The Imperial Vindicated

a k a n t h a e - h i m e

Authoress' Note & Disclaimer: (Insert a beautifully written author's note/disclaimer right here, just like mother used to make.)

No, for real, Ashe and Ashelia are supposed to be seen as two different people. That's just a little dose of symbolism and multiple personalities right there. And I added in some of the Espers - by the way, yes, in this fic, when Espers' owners are defeated, they do sign contracts with whomsoever killed them.

This is for Zaz9-zaa0, who is official godmother to any fic spawned from Erroneous Actions of Late. (Godfather and goduncle/aunt are all still open, dearies!)Did you notice this isn't even related to Erroneous Actions of Late, by the way? That's me and my beautiful random self at work. I'd dedicate a fic to Meii, but I can't write Twilight stuff and she doesn't like Final Fantasy anyway.

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Queens, Ashe thinks, must be incapable of hate.

This belief is born not out of altruism, but out of necessity: she can no longer afford to embroil herself in garbled pettiness, in war, and in other such things. It is for the sake of her people that she believes that she must grow out of her childish habits of zealous fury, for fear they will overtake her and she will plunge her country - her Dalmasca - into war without knowledge of it.

She is trying to protect her throne. This is what Ashelia believes. Ashelia believes that she can do a better job than anyone else that thinks to take her place because she has lived as her people lived and came out knowing that she would be able to do something about this squalor. She knows that if any simple weakling tries to usurp her place, she can beat that person back easily, because she is both a warrior and a queen - woman king, rather, for the title of queen has ever been associated with porcelain puppets and arranged marriages. She must be both a queen and a king, because Ashelia has also sworn to never take a lover.

Sometimes, she thinks she is taking her paranoia too far. But then she reminds herself that this is for her country. These sort of sacrifices must be made. (She has already given up her sword in favor of a sword-staff, the weapon that her advisors claim she favored as a young girl training with Vossler. Vossler she remembers, but the sword-staff is gone, and even now it is a foreign weapon. Ashelia knows deep down that she has only used it once. She will only need it one more time, if she deems it a worthy investment: to run it through her own stomach whilst standing rigid, rather than let herself fall even as Dalmasca does.)

As Ashelia refuses to take a lover, her councillors have tried to find someone to succeed her as heir. She refuses whomsoever they place before her. They all meet mysterious deaths save for the ones that Ashelia truly does like, but will not acknowledge publicly. They huddle like chained dogs in her own apartments, where they enjoy a better life than before at the price of their freedom. When Ashelia finally chooses one, she lets him keep his brother as well, and this new heir is instigated secretly.

This is a precaution that Ashelia believes she must take - and not simply because of that belief, but because this is how she follows the example of others before her. If the time comes and he, too, tries to steal her glory, as Vossler and many others did, Ashelia has the political leverage that allows her to lay claim to the idea that the man is lying. Not even her council knows, but she expects this to happen.

She always has.

Ashelia is glad, however, that she must only slaughter a few of the people she once loved, but because there are so few, she finds it increasingly harder to keep the tears from weaving trails across her already marred skin. There is a scar there, now, where she went after Balthier himself because she knew that he would be the hardest of them all to find. Larsa proves less protestant, accepting his fate by commiting suicide before Ashelia can do it for him, and all others break before her steel gaze. Penelo breaks down crying when she realizes that Vaan is dead, lying in an unmarked grave in the Plains, overlooked by a dark crystal that drains life not only from the sun, but from his everlasting soul, which will soon wither and die so that even in death, Ashelia will be unchallenged.

His ship, the Aureolis of the Sun, is torn asunder to make scrap metal for better tasks. Nalbina has since been rebuilt, with that same ship as much a part of the walls as those who died to build it. Basch is one of these laborers, a man who Ashelia has condemned not once or twice, but so many times (most in her mind) that she takes little more than satisfaction in it. His eyes almost make her regret his decision, but the stripes of red across Basch's back are beautiful in her eyes. He does not scream when he is punished for being a miscreant, so there is no music to accompany this work of art that Ashelia believes she is wholly responsible for.

Fran does not need to be captured. She presents herself before Ashelia in chains, and with eyes clouded black by a feral need for vengeance (for Balthier, Ashe knows, because she might have loved him too, if she'd let herself), she throws herself at the queen in a futile attempt to tear her eyes out. Ashelia gifts the viera to Belias, who looks on from outside his body as his hands do something he will forever regret. The shredded, maimed pieces of her body are fed to the jackals, both human and fiend, during the next banquet that Ashelia holds.

Everyone who attends has their throat slit before the clock chimes midnight. Ashe cries at the loss of some, like the Marquis, who knew his fate and yet still did not so much as even linger at the threshold.

Eruyt is stormed. The Mother, sickened by the world of humes that is forever imposing its laws on her, dies not moments after her children have all been violated, mutilated, and thrown onto a pile to be given to the Malboros so that their children will never forget the smell of blood. Another village, this of male viera that Ashelia has never seen before, is discovered deep within the labyrinth of branches that make up the Salikawood. She harnesses the power of her Espers, the ones she has stolen from her once-friends, to cut their trees down. Ashe is saddened to see that they are all already dead, life having escaped them as soon as the Mother gave up life as well.

In Ambervale, Ashelia strangles Al-Cid with her bare hands, and his wife's spine is snapped in half before his very eyes. She does not give him the pleasure of an afterlife, and cuts out his tongue and his eyes so that what afterlife he may obtain will only be a half-enjoyed one. Magick is used to freeze the everlasting autumn that pervades the Ambervale of Clan Margrace (now an ended bloodline), so that it is replaced by everlasting winter in its stead.

Zargabaath, whom Ashe once admired for loving the people as he did, is forced to watch on as his daughter - now a beautiful adolescent whom Ashelia seems to envy - is relieved of her ability to have children, tied to a Remora fighter ship, and torn to shreds by ripjet currents that not even Ashelia can control. Archadian nobles and gentry alike watch on, assassins Ashelia have hired snooping around in the crowds to destroy those who view this event with disgust rather than joy.

By the end of the night, when Zargabaath is executed by one of Ashelia's generals, all of Archades is silent and covered in blood spatters. There is no one left to mourn the dead: not even the assassins are allowed past the city's borders as anything but a corpse.

The next day, Ashelia and her hordes of unwilling followers march on Bhujerba with their airships, claiming the magicite mines without problems when the inhabitants of Purvama Dorstonis evacuate into them. Gases and special magicks are unleashed into the mines as soon as all of the exits are sealed off, making escape impossible unless anyone inside knows how to walk through walls, and the Aerodrome is sabotaged so that anyone who tries to leave will die by gunfire and the edges of swords already coated in sticky red.

Ashelia sleeps peacefully that night, knowing she must only conquer Mt. Bur-Omisace, Jahara, and Balfonheim before practically all of Ivalice is hers.

(Ashe tosses and turns, tangled up in her bedsheets and writhing with the painful regret that makes tears stream down her lashes constantly. She feels responsible for everything, although it has not been her whose commands Dalmasca has been following.)

It takes a week for her troops to reach Mt. Bur-Omisace, so long is the distance. Ashelia is content to know that not only has the Gran Kiltias accepted her fate - it is a woman, a viera called Kril - but she has foreseen it. Mt. Bur-Omisace is taken without a struggle...at least until the Gran Kiltias is ordered to present herself before the Dynast-Queen and it is found that she is already dead, poisoned in the middle of the night at the word of one of Ashelia's more sadistic advisors. The viera reminds her of Fran, so Ashelia has her body offered to Mateus the Corrupt, ever Ashe's to hold sway over, instigated by Ashelia herself as Chief Regent of Mt. Bur-Omisace and all surrounding lands, such as the Rift and the Stilshrine.

(In the same manner, Chaos, once Basch's to command although he never called him, is given precedence over the sands and Giza, controlling trade in and out of Rabanastre with an iron hand. His Chaosjets, children of elements, take the form of humans and are known as the Quartet of Deathly Rapture, for all they touch dies a horrific death that is somehow enjoyed by the victim. They spawn many more fiends, of the sentient sort that Ashelia delights in ordering around. Ashe quivers at the sight of them, so this is the difference they become accustomed to.)

A gift sent to Jahara by Ashelia proves to be cursed with the foulest of magicks, and Zodiark is summoned (not by Fran, who is familiar to him) when Ashelia takes the Garif sanctuary even though an epidemic of smallpox has already ravaged the place, burning it to the ground from the inside out. The Garif are stripped of their masks, weapons, and home. Zodiark is allowed to do as he sees fit with them. He does nothing with them, leaving them to wander Ozmone until they die, of natural causes or because the monsters living there are hungry and don't care upon what they feed.

Such monsters flourish in Cerobi, but Ashelia eradicates them all on her way to investigate an uprising in Balfonheim. It turns out to be nothing but a fanciful rumor. Ashelia has the man who fed her court the news torned apart by the new breed of Slaven her followers have spawned. It, like all things in Ashelia's current reign of terror, is bloody made for war. She allows Cuchulainn the honor of poisoning Balfonheim waters, turning them from a clear blue to a spastic green, so that Elza (the only one left of Reddas' posse) must give up her title as Lady of the Manse or sacrifice her people.

And as if she concludes that her heir, whose name she does not deem important enough to remember, will never be faithful to her image forever, she has him burned alive and his soul trapped into a piece of manufactured nethicite. Such experiments have begun to be conducted within Dalmascan borders. The nomads of Giza have all been slaughtered and their souls transformed into lich-food to make way for a tall building that challenges the sun with sleek lines and strong borders, from which smog pours constantly, ruining the skies' natural splendor.

If this is not hate, then Ashe does not know what it is. But blood must run, and so it has and will.

For this, Ashelia remains content.