*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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The poison is burning her up from the inside.
She knew that weaselly prick had done something. She knew he had been too docile, too contrite until the very end. Whatever this is, it is trying to clamp down on her throat, as if an invisible hand has seized around it, and it roils fire-like in her stomach.
She had made it through the initial fallout from the king's assassination before it hit her. It was at first all just a blur of thought and command—willing her creatures to overwhelm the guards, sending Hiran and a squad to talk the court down and into compliance, receiving the indication that Marron had begun to march through Solveig with ease.
She started to feel it when she dealt with the armed forces. One foolish soldier had charged her as she had emerged from the room; he had seen all the blood and correctly surmised what she had done. She had put a spoke of the mother metal through his brain and then paid his companion similarly and then they were all descending on her, stone swords drawn, and her retinue was clashing in on them too.
She had predicted this would happen; but it did not bother her. What was the guard to do when their king had been murdered under their noses, other than die auspiciously too? She did not deny them this. The mother metal sang if anyone came near but, this time, she let her creatures do the work. This death, like Feuilles's, was about more than the killing.
Two of her creatures, just two. They cut through five scores of men in the narrow hallway. Two frozen masks, now painted red, grinning amongst the piles. Amongst the screaming.
Elsewhere, or rather, at every point of entry into the palace, her followers followed suit.
Yes, this killing was about more than death. It was about submission.
The time came when enough waves of men fell, enough carnage riddled these ivory floors, that she had then used one, shivering command on the captain of the guard, a needle-prick jab of 'Surrender,' and that, that was when she felt it inside her: a little parasite, wiggling around.
It was a good thing the sweaty, blood-splattered man had folded so easily under her direction and, under his, all the rest of the guards had then capitulated too, because this was when the pain started to bloom.
She makes it now to an empty chamber and leans over, gagging, but the fire is in her veins and she can almost feel it, something slippery, something sly, moving through her, spreading damage.
She knows she could die very soon.
Allayria breathes in sharp through her nose, letting her eyes fall shut. She felt the poison before, she can find it and feel it again. She scans through her body, through the tightening air cavity, through the blood vessels and veins. It shows like little white specks against the red of her eyelids, littering through her body, spreading.
Allayria raises a trembling hand and then swipes.
A long scream rends through the air, a scream followed by blood, a scream that must have come from her. Sweat pours down her face; the pain is an unbearable heat traveling up her even as the black liquid shimmers, suspended in the air in front of her. Out of her.
