I didn’t ask to be the Demon Queen

We rode all night, until the horses needed to rest. We stopped a wayside inn, bursting in through the door in the early hours of the morning. The woman cleaning the tables was clearly more than a little surprised, ejecting a little “eep” when we threw the door open. She was probably not expecting guests to arrive until the afternoon, perhaps only making some breakfast for the rooms that were already occupied. 

 

Kazumi had suggested we give the horses some hours rest and care after how hard we’d pushed them. The woman approached us -- we looked more than a little haggard and I wondered if she was scared of us in some way -- wringing a towel uncertainly. 

 

“How can I help you?”

 

Kazumi ordered us some food. We wanted to get a hot meal inside us before we kept riding. We hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep and I had no idea when I’d get another night’s rest again. The least we could do was take care of the rest of our needs. We wouldn’t have had enough coin on us, but checking the stolen horses’ saddle-bags, we’d found a small coinpurse that could last us a while. 

 

We sat down at a table and ate in tired silence. We were all processing the events of the previous night. We, well, I, mostly, had set something in motion, and now we had to stay ahead of it. There wasn’t a lot of time to waste. If the Centaur had told the truth, we had one day, maybe two, before an army of released collars descended on the capital. I didn’t know how aware they were that the Wydonian army had been moving south again. I didn’t know how much of that military would be arriving at the capital within the next day. It was going to be a massacre regardless. 

 

“What do we do?” I finally asked. 

 

Sally slurped the rest of her stew as Kazumi rubbed her eyes softly. She was clearly tired. Heck, I was tired. She looked at me and reached across the table, softly squeezing my hand. I could tell she was lost in thought. “We should be arriving at the capital by noon, I think. There’s an advantage to the revolt,” she said. 

 

“Other than how amazing it feels to see slavers get their comeuppance?” Sally said, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. That got a smirk from Kazumi that was a little more gleeful than I’d expected.

 

“Other than that, yes. We’ll get through the city gates easily. We can just claim we’re trying to escape the violence.” She cleaned her plate with a piece of bread. I squeezed her hand and she smiled again. I figured she was more than a little happy she’d gotten to help the enslaved Lamia, anyway.

 

“Then we might be able to rest for a bit, but we need to find our way to the royal palace before nightfall. We won’t have a lot of time,” she said. I nodded. 

 

Sally stuffed some bread in her face. I looked at her and smiled softly. Being allowed to finally punch something had probably released some pent-up tension and she was clearly feeling a bit better than she’d had before. It was good to see her more relaxed again. 

 

After we finished our meal, we arranged for a room -- this place had a room with two beds at least -- and decided to rest for a few hours. We figured it was a three-hour ride from where we were to the city limits, and the sun had only barely come up. We told the innkeep about the uprising, but she didn’t seem too worried. Perhaps something like this had happened before? She nevertheless agreed to wake us up at nine-ish, and as soon as we hit the beds, we were out cold. Sally had slumped on her own bed and had been asleep before her head had touched the pillow. Kazumi and I had taken an extra minute to enjoy the quiet moment in each other’s arms, before we were both gone too. 

 

The knock on the door came much too soon. The woman entered the room to wake us, and didn’t even raise an eyebrow at Kazumi and myself sleeping in the same bed. Thanking her, we got up and gathered our things. We’d slept in our clothes and felt sufficiently disheveled, but at least it saved us the time to get ready. Kazumi tried to impress upon the woman again that there were some very angry people coming her way, but she seemed convinced that the city guard would stop them, and Kazumi gave up.

 

“I tried,” she said as she came outside and shrugged. I kissed her softly before we got on our horses. The light of mid-morning was bright and I was glad we weren’t riding directly into it. I wouldn’t have been in the mood to squint into the sun for the next few hours. The road was calm. It wouldn’t be for much longer, I figured. We’d be some of the first out of the town, but more people would be fleeing for the capital sooner rather than later. We were lucky to be out ahead of them. The few hours of rest had done the horses good, too, but I still wasn’t planning on pushing them too hard for the remaining few hours. After an hour or so, we rode up a hill and the capital finally rose into view. 

 

It was big. Unimaginably big. I had expected something small. I’d seen this image before, I realized. It had looked this way in concept art for the game that I’d almost forgotten this world so closely resembled. But in the game it had been a small hub. This was a city of thousands. Tens, maybe hundreds. It was built right where the outermost edge of the river-delta met the ocean, a crook of land raised from the surrounding countryside. The city itself gleamed white in the morning sun. Its massive wall rounded the part of the city that faced us. The cliff on the other side made any other kind of approach almost impossible. 

 

On the highest part of the cliffside was a palace. I could tell because it had more spires and minarets than any fictional castle I’d ever seen. What was more was that there were giant natural stone pillars in the river delta. The castle had been built as a giant bridge across them. It was an amazing sight, a feat of engineering I’d never seen before in my life, the massive castle built as a bridge over the river. 

 

Outside the walls, we saw that the city had spilled into the surrounding countryside. Farms had given way to more and more housing, as if the capital had burst at the seams with population. 

 

We continued our approach, which was when the size of the city became clear to me. Even though we could see it clear as day, it would take us several hours to even get close to it. As morning drifted to noon, the city loomed over us more and more. Because it’d been built on a hill, it towered over the valley in front of it. It was hard to imagine living in the shadow of a city like that your entire life, but then I realized that I’d grown up in cities with buildings that had scraped the sky without batting an eye, so perhaps people could adapt to anything. But all of this was very new to me. 

 

When we reached the outskirts of the city, we saw that the whole place was bustling. At first it had seemed that people were just going about their daily lives, but then I realized that a lot more things -- carts, horses, people -- were being carried into the city than out of it, and there were soldiers everywhere. Maybe the news had already carried to the capital? 

 

We arrived at the city wall. The massive gatehouse was guarded by a dozen soldiers in uniform and we dismounted as we approached. There was a long queue in front of them, but things seemed to be moving quite fast. We were standing behind a young woman leading an ox. 

 

“Excuse me,” I asked. She turned to me with wary eyes, but when she saw I was slightly shorter than she was, she clearly realized I wasn’t a threat and relaxed visibly. 

 

“Yes?” she asked. “Can I help you, miss?” Something about being called ‘miss’ still felt good. I doubted that was ever going to go away. But I wasn’t here to spend time wallowing in that happy feeling. 

 

“Why is everyone so… on edge?” I asked. It had been an understatement. A lot of people were genuinely distressed. 

 

“They say the Demon Queen is coming, miss. And they’re saying she’s rallying all the monsters to come get us, miss. We’re getting inside the walls. For protection, miss,” she said. After she’d spoken, it was her turn to approach the gatehouse, and she talked to the defending guards for a brief moment before being let through. We walked up to the guards when they motioned for us to come forward. 

 

They looked tired and weary, and three young women who looked like they’d just been riding for more than a day were hardly a cause for alarm. On the road, Kazumi and I had been working on our story, to get us through the gate. 

 

Posing as three young noblewomen, we would have been attacked by rebelling indentured men. She was the oldest of her family and my little sister -- that was going to be Sally -- and myself had spent the night at her house. When the door had been kicked down, Kazumi’s father had tried to defend us but had been struck down. Her brothers had put up a fight that had allowed us to get away. We’d taken our three fastest horses and rode to the capital, where we could meet with my aunt and hopefully find shelter for the rest of our family to come find us. 

 

It was a solid alibi and we hoped it would get us through the door. Kazumi had even come up with names that sounded sufficiently noble without being well-known enough to raise eyebrows or attention. I took a deep breath -- I was going to have to do some of the talking, Kazumi was ‘in mourning’ -- and approached the nearest guard.

 

“My good sir,” I said, trying to sound as much as a distressed young rich girl as I could, “we are--”

 

“Yeah, get in,” he said and stepped aside.

 

“Excuse me?” I said with confusion. We had expected a bit more resistance trying to get into the city. Clearly, the guard wasn’t going to be wasting time talking to lost young girls, I figured. I looked at Kazumi and tried not to smile triumphantly. 

 

“Oh, thank goodness,” Sally said dramatically and led her horse through the gate. We followed suit. Behind us, the guards closed rank again. We were inside the capital. The hill curved up in front of us. Some houses were built on top of each other, while others had been dug out of the hillside itself. No space had been wasted. The city was incredibly dense and if we’d considered the hustle outside busy, the bustle inside was downright crowded. People were going to and fro on all sides and we were bumped into constantly. 

 

We decided to mount up again, and began to make our way up the hill. If you lived in the city, I figured, it would be very easy to get lost. The place was a veritable maze of streets, and the sea of people everywhere would make it very easy to lose your bearings. We had the advantage of knowing exactly where we were going: up. The palace was at the top of the hill. Up there were the regents, up there was the seat of Wydonian power. Up there was Anastasia, and it was up to the evil queen to rescue the princess. We turned a corner and finally saw it. I looked at Kazumi and Sally, then up at the palace, a grey colossus that looked down on its citizens with eyes of stained glass in a face of uncaring stone.