A/N:

...Why am I still in this fandom?

I have no clue, beyond the fact that this will always be the only series I feel the itch to write about. That, and the best cure for RL writer's block is playing in the sandbox of nostalgia with someone else's toys.

The premise of this fic is very mystical-fristical. A lot of Okinawan lore, Norse mythology, and horrific abuse of Jungian symbols. Beyond that, mostly just my crackpot theories about Chiropterans and their weirdass mating practices. A lot of slice-of-life and soapy drama and angst and conflict too, centered around Saya and her family, as well as her budding romance with Haji. As for an overarching plot - well, it's better I not give too much away at this point.

All locations in this fic, unless otherwise specified, are from the actual Okinawa, which I had the immense pleasure of visiting in 2014. Any errors and touristy stupidities are mine.

Please don't sue for the story title, which is also shared by an atrocious(ly fun) B-grade horror movie about zombies.

Rating: Hard R, for violence, squick and sex. Will post more specific CWs in chapters as they are posted.

No idea how much readership this piece will get - but it's gnawing at my brain, and I am determined to pen it down. Updates will be hella sporadic, given the dramafest that is RL.

Hope y'all enjoy. Reviews are delicious and will keep this crazy lady motivated! :)

I do not own Blood+ and play about as nice with its characters as Jun'ichi Fujisaku did. Which is not nice at all.

"I want a trouble-maker for a lover, blood spiller, blood drinker, a heart of flame, who quarrels with the sky and fights with fate, who burns like fire on the rushing sea."

― Rumi

CW: Gore, mentions of rape, induced miscarriages, angst. (I know. I wasted no time.)

Anyway.

Gird up your loins. Dust off those brainpans. Pour yourselves an appletini—or five.

It's storytime.

Many lifetimes ago—my lifetimes, not yours—in a world not so different from this one, Chiropterans lived. And flew. And fought. And fucked. And frittered away their time, in ways not unlike your own.

Okay. Full disclosure: I speak facetiously.

I have to. You wouldn't enjoy storytime, unless the stories reminded you of you. That's what you like, right? Figments of fantasy, but the meat of the tale must be human. It must whet your appetite in all the right ways, so it becomes your story, as much as anyone else's.

You can be the damsel. The knight in shining armor. You can even be the villain, if it blows your dress up.

Hey, I'm all for it. Blowing up dresses. Blowing bits and bobs. Whatever shows you a good time.

But I'll be honest. I'm flattering you by speaking this story in a human tongue. Except this isn't a story about human triumphs or frailties. It's a story of Chiropterans. And in the world of Chiropterans, you would be little more than an aperitif. Or maybe a toasty nightcap.

Pick your metaphor, and pray it doesn't poison you.

Anyway.

Many lifetimes ago: Chiropterans jived. Swived. Thrived. In those days, to be born a Chiropteran was not too different from being a godling, in some war-torn land you'd like to pretend is as distant from your reality as the stars.

The skies were alive with the beat of their wings. Their castles towered in the mountains like cathedrals of ivory. Gold were their turrets, and marble their halls. They even had daily baths of milk and honey, and baby-blood smoothies.

I know. Obnoxiously extra for these gluten-free, sustainable, thrift-shoppy times.

Many lifetimes ago, humans lived too. Not too different from humans today. Whiny. Weak. Warm, though—which is why Chiropterans kept them around. Always good to have a snack nearby.

In those days—these days?—humans outnumbered Chiropterans. A ratio of fifty-to-one. But Chiropterans were stronger. Not just a matter of physical potency. Chiropterans were tight-knit. Highly social. All that bullshit about vampires being eccentric loners holed up in haunted castles is just that: Bullshit.

As a species, the Chiroptera have always been communal; an intimacy that is rooted in necessity as much as kinship. Between great houses, Queens shared resources. They shared armies. They shared blood.

Humans, conversely, were a selfish bunch. Always squabbling among themselves in feuds, or struck by epidemics. Or natural disasters. Or dancing plagues.

Pathetic little things.

What? I said I'd be honest.

But humans could be useful. In addition to being tasty snacks, they made great worker ants and better cannon fodder. So Chiropterans tolerated their not-infrequent stupidities.

In the shadow of their castles, humans built temples. They swore fealty to Chiropterans as their deities. They paid them tributes of silver and gold. They revered them with songs, with stories, and, yes...

With human sacrifices.

I use the word sacrifice snidely. In those days—these days?—to be chosen as a sacrifice for a Chiropteran was the highest honor. Think banging Beyoncé. Or a picnic with Luke Skywalker. To be sacrificed, you see, was to be reborn as a Chevalier. To serve as the banneret and bed-warmer of the Chiropteran Queens.

Because that, my doves, is the crux of this tale.

The Queens.

Always, two Queens presided over each great Chiropteran house. A matched pair, yet complete opposites. One Queen was born of fire: red eyes, hot heart, the irresistible song of battle in her blood. A warrior. The other was born of ice: blue eyes, cold hands, a voice like a lungful of rime in winter. A priestess.

Both from the same womb, and held to the same esteem. But their duties were separate.

The Red Queen oversaw all matters related to conquest. She drafted strategies in war-rooms with her generals. She led her troops to battle. She welcomed victorious heroes with wreaths of blue roses—and executed turncoats with the bite of her fangs.

The Blue Queen's duties were more spiritual. Sequestered in her temple, she drank elixirs in toast to the Old Ones, tasting prophecies in her dreams. At the tip of dawn, she sang prayers for a bloody, bountiful harvest. At night, she held court for commoners and nobles alike, so she could read their future or utterly change its course.

Ah! What bliss those days were! Worshiping at the dainty feet of one Queen by daybreak, ensconced in the other's feral embrace by night...

What? Didn't I mention? I was a Chevalier in the Queens' court! Handpicked to serve the most illustrious Chiropteran house in the realm.

Where, you ask? Well, the location doesn't matter at this point. But what's a story without a setting? Especially a fairytale, meant to conjure up uniquely human fantasies of courtly love and historic pageantry? For that, a location is wesentlich! El elemento necesario!

So let's imagine this particular tale as taking place on the Faroe Islands.

Hm? Never heard of them?

Tsk. Kids these days.

The Faroe, or Føroyar, is an archipelago at the icy margins between the Norwegian Sea and the North Atlantic. A realm of pale skies, dark cliffs and wintry tundra. No barren wasteland by any means, but nothing like the tropical paradise where you envisioned this tale would begin, either.

No need to be shy: I know what you were expecting. A familiar island at the fringes of Japan. A familiar Queen, her power wrapped in girlish delicacy to remind you—remind herself—of her ties to humanity.

So where is she, you ask? Don't worry; we'll get to her soon enough! She's with her family as we speak. With her Chevalier—the one man who wears brooding, secretive romance the way a wolf wears its fur. Smoothly unruffled in day-to-day life, but prickly and dangerous when disturbed.

Not that you should be thinking of him—disturbed, dressed or undressed! That man is spoken for! Try to put him from your mind. He and his mistress are fine, I promise you. They are even, dare I say it, happy. As happy as they can be, given the odds against them.

It is more than most Queens or Chevaliers got, in the days of yore.

Speaking of days of yore, where was I?

Ah, yes! A young lad in Føroyar, strong of bones and flaxen of hair. It was my eighteenth year, and I was chosen from my village to serve in the Chiropteran Queens' court. As I've mentioned, this was the highest honor.

I was frightened, to be sure. But determined to prove my mettle. It was a matter of Wyrd.

To you, the word translates into fate or destiny. But Wyrd is more complex than that. It is not a state of being, but of becoming. You can bend it, or change it to your will. But you cannot escape it.

As a boy, I had to courageously face whatever my Wyrd meted out to me. At the time, I figured I was meant to be a Chevalier to a Queen, the most celebrated of lives, and to fall in battle an eternity afterward, that most celebrated of deaths.

I did not.

My Wyrd would prove as wayward as the roads I walked upon.

I suppose it seems strange to you, that Chiropterans would so disparage humans, yet choose Chevaliers from amongst them. But as I mentioned, humans had their uses. Have you heard of the devshirme system, used in the 14th Century by the Ottoman Empire? The blood tax? No?

Well—go on and google it. I'll wait.

Now, I'm not saying the Chiropterans' conscription process was exactly the same. But there were key similarities. It arose as a means to forge ties with the human across the kingdom. A means for conquest, really, without the messy business of war.

Still. A blood tax is a blood tax. And it demands that life be paid with life.

Of the boys assembled, only a worthy handful were chosen. The rest—rejects—were put to the sword.

Barbaric, you say? Not really. Had they lived, the boys would've led bleak lives of exile. They would've been driven from village to village, stoned and starved, and died a lonely death on some frozen spit of land. Only fitting, really.

In those days—these days?—only the strong survived.

The chosen boys were taken to the castle. There, under the tutelage of the greatest scholars and warriors, they were taught everything from the military arts of horsemanship, weaponry, strategy, politics, to the courtly arts of music, rhetoric, literature and dance. Oftentimes they served as squires for Chevaliers; other times as cup-bearers for Princess-Regents. Their schooling typically lasted for four winters. About the equivalent of an undergrad degree at a fancy private college.

Then came graduation day. The Red Glory, as it was known.

It fell on the month known as Gormánuður. Slaughter Month. Its equivalent today would be somewhere between October and November. The boys' parents were invited to the castle, to watch proudly as their sons were paraded on horseback through the square, bathed and perfumed and garbed in the costliest finery. There was music, and wine, and floor-shows, and floozies.

Not for the boys, mind you! They were kept unsoiled—virginal—for the occasion. They were well-cared for and well-fed. But any hoochie coochie rum pum pum pum was out of the question. Their wedding-tackle—like everything else—was reserved purely for another's use.

Their Queen's.

Ah, I remember it well! It was a blue morning, the air shimmering with darts of cold sunlight. My cloak was made of dyed sheepskin, both caramel and gold. My woolen tunic was green, my gloves of the softest calfskin, my brown leather boots polished to a shine.

Forget Blahniks or Doc Martens. Those boots were pop, pop, poppin'—

Anyway.

The lucky boys, myself included, dismounted at the gates of the great hall. We were ushered inside, to much fanfare and festivity. I still remember how brightly the torches shone. The place was filled with the chiming of goblets and the burble of voices. Music—lyre, langeleik, flute and drums accompanying the sweet contralto of a boy's voice—unfurled in the background.

At the end of the hall, on a raised dais of gold, heaped in quilts and fur-trimmed pillows, sat the two Queens.

Ah! How to describe my first glimpse of them?

The Red Queen glowed like an ember of pure heat. Eyes and mouth painfully red, her whole body radiating firepower and fury. The Blue Queen, meanwhile, glittered like frost at the sea. Her face was without color and her eyes so blue, strangely hypnotic, strangely haunting.

A matched pair—each finishing a sentence the other began. Each as naked as her hatching day, and as lovely as a fever-dream.

It was there, on that dais, that the boys were summoned. Lambs to the slaughter, tender and trembling. Each one was gathered into the arms of his Queen. He was shown every exquisite attention. Given the first and most fantastic ride of his life. And then bitten at the height of it, drained to the edge of death before the Queen blessed him with her own blood.

Blessed him with eternal life.

Ewwww, you whine! The boys were fucked and fed on in front of everyone?!

Well, I did warn you. This isn't a tale for human sensibilities. A Chiropteran Queen thinks nothing of being nude, or bathing, or copulating, or sleeping, or performing any function in the presence of her court. We mean less to her than a pet canary or a footstool.

If you're repulsed beyond words, turn away. If you're intrigued, stick around.

The tale gets raunchier. And bloodier.

Now where was I? Oh right! One by one, each boy was sampled and slaughtered. As I recall, there were six of us altogether. Three for the Red Queen. Three for the Blue.

So it was every thirty years. So it had been for centuries before.

Yes, I know. This fairtytale is ass-backwards. As a rule, it's the princesses who are the virgin sacrifices. Pure of heart, pristine of blood. Yahta yahta. But a Queen is an entirely different creature. You serve her, not the other way around. And her power cannot be sullied by one little prick, any more than a teaspoon of sugar can turn tea into tequila.

She'd laugh at you for believing so. Or slit your throat. You'd deserve it, either way.

A variety of Chevaliers in a Queen's bed were no oddity, either. They merely sweetened her day, or spiced up her night. Blue Queens preferred silver-tongued bards, or clever-fingered minstrels. Men who could sweet-talk their way out of duels, out of debts, into drinks, or into pussy. Or, hell, talk through pussy, because that right there is the mark of a true connoisseur, and Queens don't suffer incompetence lightly.

Oh, the Blue Queen might let you live even if you displeased her, to slink away in shame; they're soft-hearted as a rule.

But the Red Queen? ¡Dios mío! О мой Бог! The Red Queen would eat you alive, and spit out your bones. They are the pinnacle of wildness. Not just aggressive, but carnivorous. They prefer their lovers the same: possessing a nature predisposed to famine and frost. Lean and hard and silent, with a spine that bends to nobody but them, and eyes that bite as coldly as their teeth.

I could tell you which Queen's Chevalier I was.

I could also tell you, by the end, it didn't matter.

The trouble didn't begin with us.

It came with the humans. Specifically, it came with six brothers.

Funny. The standard fairtytale number is three, isn't it? Bad things always come in threes.

But the number six holds its own dark symbolism. Six, lauded by Pythagoreans as the perfect number. Six, the Biblical mark of Man. Six, the number of bindings used to create Gleipnir—the enchanted leash that restrained the savage Fenrir Wolf.

For if he broke free, it would herald the Ragnarök.

The end of the world.

Anyway.

Six brothers. Their names are lost to time and posterity. So I will call them Frick Frack Diddly Dack Patty Wack—

I'm joking. Come back! The tale isn't over, and I'm enjoying the audience.

The six brothers—whose names I shall tactfully omit—were as cunning as they were cruel. They had grown weary of toiling beneath their Chiropteran masters. So they set into motion a scheme, whose ripples spread far and wide across the land. The ripples I still feel to this day.

Neither foolish nor brave enough to stage a revolt—for those periodically occurred, and were quashed by the Queens with the same indifference as stomping on an ant—the brother's chose to overthrow their sovereigns from the inside. To attack the belly of the beast, so to speak.

So they insinuated themselves into the court as Chevaliers.

Once there, the brothers were fast favorites. Each one as accomplished at wordplay as at swordplay. Light on his toes in a dance, yet honeyed of voice in a ballad. Also? Big in the breeches, with enough stamina to make even a Queen swoon with exhaustion in the bedroom.

I imagine each had plenty of opportunities, if he chose, to cut out his Queen's heart as she slumbered in his arms.

But simple assassination was not the brothers' aim. Nor was destroying an entire dynasty of immortals.

No.

They planned to subjugate every Queen in the land. To replace them, as the new masters of humanity.

They began with sowing seeds of mistrust and obfuscation. Turning humans against Chiropterans. Chevaliers against Chevaliers. And finally, Queens against Queens.

Understand me: it did not happen overnight. In those days—these days?—vendettas could take a lifetime.

A lifetime to catch fire, and a lifetime to extinguish.

And catch fire they did—an internal rift that tore the once-proud house asunder. Revolts broke out across the land. Wars raged between humans, between Chiropterans. Cities were ravaged, their fields set ablaze. Entire castles were toppled to the ground. Newborn Queens were torn from cradles, to be decapitated or flung from cliffs. Princess-Regents were kidnapped and despoiled, mutilated and murdered. So many Chevaliers died, in ugly war-games and uglier executions.

As for the Queens?

The Red Queen succumbed to her Long Sleep. She became the brothers' prized weapon.

Each year, they ripped open her cocoon—an act as profane as tearing apart the pages of holy scripture. The brothers fed her blood, lighting a fuse to the powder-keg of wrath inside her. They set her loose on battlefields, a blind berserker who slaughtered everyone in her path.

And when the battle was won, and she collapsed once more into slumber, a red cherub in a halo of glistening gore, the brothers would haul her off to the next battlefield.

And the cycle would begin anew.

The Blue Queen was locked in a fortress at the edge of the sea, to be starved and slowly driven mad. The brothers did not kill her. They needed a broodmare, to give them a fresh pair of little Queens every second yuletide. Little Queens who were firmly under the brothers' thumbs, to play the puppets for an army of Chevaliers that obeyed the brothers' every command.

And so, biennially, on the cusp of spring, as the birds twittered in the trees and the fortress rang with screams, the Blue Queen was mounted and ridden, with as little care as a brigand might show to a door he were battering open.

And each winter, as the moon bit itself into a ghoulish white smile, she would purge a pair of Queens from her womb—lifeless in a bath of black blood.

The brothers, in a fit of fury, called for the best sage, and mage, and midwife in the land, to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Little did they know, they were playing right into the Blue Queen's hands.

It is true. She had been driven mad in her waking life. Weeping at everything and nothing, plucking roses from thin air and serenading the moon with prayers that sounded like song.

But in her dreams, she saw everything with brutal clarity. She saw her sister being used as an instrument of destruction. She saw kinsmen butchered in wars. She saw the six brothers amassing armies, hell-bent on creating a future of suffering, and blood, and naked greed.

So she did her best to forestall it.

With what meager herbs she grew in her rooftop garden, and with the help of a pitying chambermaid, she cobbled together potions that would stop the heart of any child in her womb. She lay out her plan with ruthless precision, a raft floating on a sea of little corpses, so she could sail out to those who would aid her cause.

Sages, and mages, and midwives, for whom she was still revered as a goddess. She came to them in dreams, blue-eyed and blood-soaked, to whisper her commands.

So the night the brothers summoned the sage, the mage, and the midwife to the fortress, she was well-prepared indeed.

From the mage, the Queen requested forbidden scrolls, alive with dark magic. From the sage, forbidden herbs, alive with dark power. From the midwife, secrets of the body, and all the inscrutable, powerful, magical ways life could be preserved for eons inside the darkness of her womb.

Because the Queen was pregnant again. Only this time, she did not plan to birth dead daughters.

Keep them safe.

Those were her final words, a mother's desperate plea.

The sage, the mage, and the midwife did as they were bid.

I do not know more details of that night. But I do know the Queen did not survive beyond the sunrise. Or, I should say, her body did not. Her spirit was ferried to another place. If place is indeed the word for it—a way-station as small as a teardrop and as infinite as the cosmos at the border between life and death.

A place where souls with unfinished business wait, without rest, until said business ceases to be so.

It's a place with many names. Dante Alighieri famously called it Purgatory. Buddhists sometimes refer to it as Naraka. A folklorist, in this context, might term it simply as liminality, a crossroad between two states.

As for myself?

Well. In those days—these days?—such a place was called Niflheimr. An abode of twilight.

A place not of being, but becoming.

It was from this place that the Blue Queen reached out to the Red Queen, the only way she could.

In her dreams.

Hm? You didn't know? The practice of two Queens conversing in the realm of dreams is age-old. Mastering it can be intuitive, for certain pairs of Queens. For others, it may take years of meditation and control over the senses. Rarer still, are those who share this unique experience only after one Queen is dead and gone.

I wish I knew what the two Queens said to each other. I wish I knew if they parted with smiles, or with tears.

I only know that a week later, the Blue Queen, her belly round as the harvest moon, was buried in her ancestral tomb. A week after that, the Red Queen was forced awake once again, to fight in a war.

Only this time, she attacked not her intended foes, but the six brothers.

That, I was there to witness. For centuries, the memory and my body will vibrate in echo of each other, to the song of red, red victory.

Watching the Red Queen fight had always been like watching a cyclone at sea. At once breathtaking and terrifying—a force of nature wrapped in sleepwalking skin. But this time … oh! This time, she was wide awake. And the way she took her enemies was zesty, and bloodthirsty, like a spider devouring a twitching moth.

The oldest brother was a renowned archer. But what good is an archer without eyes? She plucked each eye out with the tip of her sword, juicy as cherries without stones. The rest of him, she slashed to pieces, slowly, making sure he felt every cut.

The second brother was the finest swordsman in the land. But what cares a Red Queen for such vainglorious titles? She slew him in combat—if combat be the word for an eyeblink swish-swoosh of her blade and messy thuck of his chopped-off head.

The remaining brothers suffered the same fate, one after the next. Slash, bash, crash.

The last brother, the youngest and cleverest, escaped. The Red Queen gave chase, across distant lands and numberless days. Each time, by accident, by design, she nearly overtook him. Each time, with cunning, with patience, he eluded. Her hunt spanned far and wide, a net trapping many slithering traitors in its hold.

She spared not a single one.

As for myself?

I was the Blue Queen's only living Chevalier. The Red Queen's only living groom. So I pledged to her my troth, my body, my life.

She accepted.

We ranged across continents, the two of us. I was wily, she was wise, and between us we had such strength that the engines of our bodies seemed powered by the steam of ten armies. I have but to blink to summon the shape of her in combat: a small woman, sharp of eye and pale of skin, her long plait of black hair looped intricately around her skull. Carrying two pearl-handled blades that could slice a hummingbird's wings in half with either hand. Her shadow was the last thing her foes saw before their arterial blood fanned red through the air.

But in those days—these days?—skill was not enough to settle the score.

To kill the last brother, we would need not only swords, but the Devil's own luck.

Days passed into months.

Leaves reddened and crumpled and fell into patterns in the fields, and our journey took on a pattern: awake at daybreak to the chirruping of birds, on the road by the cold blue morning hours to sniff out the brother's whereabouts, skirmishes against highway robbers or hired swords in the foggy evenings, steel striking off steel and blood splattering the swaying grass, resting at a shady grove or dripping barn by night, myself counting the hours until she was asleep so the haunters in her eyes were dispelled.

Sometimes, under the starry curve of an open field, she would speak to me, our bodies virtuously apart on different pallets, the fire crackling golden between us. I miss her conversations—full of sweet girlish uncertainties, and a seasoned warrior's stratagems. Sometimes she would ask me to sing to her, or play lively strains of the pan flute. Other times I cheered her up with chatter: bits of poetry and raunchy tales from court, and memories of her sister, as sprightly and wise and maddening in her way as the Red Queen was in hers.

She almost always wept on those nights, and always we would speak of our quest in fierce whispers, vows of vengeance and yearnings for closure coming together, as such things often do.

Never once did warmth pass between our bodies. Not even a kiss.

In her all-encompassing quest, she had killed every natural desire in her body. Her soul clutched at nothing but vengeance. It was her Wyrd to seek out the treacherous brother—or die trying. Mine was to follow her, but always at a distance.

Yet I grew to love her.

How could I not? Everything about her was perfect. Pure and ruthless and blazing as fire. I loved her focus, her ferocity. I loved her for the hells she carried inside her. I loved her for the way she wore death like perfume.

I loved her then.

I love her still.

One night—just the one—I nearly told her so. After a brutal battle, propped like bloodstained effigies atop our horses, we found safety in the grasslands of a wintry plateau. Both of us riding in silence, and bleeding; my Queen's clothes soaked as red as her eyes, her head lolling drunkenly against the horse's mane. Three days without sustenance, no flint or medicine between us, it was a quiet inevitability that she would die. It seemed the next gust of wind would knock her from her horse into the grass.

Yet she kept her seat, as if by some ungodly magic. Kept her wits, as she aimed with one shaky hand to a copse of towering oak trees.

In the bone-chilling wind, no other shelter for miles, it was wisest to huddle there than to risk frostbite. And so, after lashing the horses to a tree, I held her braced against my body, her spine curved along my chest. She shivered and murmured, caught in some hellish state between dreams and wakefulness. The coppery scent leeching from her skin held a tang of sickness; I feared she would survive the next sunrise.

Holding her close, whispering her name, I nearly told her then. A love-ballad turned deathbed confession.

But as the first rays of sunlight ribboned through the trees, we were roused at the approach of visitors. Visitors bearing no arms—but flasks of fresh blood, and jars of salve, and piles of fur.

The sage, the mage, and the midwife.

At great peril, they had sought the Red Queen out. They imparted to her the exact manner in which her sister had passed. The forbidden rites she had undertaken, to turn her death into a catalyst for reprisal. They showed her a vial, filled with liquid the color of wolfsbane. A poison, ancient and strong, that could kill even a Chiropteran.

The Red Queen, rested and healed, vowed to use it on the last brother.

It took her decades to find him. Countless Long Sleeps. Countless Awakenings. She roamed far and wide, hatred burning in her like a column of red flame. I was by her side, always. Silent as her shadow, and as devoted.

As our legend grew, renowned warriors joined the Red Queen in her mission. Together, we became a safeguard for her.

A Red Shield.

With the aid of arcane magicks, the mage conjured a network of lookouts for her. Eyes spread out across every city, every mountain and river. Eyes made of strands of power, with forked tongues and tails like snakes, entire swathes of them covering the roads, unseen and unheard, slithering together to form a world-serpent in the shape of Jörmungandr, the ouroboros biting its own tail.

These serpents were the Queen's sentries. Each with glowing blue eyes and tongues shaping the shadowy echo of a name. A sibiliation of tongue-tip and teeth, a parting of lips, a shivering exhale.

Saya.

Ironic, that this was not the Red Queen's name, but her sister's. For everywhere she traveled, slaughtering her enemies, the snakes followed, whispering her sister's name as a reminder of all she'd lost.

People listened from behind their windows, and heard the two-syllable word that wafted after this strange, savage fighter.

They began calling her Saya too.

Centuries into her quest, the Red Queen heard rumors that the brother was on a tiny white-rimmed island in the blue seas of the Pacific, in a dark network of caverns within a green tangle of jungle, all of it part of an exotic archipelago known today as the Ryukyus.

There, on a stormy night, she made port with her comrades. Ready to end this quest, once and forever.

Anyway.

Long story short, we walked into a trap. The brother had laid an ambush for us on that island, all his forces cunningly concealed, all of them converging on us without mercy. It was a blurred typhoon of a battle, blood sprays and arrows, screams and raging rainfall, the zing of adrenaline overlaying the air like electricity.

When it was over, the brother, in a final duel with the Red Queen, was tossed half-crippled into the bowels of a cave. The vial—carrying the poison earmarked as his doom—clattered off to nowhere in the frenzy of the battle.

My own body was a mangled mess of stumps: wings torn off, one arm dangling in its sleeve, the other dropping off in a twist of muscle and bone.

But I was lucky to be alive, if not intact.

Which is more than I could say for my Queen.

I found her at the bottom of the cliffside. Flung away in a final sweep of the brother's claws, just as she had thrown him into the cave. The impact of her fall had shattered her, like a doll thrown from a window. The brother's henchmen, cruel of claw and fangs, took care of the rest. Bits and pieces of her were strewn everywhere, a blood-splatter of body-parts that filled me with dizzy despair to behold.

A Chevalier shouldn't have to gather the fragments of his Queen. He is meant to die at her side, with honor. Or, better still, give his own life to spare hers.

I failed at that.

I failed the Blue Queen—my birth-mother, my lover. I failed the Red Queen—my bride, my salvation.

Perhaps that is my Wyrd? To outlive those I love, not by virtue of victory, but failure.

The brother, at least, was no longer a threat. Our surviving allies and I swore to keep it that way. We sealed the mouth of the cave that held him, with powerful sorcery, and an assload of rocks besides. Imprisoned him, as his brothers had once imprisoned the Blue Queen, so he languished into death-like stasis from want of blood.

The clever mage tasked the serpents to keep watch over the cave.

If the place is ever disturbed, warn the Queen's closest kin.

The Red Queen's remains were gathered into an urn. I journeyed home, to the ancestral tomb. There, I placed her alongside her sister.

In those days, it was custom for Queens to be mummified, as only the lowborn were left to rot. For the Red Queen, this was impossible. It grieved me beyond words, for what the maw of war had left uneaten of the woman who was once as beautiful as she was deadly.

But the Blue Queen, with the embalmer's secret herbs, had been preserved. She lay in her glass coffin, a perfect shell, for in the end that was all she was: a shell. They had eviscerated all organs except the cocoons in her belly. This, too, was custom—for who are we to break in death an embrace that was never broken in life?

Keep them safe.

So she had begged the sage, the mage and the midwife. And they had granted her wish. A wish, not to cheat death, but to stop time. A wish, in its own way, for eternal life.

For her daughters had purposes, beyond life or death, that even I couldn't fathom.

But I did not think of her daughters. Not then.

Oftentimes we forget everything in our grief. We forget even ourselves, a madness born of pure desolation.

Alone, in that tomb, I wept. I wept for my Queens, for the world would never see their shape again—a fact I both knew yet couldn't believe. I wept for an entire dynasty ruined, an entire people erased. I wept for myself, the last of my kind, a reality of such loneliness that I did not think I could bear it.

But bear it I did.

It is my Wyrd, and I cannot escape it. I can only let it beat against me, as I did that night, walking out of the tomb and into the darkness, down roads with no end in sight. Down futures that may never happen, futures that would happen, and futures I will do everything in my power to stop from happening again.

It is into one such future that this particular tale begins.

Anyway.

Gird up your loins. Dust off those brainpans. Pour yourselves an appletini—or five.

It's storytime.