1. Melisandre

1

MELISANDRE

C ries of mourning for the dead and the dying rang through Lumilia as the sun rose. Standing by the window of my castle chambers, I smiled. The dull skyline of this pathetic city was no more. Only rubble remained where countless homes and businesses once stood, the debris spilling out into the roadways like party favors left scattered after the celebration had come to an end. Here and there, bodies lay on the cobblestones like so much left-over garbage—corpses of the poor, the destitute, and the rich alike.

Soon, they would start to stink. That was if the monsters roaming the city didn’t devour them first.

I chuckled as I watched smoke drift like a gray shroud over the morning sky. Wood burned. Stone crumbled. Humans bled and died.

Nothing was permanent… except me.

“You’ve made a mistake.”

A contemptuous sneer tugged my lips at the sound of the hissing-clicking voice. I cast a glance over my shoulder. Though before, I would have seen a muscular man with long brown hair and a strong jaw, now I saw only a shell. The truth hid inside the shifter, invisible to anyone besides me or his own kind. A twist of smoke and darkness lurked under his skin, glaring out at the world with metallic spikes for teeth and burning yellow eyes.

One of the Voidborn.

“I don’t make mistakes.”

My words were met with silence. Those smoke-like creatures hated me, I knew. They resented me for how I’d destroyed Alaric, their insufferable leader who’d crawled inside my head and deluded himself into thinking he could make me his pet .

But they feared me too, for that same reason.

Smirking at them briefly, I turned back to the smoke rising over the city. The Voidborn were such cowards. Born of the empty realms between worlds, they couldn’t survive the sheer force of reality without hiding like frightened children inside creatures like those behind me—formerly extinct monsters they’d resurrected to serve as vessels. They hated reality for that and a thousand more reasons, and so their brilliant solution to that was to consume and destroy it all.

Rather than crush it beneath them and bend it to their will.

And yes, I’d bargained with them once, decades ago. Fate had left me no choice, cursing me to be born as a lowly carbon witch, destined by the hierarchy of the Jeweled Coven to spend my life serving at the feet of those who thought themselves better than me.

So I bent fate to my will as well.

The Voidborn transformed me from a lowly carbon witch into a mistress of magic who surpassed the diamond witches themselves. They’d made me a vampire. And in exchange for giving me the power and might to annihilate the Jeweled Coven, I was meant to sacrifice myself to them… eventually.

As if I would ever keep such a deal.

In the end, Alaric was the one who’d made a mistake. After my infuriating stepdaughter failed to fulfill her purpose and die in my place, he’d thought to use me as his shell, to hide him in this reality. He’d thought me his plaything . Using my magic, my body, he’d tracked the ley lines of power flowing through this world, following them back to each nexus where they met so he could consume them and destroy all that I intended to rule.

But he’d underestimated me. People often did—until I stood over their broken bodies and watched them die.

The smoke hanging over Lumilia suddenly twisted, forming a face. A laughing face.

Alaric.

I flinched back with a sharp breath of alarm.

The image disappeared, becoming billowing smoke once more.

A shiver rolled through me. Alaric was gone . Dead gone. I’d taken control of the nexus he thought to destroy and I’d used its magic to consume his power and essence like he once thought to do to my world. I’d triumphed again , and with that victory, I gained even more strength. I could understand the hiss-click language of the Voidborn. I was even connected to them, just as he had been, allowing me to feel them throughout the land.

I was their queen, and nothing of that bastard remained.

“You won’t survive this.”

I whirled to face the Voidborn hiding within the shifter. A twist of my fingers sent the creature and the man writhing. “I always survive.”

Quivers of power rushed over me as I pinned him, an obedient surge of magic from the nexus I’d made my own.

Fur sprouted all over the shifter’s body as the animal inside him tried to escape. His muscles and skin rippled, unable to complete the shift. “Reality… will… crumble…”

I tightened my magical grip, making his body spasm. “ I control reality.”

“ Your reality…” A choked howl left the shifter’s mouth as the Voidborn attempted to flee and couldn’t. “You… used Alaric. Made his knowledge… his power… part of you.”

“Imagine what I could do to you, then.”

The man’s head shook. He was merely a puppet of the Voidborn within, and when that creature bared its teeth at me, the shifter did too. “We are… anti-life. We are… beyond mere death. You made a mistake … consuming him.”

With an irritated sound, I snapped my fingers. The Voidborn’s scream joined the shifter’s as the man’s limbs suddenly contorted beyond the limits of his joints and his organs collapsed.

The body dropped like a sack of bloodied meat to the floor. Fragmented wisps of the Voidborn’s smoke drifted from the corpse, but still the dying creature made the dead man’s lips move. “Madness… comes… for you.”

The last of the smoke faded.

“Anyone else wish to accuse your queen of impending insanity?” I asked the remaining Voidborn.

The creatures were silent.

“I thought not.”

A tentative knock came at the door to my chambers.

“Highness?” Harran’s nervous voice carried past the spells covering the thick wood. The gray-haired palace steward still lived—and remained human—if only to deal with the irritating populace who’d survived the arrival of the Voidborn in Lumilia.

I’d kill him eventually. But the man was useful in a way, and such a coward that, for now, it was rather entertaining to watch this defender of Aneiran propriety flounder as I tore his understanding of order and decency apart.

“The, um…” Harran’s feet shuffled on the tile. “Your people wish to know if it’s safe to, uh… to venture outside now that your… your guests seem to have stopped their, um… their…”

I restrained an amused scoff, watching him flail about in the search for a word besides attack . “Only if they wish to be eaten. Now, has any word come from my Huntsmen?”

“No, Your Majesty.”

My mouth tightened as I turned back to the window. I’d sent my Huntsmen out mere moments after I defeated Alaric, though of course I hadn’t let them go alone. Voidborn hid within several of the soldiers in their company.

The creatures were being recalcitrant. They gave me only what information I demanded, nothing more.

I’d learned they’d had some success with their mission. They’d captured one of Gwyneira’s Erenlian allies. A young man who could have been mistaken for a human, if one were a fool. But thanks to the soldiers’ incompetence and the cowardice of the Voidborn, my irritating stepdaughter remained at large with several other giants and the descendent of an angel in tow.

A hiss-click sound left an orc beside the door. “The Nine chase the boy. The girl leads them.”

And then there was that nonsense.

With effort, I pushed my irritation down, though my hand still tightened around the hilt of the sword that lay on the windowsill. It was an ugly weapon, with a grotesque face on its hilt and too much bulk to be fitting of a queen.

But it was also the sword Alaric claimed as a souvenir when he’d marched me like a puppet across this land. Thus it was a lovely reminder to the Voidborn that it was by my hand he’d died.

I gave the orc a contemptuous glance. “The Nine are a ridiculous fairytale, and my pathetic stepdaughter couldn’t lead a goose , let alone anything to threaten us. If my Huntsmen don’t find her, my trap will snare her, or she’ll die when my plans come to fruition. She has no way out, and thus she and her allies are irrelevant. I will prove that to you.”

Harran cast a confused look at me and the orcs alike. I ignored him.

The orc’s glowing eyes narrowed. “How?”

They would learn not to question me soon.

Reaching for a glass bowl at the center of a nearby table, I lifted out an apple with crimson, unblemished skin. For every single day of the past nineteen years that I’d pretended to be the loving wife of the king and stepmother to Gwyneira, a servant had placed these fruits upon a table in my chambers. They were the symbol of the queen of Aneira, after all. A symbol that went back generations until no one could remember why it had even become such a thing in the first place.

And that, in its way, was the entire point.

“Do you know why the witches believe apples are at the heart of so many stories?” I asked mildly.

The orcs shared a wary glance, saying nothing. Still confused, Harran apparently believed I was speaking to him, and thus the old man’s head shook, his wide, watery eyes never leaving me. “N-no, Your Majesty.”

My lips curled into a smile, willing to indulge him, even though it was the orcs to whom I truly wished to make my point. “Because they say that, once upon a time, the term apple was a generic word used to describe any number of things. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Even nuts. And thus countless stories were filled with them, because an apple could be anything. Yet, over time, languages changed. Those other objects fell away, being labeled with different words instead. But the term itself remained, drawing down until it applied predominantly to this little fruit, the one found in countless realms—both existing and now destroyed.”

I pinned the orcs with a pointed glance. Their eyes narrowed again, distrustful of where I might be going with this.

“Fascinating, Your Majesty.”

I didn’t bother to acknowledge Harran’s obsequious response. “But the important part of this—” I chuckled, “—this story is that all the incredible energy of meaning and intent didn’t disappear when languages changed. That power wasn’t reduced simply because it was used to describe fewer fruits or nuts or what-have-you. Quite the opposite. Because the power of story and words can never actually be erased. Be rid of one word, life will only find another to describe the thing at hand. Kill one prophet, another only arises. Sometimes years later, yes, but story…” I made an admiring noise. “Story is power. Story finds a way to survive.”

A low rumble of displeasure came from the orcs. They didn’t like the idea of anything surviving.

They were fools.

“Therefore,” I continued, “even as the other objects behind those stories became known by the words we use now, the word itself within those stories didn’t change. And thus the power of apples only grew. This little fruit became everything from the food of the gods, bestowing immortality, to a carrier of the knowledge of good and so-called evil. All that power, and all of it focused right here, until the energy became pure. Concentrated. Refined by the pressures of meaning. Honed by surviving the test of time. Almost…” Satisfaction curled my lips. “Like a diamond.”

The questions faded from the orcs’ expressions, and cold hunger took their place. Here was a magic equal to some of the strongest in this world, but it was a magic that could be consumed, unlike a simple jewel.

Thoughtfully, I turned the fruit around in my hand, admiring how its blood-red skin glistened in the morning light. “It hardly matters whether the Nine are real, if they are warriors who believe they’ll save the world or if they’re the cause of its destruction just as Alaric claimed. The truth is, I killed that girl with an apple once.” My smile turned cruel. “This time, I’ll do something worse.”