Sadly Sings Destiny

10

Andretti stood on her balcony as she watched the bulky, lumbering shape of an airship shamble into the Rass River in the fading purple twilight as the city lights flared up in the distance. She had seen Valerian’s ship dozens of times, but this one did not look right. Valerian was the only person who would land and moor an airship in her river, perhaps it was a ship in distress. She watched as people began to stream off the ship, and horsemen of her honor guard rode across the cobbled square to meet her guests. She smiled, it would certainly be interesting to have a crew of Sabbistahni merchants join her for a while. For half a second the thought of Verona and her rebelion crossed the queen’s mind, but she expected the usurper to come over land when they did mount an attack. With that assurance in her mind, she relaxed.

The leader of the honor guard suddenly toppled from his horse, as if swept from the saddle by an invisible tree branch. Andretti leaned over the balustrade, confused. Then the report hit her ears. The thin pop, echoing across the extensive common area. Andretti jolted back as if it was her who had been shot as the other two horsemen fell from their mounts before they could react. Her hand came to her mouth as she gasped and staggered back. Alarm bells were already beginning to ring in the lofty castle on the bluff as watchmen with spy glasses realized what was happening under their noses. As Andretti stumbled back into a plush chair that was behind her, she could fancy that she heard the lower accesses to the castle being closed and locked.

“Nikki, Nikki, are you alright?” she heard Vixen call out as the barefooted attendant ran from the open door to see her mistress. The ever-loyal half-blood crouched by the Queen and put caring hands on the human’s arm.

“I’m fine sweet Vixen,” Andretti said absently stroking the wyvern’s hair as a dozen slim bolts from a ballista with a scatter load flew over her head. Andretti tried to convince herself as much as she tried to convince Vixen, but the hollowness in her voice did not help either of them believe her. Andretti didn’t need to be told to know what was happening. She had discussed it with her guards in a dozen different scenarios. Verona had taken her speech as an invitation, and the usurper had come to the castle as a violent guest.

“Help me up,” Andretti said, extending a hand, and as the small creature pulled her to her feet, she said, “Help me into my Angel armor and war paint. I will wait for Verona in the grand throne room, and if she is half the woman she claims to be, then she will meet me in combat for the throne.” Vixen nodded and followed the Queen back into her quarters. It took longer than the slight creature would have liked to deck the Queen in her shining armor and her gallium face paint. Once it was done, Andretti dismissed her to do as she pleased. Vixen smiled a smile full of sharp, pearl white fangs. She loved her queen, she loved the woman under the gallium and under the armor. Faithful little Vixen knew what she would do.

Cannons shook the castle as they fired from strategic nooks on the invading men who were trying to force the doors at the bottom of the bluff. The Betrayer had been smart, a small force pressed against the cliff was a difficult target for the cannons and ballista to hit, and even difficult for the archers and riflemen. The grenadiers and vats of pitch that were being put to a boil would surely do damage as well. Still, Vixen knew there was one thing that the Betrayer and her women wouldn’t have planned for, and that was the loyal halfbreed herself.

The ashen skinned girl shed her thin dress as she stepped onto the balcony. The night air was cool on her bare skin as she climbed onto the stone balustrade. The flesh on her hands and feet had changed, purple, iridescent scales covering her, spreading higher. Her limbs were longer, her fingers were ivory talons and her toes deadly claws. She smiled a bloodthirsty smile as she let go of the magic she had to hold every second of every day. A scale-covered almost-girl lept from that darkening balcony, and a winged beast took to the sky in her place. Vixen was by no means a large wyvern, but her wings stretched sixty feet, and she was forty feet long from her pointed snout to her ivory spiked tail. She let out a feral growl as she reared back on wings that doubled as forelegs, and she let loose a jet of golden fire into the sky.

Below her, the guns stopped for a brief moment, but that moment was long enough to let the wyvern hear the cheers of the Lotheranian women who fought to hold the venerated castle. She let the wind fall from her wings, and she swooped down to the crowd of invaders who worked at the doors with battering rams and who set explosive charges. She leaned forward and came into them snout first, the bee stings of their bullets annoying and smarting, but not enough to deter the faithful servant. She flared her wings at the last second, and she felt the invaders crash into her outstretched arms as she swept across the ground at breakneck speed at head level with most of them. Her pearled fangs snapped indiscriminately, and she could taste the iron of human blood in her maw as she began to climb.

She had no concern for how many she had killed or injured as she began to circle. She could feel dozens, hundreds of spots where the bullets had pierced her skin and lodged barely beneath like thorns. She could already feel a spreading stiffness in her wings that told her she would be riddled with bruising if she saw the sunrise and one crafty, or lucky, soldier had sliced her this wing membrane when she strafed them. She circled and tried to let herself recover, but a number of the humans were still firing on her with their bee sting bullets. She needed a new strategy, but the house servant had never been trained in or experienced battle in her life.

As she circled, she heard and felt the blasts from the Sabbistahni soldiers who had managed to plant their charges on the closed-off doorways. Vixen let out a frustrated roar as she dove to sweep the soldiers with fire. Her own weakness had given them the lul they needed to break the defenses of the Swallow’s Nest. She flew low and blew flames over all she could, and though the heat was intense, she had come in at too high a speed and failed to do severe damage as the humans fled into the tunnel filled bluffs that supported the castle. By sheer luck, poor for her and grand for a nameless soldier, a bee sting bullet found her double iris left eye. She let out an animal howl of sheer agony that even the Butterfly heard five miles away, where she was working on packing for her upcoming flight from Lotherania.

Faithful, well-meaning, and poorly trained Vixen crashed into the cobblestones and slid across the broad commons until she came to rest, holding her wings over her face and crying out in pain and anguish. She knew that she had failed in the most fundamental aspects of having even a drop of dragon’s blood in one’s veins. She had not been the winged fury sweeping fear into the hearts of men. She had not been the faithful guard dog she had always promised Andretti that she would be. She had been nothing to the invaders but a nuisance at best. She had become too accustomed to the life of a house servant, flying had winded her, and her fighting had been an awkward flailing. The howling cries from the stricken beast were for the pain in her eye, the thousand bee sting bullets under her scale, her battered and bruised body, and, most of all, for the failure to protect the person she had practically raised from birth.

Andretti stood in her grand throne room, waiting. The chandelier-lit the white marble walls and floors, all covered in rich tapestries and rugs in the gay light her candles provided. Her polished Angel armor glittered in the flickering illumination as if she was dressed in a star-filled night sky and the blue steel of her war ax gleamed, thirsty for blood. Guards lined the walls of the room, each holding a different weapon to offer to the leader of the invaders when she found her way into the room. Queen Nikki Andretti had reverted to the ceremony of the Tylmathri emperors who had faced coups of their own. If Verona was a traditional woman of class and grace, then she would meet Andretti in a fair one on one combat for the crown.

Andretti waited for hours for her enemy. She heard the cannons of her castle fire, she felt the castle shutter as the Sabbistahni mercenaries blew the doors to the subterranean passages. She had to fight back the tears when the ear-shattering howls of her dear Vixen split the night. You’ve done well, little one. She had whispered to herself when she knew that her companion had failed. On and on through endless hours, Andretti stood waiting for her challenger to arrive. She half hoped that her enemy had fallen to the hands of her faithful guards. Andretti knew that was an empty hope, so on she stood. She held her position until the first streams of morning light began to flow through the stained-glass windows. Through all of those hours, pure adrenaline kept the Queen on her feet. Finally, she heard the fighting outside the door. She braced herself as the door flew off its hinges.

Verona dressed in one of the vests the mercenaries carried with them, a vest with plates of steel sewn into the fabric, as she stood on the bow of the descending ship with her soldiers forming up behind her. The time had come, and the CCS Arrowhead was descending along the Rass River into a sea of gabled roofs on a shore of cobblestone fronting the high Swallow’s Nest. The night air ruffled her brown hair as she gripped the Sabbistahni repeating rifle in her hands. She had long dreamt of this moment, she had visions of herself standing triumphant in the sunset and delivering a heroic speech to awestruck women and men ready to follow her into battle.

Now, the reality of the day was sinking in. She was not the heroic leader of women she thought she was, she was nothing more than a scared girl with a gun. She had been able to give a brief speech, and if anything, the Lotheranians seemed to feel a kindred spirit with her in their shared fear. She had a feeling that the Sabbistahnians who were to lead the charge scoffed at her, but she was lining their pockets with gold, so she knew they would follow her into battle.

Verona watched the castle as the ship fell onto the river. There was no alarm ringing, there were no soldiers there to oppose her. The vessel was allowed to land in the water and moor as if it was Valerian visiting from his distant land. Verona took the head of the soldiers on the gangway as she saw the honor guard riding across the common on their horses. No soldier’s fired as she raised her gun and looked down through the open sights at the lead rider. She had been precise in her orders that she be the one to fire the first round of the battle. Through nothing but dumb luck, the horseman toppled when she pulled the trigger. Two more shots rang out, and the other guards fell. Almost before she could give the order to charge, she was pushed down the gangway and onto the cobblestone as her eleven-hundred warriors cried for blood.

She led the charge across the commons as the alarm bells began to ring, and the sky blackened with bolts from the ballista on the castle. When the wyvern leaped from the castle and roared, she cowered with the rest of her men, but a level headed Sabbistahni officer kept her in check and directed her to focus on firing on the beast. When the creature swept them, she had ducked and let it soar over her back. The attack from the beast was effective, nearly a tenth of her soldiers were left lying lifeless or useless on the stone of the common. When the wyvern swept back and brushed them with fire, she was one of the hundreds that were caught in the flames, and in that instant, she thought she was dead, but the heat faded, leaving her feeling as if she had been out all day in the summer sun.

Then the doors blasted open. The Wyvern fell. The order of events was skewed in her mind, but she couldn’t tell if her confusion started before or after that moment. Perhaps she was directed by a Sabbistahni soldier who refused to die no matter how many times he was shot, maybe she moved into the dark caves under her own free will. All she knew was that her ears were ringing from the endless rifle fire that she had heard unprotected before she had been smart enough to protect herself with a simple hex. The tunnels were an infinite maze full of soldiers that would charge her with spears, only to be mowed down by the hired guns. She had expected to have more advanced weapons, but it felt as if she had come from a distant future to fight primitive tribesmen.

Through uncounted adrenaline-fueled hours, Verona fought with a viscous force that seemed to grow and shrink and reform with every junction in the tunnels, always working its way upwards to the primary levels of the castle. The force broke through doors at random, leaving behind those they deemed to be no threat, and gunning down those that could cause harm. Through sheer chance alone, Verona was at the head of the ever-changing and ever-shifting liquid force that pushed through the ornate double doors into the grand throne room. Verona was shoved into the room a few feet, then the movement stopped. Across the room, Queen Andretti the Silver stood in her armor reflecting the dozens of colors from the stained glass, throwing a cascade of shards of hue across the room, illuminating a hundred points in a hundred shades.

“Ms. Conroy.” she said in a formal tone raising her ax, “I challenge you to battle-” the Silver Queen was cut short in her rehearsed speech by the peal of a repeating rifle firing a single shot. Andretti didn’t know if the round pierced her armor, but she felt it hit just under her collar bone on her left breast, and she fell backward onto the ground out of shock more than anything, adrenaline still doing more than reason to keep her going. Andretti heard the guns fire, and her guards fell moaning in pain as Verona stalked forward and put the barrel of her gun between the stunned Queen’s eyes.