When Prince Sado returned with the wagon of former soldiers, the only thing he said to them was, “Wait here.” Who he was had long since been figured out, and when he walked away, he paused and turned to them. They stared not at him, but at the great estate at which they’d found themselves, the field of horse corpses where dozens and dozens of servants were busy skinning and defleshing the beasts under one broad old man’s eyes. ‘What do you say to them? A great prince of legend would have a stirring speech to give. But then, a great prince of legend… wouldn’t have fallen to this in the first place.’ He turned away from them again, entered the manor, and ventured to the office of the Duchessa.

He knocked at the door when he reached it. It was the most quiet knock of his life, like a needle in his heart to the man who lived a life of boldness. But it was done.

“Come.” The feminine voice came from within, and he opened the door, several servants were working to put bookshelves into place, a new ‘better’ desk to replace the one that had been borrowed temporarily. The hustle and bustle of it all, and all with purpose, reminded him of home.

He waited a few feet in front of Duchessa Aiwenor’s desk, his hands folded at the small of his back, silence alone passed between them. When she finally tapped the last jot on the paper under her hand, she set the quill back into place, then went to the front of the desk almost within reach.

Her feet were planted shoulder width apart, the green leaf top and the way the leaves curved up to cup her supple breasts, the way it conformed to her skin like she was the tree from which they sprang, and the way her blonde hair tumbled freely down her back… ’Beautiful.’ It came to mind again unbidden, but fled in the instant it came.

“You have completed your task, then?” Nua asked rhetorically, watching him with an intensity that briefly gave him pause, until his body took over..

Sado’s answer was to fall to his knees. His ashen pride screamed from the grave in which he’d buried it as an undeserved and unworthy thing, indifferent to the fact that servants who had surely been his citizens saw, he lowered himself from there, prostrate, and kissed the surface of her boot. When it was done, humiliating as it was, he felt nothing but relief. Like a great weight had come away.

His mistress looked around to the stunned looking servants, “Leave us. Return when he sends you in.” She said crisply, and they set down their materials, books, paintings, anything and everything was put down, lightly and then the pair were alone.

‘That should take care of that.’ Nua thought with a measure of satisfaction that caused her to briefly shut her eyes, ‘Your god looks down on that thought. You’re not supposed to hate humans… Raymond was human, and he gave up everything for you and for your people. The Dark Savior is human, and look how far she went. Even Aalon… in the end.’ She cursed the rising bigotry and hatred that she still had not purged entirely, and forced herself to focus.

‘This man is not those men. Nor do you know that he would be if he got the chance.’ Nua reminded herself, and extended her right palm.

When the fallen Prince took up her wrist and kissed it, he meant it, and she knew it.

“The lesson… is well learned, mistress. I knew I’d lost. But I never truly saw the fruits of loss laid so bare before. I was isolated, I was blind…” He turned his face away from her and looked out the window, his powerful chin wrinkled over and over again as he tried to restrain the sense of the totality of his loss and failure all hitting at one moment.

Nua stepped away from him, over to the window that took up most of that wall. “Come here, Sado.” She said and folded her hands behind her back again, she looked down at the many working slaves, and when he joined her, kneeling again, he followed her eyes.

“I’ve been very cruel to you.” Nua said in a soft voice, looking down at him where he knelt.

He didn’t answer.

“It wasn’t fair.” She said in barely more than a whisper. “I thought I had to break you, that’s why. There’s more to it, but at the heart of it, I knew you didn’t see me as your mistress, you saw me as a woman.” Nua added.

He remained quiet, and she held her blue eyes down at him, he still didn’t meet her gaze. “You’re not going to deny it?” She asked with an inquisitive pitch.

He gave a slow, sullen shake of his head. “No, mistress.” He said in a broken, humble voice.

“Making you go out to do that task today, buying up your people to work for me, it was probably the cruelest thing I’ve ever done, to someone who deserved it least of all… and I promise you, if I can avoid doing that to you again, I will. But I did need you to understand what you clearly did not.” Nua said without any evident emotion, she turned her gaze out the window and down to where Onimeus was guiding peasants in piling the bones into one of the now empty carts.

Sado’s voice retained its newfound humility, his fingertips trembled at his side as he spoke without looking up to her. “No… I should be lucky you didn’t do worse, mistress. And I saw you in battle, the way you fought with Bracer, and put yourself into the fight rather than just let my people take the risk while you reaped the reward. I also… I saw the way you armed them, treated them. As much as it hurt, you could be doing worse to us, and you are not. May I speak freely?”

“Go on.” Nua’s clipped voice was neutral, but without underlying threat.

“That was when I first found you beautiful. I am, or, I was, a warrior Prince. I’d never lost a fight until that day.” He let out a contemptuous loud sniff for himself. “You may be new to the east, but it’s not lost on you that we don’t send women to the fighting much, we simply can’t afford to. A few rare ones go, but it’s for the same reason we don’t send women to the Tlalmok unless, well they were going to send Kaiji when she was caught, because she would have saved many more.” He chewed on his lip as he tried to think of what else to say.

“So you were enticed by my rarity.” Nua managed a smile that was arch, even amused, and he finally looked up and nodded.

“I admit it..” Sado hung his head again at the words, and went on. “I saw ferocity like mine in a fight. When Lady Solution took me to the adventurer’s guild, I fought my way through several headman adventurers before I finally lost consciousness. Seeing you fight Bracer, the way you brought him down, I saw a peer. A beautiful peer who ignited passions I thought I wouldn’t feel again.”

Nua shook her head in vigorous denial. “No, Sado. No. There is one mistress here, and no master. And believe me, whatever you think you saw, you wouldn’t want to be at my side. It’s the place where men go to die.”

Sado’s answer was swift and brutal even to his own ears. “Death is everywhere here, mistress. Komestra was a militant power, a great power that only ‘barely’ lost against six to one odds. Even with our small population and vast odds, had but one city not sided with the allies, we could have won.” His bitter expression consumed his whole body and he brought his fist to the floor and pounded it once in frustration. The thud didn’t seem to hurt his powerful fist, as he went on without difficulty.

“But worse than that... as real as everything was, this,” he touched the golden collar around his throat, “didn’t mean what it should have. I never felt the loss as fully as I should have. You’re ‘not’ a peer. My peers now have their worth measured in coins, and most of them not many coins at all. And they, like myself, answer to you.”

“You win, mistress. You win. You broke me today, maybe it’s impossible for you to understand what it feels like, to break, to be broken and at someone else’s mercy, to not even own your own body anymore…” Sado clenched his eyes tight shut, the rays of the sun through the window kept total darkness at bay, but at least he was not having to look at the one to break him. Or down at his broken people.

“But to a man like me, who I was, it’s losing half my soul.” He finished with a swallow that held back further emotional disgrace.

Nua held back the most bitter laugh of almost twenty years. “You thought nothing of owning others, and you tell me this, do you think I’ll pity you for it, Sado, now that it’s come to you?”

“Mistress, with respect, you’re wrong. Did you never learn why we were going to war?” Sado looked up at her in sudden dismay, his mouth opened and hung there stupidly as he went up to his knees again.

“Explain.” Nua demanded, turning to face him.

He spat out the words so fast he barely understood them himself, but he could see her attention on him, and he thrust the words out to take that attention as best he could. “I wanted Komestra to be the sanctuary city of the north. The demon-elf city to the far south, they are one. Any slave who flees there and stays for a year and a day is free. I wanted Komestra to do the same for this region. I thought we could add to our numbers, and then with a vastly increased population, that we could… that I could raise an army. With that, I wanted to force an alliance of the great six, conquering what I had to and forcing the rest to go along. From there I wanted to conquer all fifty smaller cities, forge a kingdom that could fight the Triumvirate as one. I thought I could broker treaties with the neighboring centaurs and hire mercenaries from the more chaotic wildlands, and… and finally save us all.”

Finally he slowed down. “Our trade in slaves can’t be helped, the sanctuary city provides a kind of safety valve, like the levies of a dam, those who just can’t take it, don’t rebel when they can flee. And sometimes captives are individually freed. There’s also the promise of heaven for loyal slaves. But rebellion still happened once!” His fingers clenched tight, digging painfully into his palms.

“We spend all this time fighting each other over who gets to live a little longer in hell! Do you have any idea what it is to watch people wail as they’re dragged off, knowing they’ll be eaten, mistress?!” he threw himself at her feet, “I couldn’t take it! I’d fought a hundred battles, won them all against good men, all so I could do what?! Send people to die for nothing but the gluttony of monsters to save my own people to do it all over again later?! That's what I wanted to stop! I wanted to end this nightmare! And that is how I ended up…” He kissed her boot again, “here.”

“Did you really think you could have won against the Tlalmok Empire? Let alone the others if they got involved?” Nua looked at him in askance, focusing as best she could on the pragmatic matter while her inner self was awhirl with chaos at the revelation of the true nature of the Prince she had enslaved.

“I don’t know… I’d heard stories though, of a vast empire on the other side of the Triumvirate, rumors came to me, rumors I at least had one witness to confirm. A man who was both a scholar and a merchant, he took ship west for a Prince’s ransom. He stayed in a kingdom of minotaurs and collected all the information he could, maps, a history, as much as he could manage… most people thought he was lying. I didn’t. His gold was too real, and he had such conviction. I thought that since Empires don’t make good neighbors... I-I had the wild hope of reaching out to that empire, and forging an alliance to crush the triumvirate between a hammer and an anvil.”

“You live up to your bold reputation, Prince Sado.” Nua said without a trace of sarcasm, and to his shock, her right hand came out, not to demand his submission, but to touch his cheek with affection. “If you’d lived in the west, you’d have been a great man, instead of a slave. You might have even been one of the heroes of those chaotic days. I’m glad to know the man I hired to teach me, made his way back here alive.”

Sado almost fell back on his heels at her final statement, “It’s all true?! It wasn’t some wild hope that somewhere there lay a power that could have helped us?!”

Nua inclined her head toward him, then crouched to where his shaking body knelt. “Not a bit of it, no matter how wild, was false. Now, Prince Sado, I have some good news for you. The power you wanted to ally with, will move east on its own. The foes you fear, the horror you despise, it’s all going to end. The Devor Empire made an enemy of the Dark Savior, she’s been building a holy army for the last twelve years, and will be building a warmachine under the aegis of her god and his servants, for another eight still. When her children come of age, they will ride east, and this world you hate will cease to exist as it always has.”

“Are you more than just a foreigner, are you an agent of this empire?” Sado asked with a hesitant glance upward, only to watch her shake her head in denial.

“I am a priestess of the one god, a death worshipper and an explorer, I do serve my divine lord, as do all those like me. But I am here on my own, except for my Teacher. I will accomplish what you could not, Prince Sado.”

He looked up at her with daring in his eyes, “You really think you can do that? You? A foreigner with no connection to this land or its people? You think they’ll accept your rule even if you get a chance?”

Nua thought that over, “It does sound arrogant when you put it that way… I mean you did fail even with a city at your back. But yes, I think I can. If I don’t, I’ll die, but there’s a more important question, my enslaved Prince.”

“What is that, mistress?” He asked, detecting the sudden change in her tone, the cold breath of the grave hit his skin when she cupped his cheeks and then dug her nails into his skin.

“How badly do you want to see me succeed?” Nua’s eyes went narrow and deadly, her nails gouged in as if he was being stabbed. In her eyes he saw the unrelenting will to power, “Understand this my prince. I will win or I will die, and if I die, Komestrans die a second time and there’s no hope for any of you. But if I succeed? Remember I promised to make Komestrans on the battlefield a thing to be feared again? I’ll take the six cities, I’ll take the fifty cities, I will win, I will have it all. In eight years, and when the children of terror ride east, we will move west to meet them. If you want your vision to come true, if you truly offer me the deepest submission you can… I will give you your heart’s desire, while taking mine as well!”

For a moment, like a dream, he saw it pass before him, armies like he’d heard stories of from the adventurous merchant scholar, many times greater than the Triumvirate. And he imagined his mistress, in the bizarre armor she’d been wearing when they first met, the relentless will that drove her to attack one of the three great smugglers with only a knife and twenty five warriors, and win. An army of Komestrans, Pasenians, Centaur Tribals, Demon-elf mages of the sanctuary city… a blown horn, a shout for revenge, and the whole world turning upside down…

“That is why you’re buying us… for that?” The Prince asked as a tear ran away from his face and his voice cracked.

“Yes, Sado. Yes. Now do you want me to win, or don’t you, slave?” Nua asked him with the tranquil calm of a monk.

“If you are defeated… it is because I am already dead… my Mistress. I pledge myself, not only to your service, but to your success. On my life, on my dead title, everything.”

She stood up, towering over him and placed her false left hand over his forehead. “I serve the god of deeds, the god of death and liberating change. Here, I worship him also as the god of war, save your oaths, show me with your actions. The soldiers you bought today are yours. You’re going to be the first of my officers. Appoint a few of the better ones in there as leaders of squads. Then see to ordering the armor and weapons they need, and work with the two headmen adventurers. Make sure they’re the best to ever take the field for the next thousand years. There’s a lot of blood between here and my final goal, and unless you want to drown in it, you’d better learn to swim.”

“As, yes, I won’t fail! Not again! Not again!” Prince Sado exclaimed as he shot to his feet, intuiting her will, he smashed his fist hard over his heart, imitating, if a little crudely, the salute he’d seen Sergeant Vargas undertake before.

“Prove it.” Nua said with a sharp tongue and a long stare. “Now go, get out of my office, I have more work to do, and send the other servants in to resume their tasks.”

He wasn’t out the door before she had cast her mind into the realm of the jewel of death that lay fixed within her false hand. Up ahead was the mana made home of Yersin, but rather than walk up to his home as she always did, she walked past it, to the dead gray lake he’d made with the mana of many lives. When she reached the still waters in which nothing lived, she sat on a rock, put her head into her hands, and cried.