Doubt in the very entity she dedicated her life to.
Thirty years of nothing.
She had realized as the axe bit into her skull.
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