Chapter Text
A fanfare of horns rang out from the royal barracks, and Princess Esme Dawnsong strode out into the streets of Clethivblaithe, flanked by her fellow knights.
The rising suns greeted them as they turned and walked down the paved tile street that led to the gate to the northeast road out of the capital. On each of their shields, gleamed the crest of the kingdom, which depicted the legendary blade held in the mouth of a golden wolf over a crimson and green backdrop.
That very weapon, Silverfang, thumped in its scabbard at the Princess’s side with each step, and she imagined it must feel as hungry to fulfill her prophecized destiny by striking down the wicked demon-witch princess as she was. It sang to her as she trained, focused her, reminded her of her purpose, of the fate set out before her.
Esme pulled back her hood, blonde hair spilling out over the proper garb of a true knight-princess of war. Her armor was looser and more ornate than the men that followed behind her, formed of chainmail segments and thicker red fabric that could defend against sharp and blunt weapons. A steel crown hung over her forehead, with gemstones glittering around the sides. All of it, carefully designed to adapt its shape as her own body could.
A fair share of her Privy Council was waiting at the gate for the chosen hero’s departure, but the one whose applause she was most pleased by was that of Ilfred, her most trusted advisor. his aged face curled with a smile at her approach had been indispensable since her mother’s passing, and she paused for him to speak.
“You look determined. What do you feel in the air, Princess?”
“Destiny. This is it. This is the final day of the war.”
He lowered his voice until only she could hear. “And you’re… sure about this. I can’t help but remember all the times you have been unable to best Onizumi. Some members of the Council still think peace would be the best option.”
Esme’s hairs stood, raw righteousness stoked in her chest. “The witch-princess dies tonight, and Erathii’s Shadow will be returned to its rightful owners. No more pointless, weak tries at diplomacy. The divine mandate of Electus herself shines on us. It’s just as the prophecy said.”
“I can’t help but worry for you. But I think you’ll succeed, because there’s something more you have, too.”
Esme grinned at her most trusted friend. “Oh? What’s that?”
Ilfred smiled warmly back.
“The element of surprise, of course.”
“…and we can check that as soon as we get confirmation that she left on schedule from Ilfred, but we will proceed assuming she is arriving by sundown at the earliest.” Princess Mira Onizumi looked up at the dozen or so humans circled around the map of Eirashidou’s southernmost district she had conjured onto the courtyard stone. “Your bonuses will be paid as long as she does not succeed in killing me, but her track record is not good at that, so you should be fine.”
The mercenaries made a chattering of grunts of agreement. Mira wished they would take more interest in the details, but knew it ultimately didn’t matter. None of them were critical to her plan, nobody individually was. All she needed to be sure of was that they were in the right place to act as distractions, and that was what she was paying them for. She adjusted the circular lenses of her spectacles a bit before continuing.
“Your weapons will be loaded with sapping hex rounds. That is not up for debate. I’m taking Dawnsong alive, though she’s not the main concern since I expect even lethal boltfire shells would bounce off her. I’ve seen her shrug off a cannonball.” She moved a clawed nail over to tap a list of names beside the map. “It’s her entourage… Any one of her little crew that goes down is another potential martyr for me to deal with, or for you, a potential son or daughter avenging their father in five years.”
Someone muttered something about not being in the business of worrying about that. Her tail twitched with annoyance. No one here saw ruling by fear and escalating retaliatory violence as unsustainable but her. It wasn’t worth explaining the politics to them.
Within another hour, Mira wrapped the briefing up and sent the mercenaries back to their posts, still in a poor mood that she was doing this at all. The half-oni princess didn’t particularly like interacting with the organizations her human side of the family came from. Nor did she trust them with the full picture of what would be happening, but she didn’t trust anyone but herself with everything. Her parents had taught her that lesson well, in so many ways both intentional and not.
They could have avoided this, so easily. Princess Esme could have left her domain alone. There was no need for these tensions, no need for trade blockades or years of raiding parties. Mira’s administration was not expansionist, not inclined to overextend itself, nor particularly fond of the material waste of pointless battles over fragile egos. She hadn’t been the one to declare war. Oh, how she missed peace.
Esme Dawnsong had appeared unexpectedly to take the throne beside her mother while waving some legendary sword around during a year that Mira had been more concerned with more important things than what her neighbors to the southwest were doing. Continuing her mastery of control magic and witchcraft, stabilizing her own seat of power against domestic challenges. Princess Mira had not even been aware of the princess’s existence before that point, and her parentage was perhaps somewhat suspect. But she had her own skeletons to hide and hardly cared what cuckoldry had produced another future monarch for a neighboring state she had not been at war with at the time.
Upon the new war-princess leaving her informational blind spot, Mira had even optimistically wondered if she might make allies with the new mother-daughter governing pair. Unfortunately, that opportunity had definitively closed shortly after, when a prophecy was made in the Dawnsong palace that Princess Esme would kill her, which was rather rude of whatever seer was to blame.
Mira didn’t care about prophecies or destiny. She cared about trade, her own stability, and the long-term peace that would stave off potential revolutions as society began to shift modes of production.
Both royal families could have laughed it off, assuming some mad, magic-drunken old hag ate the wrong mushrooms and imagined a tale. Instead the Dawnsongs declared war, and Mira’s first surprise meeting with her contemporary had involved being stabbed with a legendary blade that nearly killed her.
Again and again, season after season they had fought, and the younger princess had only gotten better at channeling the wild, uncontrolled magic that spirittouched people could. Mira had more than a few scars in the shape of a clawed paw swipe. She had come to see it as sparring, which helped to keep Mira’s magical combat skills sharp for the potential of more competent assassins that she truly feared.
But last winter, the old Dawnsong queen had passed, and her daughter had gone from an annoyance to a true danger the moment she actually tried being a competent stateswoman instead of a violent brute. As her floundering mismanagement had weakened Clethivblaithe’s standing, it was the Dawnsong Wolf’s own Privy Council who had contacted Onizumi to try to get her under control.
Their growling dog had broken free of the leash, and they knew Mira both stood the most to gain from taming her and was the most capable of doing so.
“Princess?”
Esme startled awake snarling, eyes glowing crimson, hand already clasping on Silverfang’s hilt. Her canines were sharpened by panic, gold-fur pointed ears already morphed and held high and scanning for danger. Red sparks leaped off her skin as excess power pooled in the pale lightning’s shadow that her gift of magic branded across her skin.
“Just me,” the member of her circle said in a level voice, keeping both hands visible until Esme’s usual waking alertness passed. “We are almost there.”
Jeering faces and failure and tormentors. The usual burning terrors of her dreams swam, forcing her to anchor herself to reality. She was in her armored carriage, stopped by a river so the horses could drink. One of her knights had opened the carriage door. There was no fight here.
Princess Dawnsong nodded, loosed her grip on her weapon, and mostly returned to her human form. The handle still gave her some comfort, she had slept with the legendary weapon since before she had been big enough to lift it.
As she stepped onto the dirt road, she saw they had made good time, with the many painted wooden gates to various temples beckoning from up the mountain path up to Erathii’s Shadow.
She leaned against her war-carriage, anxiously fidgeting with her own claws and turned her gaze back to where they had come from. The knight-princess could just barely make out the farmland that surrounded Clethivblaithe as she looked down the valley. Her kingdom sat at the edge of a grassland and a forest, marble and bronze buildings rising along either side of a river that led out to the ocean harbor a few miles south.
A reminder of what she was doing this for. The people who believed in her, whose faith she channeled every time she fought. The murmuring encouragement from the blade at her hip helped steady her, reminding her of what was already written in fate.
When the Dawnsong Wolf reaches the height of her power, the light of Electus will shine on the grassland hills. Chaos’s champion will be defeated, and Princess Onizumi will die.
A prophecy was a powerful thing. The guardian spirit whose form she borrowed had been made many times stronger by its spread, gifting her new heights of power with the mandate of her people. The suns indeed shone on the rolling hills, Esme had mastered her form completely, and tonight, Princess Onizumi would die.
She grinned, long canines flashing for just a moment, grasped the hilt of her sword to focus herself, and breathed in deep through her nose.
The magic to alter her shape sparked inside her skull, honed by the amplifying power of the enchanted blade. She took in the scents that only the wolf’s more sensitive nose could detect. The dampness on the air from the river, the grasses shifting in the breeze, the sweat of armored men and odor of horses.
Esme was proud to have learned to control herself so finely, restricting the alteration of her body to the inside of her face. As a small child, she had needed to turn her whole head into a canine shape to accomplish that, then in her early teens it had required at least a snout. She was proud of her mastery of form, and the deep well of strength it gave her.
The Queen… her mother… had been wise to keep her hidden away, of course.
The mantle of the chosen one had been quite difficult for a child to handle, and… well, it had made the matter of her true womanhood easier. Not that Esme was foolish enough to think anyone who saw her body under the armor would still think of her as a woman.
Those bitter thoughts curdled and fouled, and Esme directed that feeling towards her mortal enemy. Imagining finally sinking Silverfang deep into her chest, and showing the socialites back in the capital the sickeningly alluring succubus she kept hidden behind that illusion of plain humanity. Perhaps it was a brutal, violent fantasy, but that was nothing she was not used to in her dreams.
Princess Onizumi wasn’t even a real princess anyway. Her family had been nothing but dishonorable thugs just a few generations ago, nothing like the proud warriors of her own ancestry that had conquered the grasslands by divine right. She used dirty tactics, illusions and diplomacy, and every time Esme thought about her that flame of rage in her chest only grew stronger.
Dawnsong would strike her down, and then the war would be over.
Perhaps then the curse in her dreams would go away.
The witch-princess of Eirashidou opened the hidden door to her private wing of the estate, finally done with preparations and utterly exhausted. The siphons had been placed, the magic smoothbore rounds distributed, exits covered, and fire prevention teams readied. But none of that was why she was feeling drained. Logistics were fine, logistics were easy, Mira could manage that all day. She was just exhausted from spending this much time around other people.
She disrobed, turned the iron faucet and took in a rejuvenating breath of steam. This tiny space hidden within the empty grander palace was her little sanctuary. Away from any expectations on her, away from the unpredictable incompetencies of those she was forced to call her peers, in both the royal and business worlds. Peaceful, quiet, a little dimly lit.
Only once her eyes had drifted to her own reflection in a polished mirror, did she remember to drop the illusion altering her appearance and free up the mental energy passively used to keep the invisible mask up.
The wisps of ethereal prisms hovering a centimeter over her skin faded with a soft twinkling sound. Her horns grew more visibly pronounced, ears more pointed, large curved teeth more prominent. The stretch marks and texture of her skin returned, and the silver streaks in her otherwise black hair reappeared.
She could not maintain the illusion in close proximity to others, since the light bent did not stand up to inspection of physical contact. Fortunately, her lifestyle involved very little in the way of physical contact. The witch wanted to think of herself as pretty, but knew no one else ever would.
She bitterly wondered what either of her parents had ever seen in the other before the mirror graciously covered itself with steam.
The basin had filled enough for her feet, and she curled her tail behind her and sat beside the tub to dip her toes in. This was her indulgence, her cozy apartment hidden behind layers of secrets. She sighed as a familiar tingling in her tattoos wormed its way up her legs, the pleasant feeling of her stores of passive magical energy refilling.
This bath was a particular favorite, and while the basement floors of the Onizumi estate were devoted to machines that siphoned the raw magic out of the water for crystallization and storage, they didn’t get every drop of the gift of Erathii out of the springwater, and made it quite hot as a byproduct. As little as Mira believed in her hereditary title as princess… she deserved a few luxuries. And she would hopefully have much more peace to look forward to.
In just a few hours, Mira would be rid of the dog trying to gnaw her tail off forever. The war ended tonight, in the complete subjugation of Esme Dawnsong’s fighting spirit under a pacification curse. And then her transient ally Ilfred would get his prize. Ilfred wanted power, and for his heirs to mingle with royal blood.
Mira would hand over the helpless conquered hero to a man who had betrayed her, and… part of the deal had involved an enamoring clause on the binding, and a vial of Ilfred’s blood so he was the target. Mira didn’t want to think too much about where that would end. Just because she had stopped trying to argue against being called evil didn’t mean she wanted to think about the brutal realities of the more civil side of politics that shaped dynasties.
After a few minutes of Mira trying and failing to settle her distaste with the arrangement, a tiny passage slid open, and one of the many toy dolls the house’s home spirit caretaker used as its body pretended to walk in, carrying a bowl of stew up from the kitchen. “Your dinner is ready, princess.”
“Thank you, Kimi.”
The sweet little thing was Mira’s only real confidant, born from the manaspring under the house’s foundations, and given shape by the wishes that the princess had whispered into her comfort objects over the decades. Its assistance ensured that Mira rarely needed to interact with the house staff on the second floor.
“You look tired, sweetie.”
Mira picked the bowl up with a small, weary sigh. “I am tired.”
Its plush face scrunched up, as if pinched by invisible fingers into something resembling a sympathetic frown. “You’re going to miss her, aren’t you?”
“I will have a great deal more time and energy to focus on my magical studies and running the state without her bothering me every month or so.”
“You have avoided my question.”
Mira busied her mouth with her meal and said nothing.
“I’ll keep you company.” Kimi sat beside her and hummed a lullaby, a much-needed reminder of the solitude and comfort she had waiting for her tonight. The touch of its fabric was soothing. It had chosen to possess a doll she’d had since she was a child, clearly it could tell how stressed she really was.
Mira pondered the plans for her night as she ate. She was almost excited to get to the part where a royal brat broke in and tried to murder her. She looked forward to the regular visits, in a way. There was no need to keep up appearances with someone trying to cut your head off. Several years ago, during one of their many clashes she had run out of magic reserves and dropped her disguise mid-fight.
Esme Dawnsong was the only person alive who had ever actually seen her real face.
Well. Unless one included Kimi, but she didn’t think a guardian spirit counted when it came to judging her appearance and gender. The princess had always liked spirits and animals more than other people. Maybe that was why the thought of never dueling Dawnsong again made her a little forlorn, she could literally become an animal spirit, after all.
Mira finished her stew and set the bowl aside. It was deflection anyway. The so-called chosen hero had probably drunkenly called her some great-tusked manly ogre while drunk at various taverns after seeing the truth, and Mira’s paradoxical fondness for the thorn in her side was just familiarity. No, what she really dreaded was the disruption to the routine and expected.
After tonight, she’d be done with Esne Dawnsong. For good.
She could be happy about it later.