Sometimes you needed to think like a soldier to act like a queen. Oris learnt this the moment she had raised the golden sceptre in her hand and faced the royal court the morning after her coronation.

With the weight of a jeweled crown on your head it was hard to fawn over the entitled officials who had secretly plotted your rise to power and demise, even when your life depended on it. And it was much harder to lead when it felt as though it was your head about to roll the next second.

The intrigues of the court and politics had been lost to her then. All she had to do was nod and smile, a puppet ruler more than anything. Now, when disaster was heading for the state all her puppeteers had scurried off, leaving her the master of her own strings—a wish she had almost forgotten.

Being a soldier meant expecting a war before your eyes the moment you woke up to the rising sun. It meant living everyday like a battle and using your life to fight for something you believed in.

In the end as a queen she was different, she believed in nothing and hence had no conviction, and despite being of the firm belief that all men were equal, Oris had never once expected to die—no one ever did, until the moment turning back was no longer an option.

After years of struggling to keep herself upright, the crown had finally proven too heavy—the exact weight of the world she had once borne on her shoulders. It had toppled off her head in the early hours of the morning and now lay on its side by her throne beside her broken sceptre.

Now it was noon. Oris had sat here for eight hours waiting for this exact moment. She should have felt prepared.

She didn't.

"My Queen! My Queen!"

She looked up from the volume in her hands, surprised that it was her personal guard yelling for her. Not because yelling was prohibited in the hallways but because he had never managed to say 'queen' once since the first day he had been assigned as her knight.

"It is Your Majesty to you," she answered, knowing that he would not hear her. The man found it easier to say majesty than queen. There was something about the 'q' that threw his tongue out of order, he once told her, his smile bitter.

Oris shut the book and turned her gaze in the direction of the great doors that opened into the throne room. Despite the fact that they were currently shut, she could still hear Sir Rodholf's heavy footsteps and constant hollering through it so she knew that the news had finally arrived—because running through the hallways was also not permitted.

There were certain rules in place that the attendants in the castle needed to follow for reasons long forgotten, but Oris still remembered the story she was told as a child of how great men had slipped on the waxed marble floors and broken their necks by accident. The following embarrassment was covered up later in stories where they died in quests to slay fire-eating dragons from beyond the Great Sea—dragons that were never conquered in the event that another hero's name needed to be preserved.

When the doors finally burst open, she set the heavy tome on the step below her. A step, because despite having a throne she chose to sit atop the stairs. She sat on the stairs because she knew the throne meant nothing. It never had.

She could not rule a kingdom already conquered, so why pretend to be more lofty than what she was? A defeated queen.

"M-My Qu-. . . Qu—" the panting knight struggled for words as he fell to one knee in front of Oris and she, despite the situation, found herself smiling.

This is what I had expected, she thought, feeling relieved, and with a wave of her hand, allowed him to rise.

"What troubles you?" she asked, even though she already had a good guess at what had the man so flustered. He wasn't her personal guard for nothing after all. There were few things that existed in the world that could faze him.

"Hermes is at our gates," he announced gravely.

And grave the news was indeed.

Substituting the name 'Hermes' for 'Death' would have made no difference so Oris wondered why he had tried making the announcement sound less fatal. She was not a monarch afraid of death. She had already sent the servants, slaves and castle attendants away in anticipation of this very moment.

She was not like the other already fallen states that had harbored hopes of their army winning against the god of war himself and had their people slaughtered in kind for it.

Since the State of Heibey had been conquered, she had been prepared for this outcome. As the Queen of Orse, she would grow with her state and burn with it when the time came. And what better place for it to all come crashing down than the place where it had all began? The room her hasty coronation had been held in.

"Your Majesty, you must escape!" Sir Rodholf said suddenly, as though he had gained the ability to peer into her mind.

As usual, he tried to hide that the care he had for her was more than what should exist between ruler and subject. And as usual, she pretended not to notice.

She supposed that was the price they paid for growing up together, the utter lack of privacy. She always knew what he was thinking at any given moment and the opposite also held true.

A sigh left her lips when she thought about it. Her gaze shifted from the throne she had sat on everyday since she was sixteen to him, the man who was once the boy she thought she would spend the rest of her life with; her childhood sweetheart with honey-gold hair and sea-blue eyes.

Life was whimsical like that, taking everything you knew and suddenly turning it on its head when you least expect it. But it would all be over soon; Fate didn't work against the dead.

"You should leave," she said quietly, more emotion in those words than in all the sentences she had ever spoken since she took the throne.

When Rodholf didn't reply, Oris reached down for her book again. Every monarch deserved to die with their State's constitution in their hands. She would fight with her last breath to ensure that her people were not maltreated or abused. She would not see them made into slaves. They did not deserve to pay for another man's wild ambitions and their deaths were not required to prove her allegiance to him.

"I will not leave you."

She let her eyes shift to him again, this time an air of finality to the action. "You cannot fight him."

The him could have been Hermes, could have been Fate, but the distinction mattered not anymore for certain death laid beyond the castle's gates, and with no soldiers left to guard Orse's capital, there was not enough time to sigh about what could have been. There was no time for heartfelt confessions. There was no time to reminisce.

"We can run."

"Where can we run to?" Oris scoffed at the suggestion. After conquering Orse, Hermes would finally do what no man before him had ever done. He would have united the world. Every patch of land behind the Great Sea would be his domain, where could they hide?

"If he breaks through those doors and doesn't see me here, he will slaughter our people," she continued, her voice quivering slightly despite her resolve. "My death is too small a sacrifice."

"If you die, the royal line dies with you," Rodholf said solemnly. "If you die, Orse has no hope for revival."

"It does," Oris said, her voice raised slightly in objection. "My sister—"

"Your sister is no longer royal. She has not been since the moment she lost her mind."

"You." Oris shot to her feet, realizing immediately what Rodholf intended to do. "You did not send her out of the castle."

"She did not want to leave."

"Where is she?" Oris asked, despite somehow already knowing the answer. She walked down the steps and passed Rodholf. It might have been her imagination but she swore she could hear the sound of a sword leaving its sheath.

"Where is she?" she asked again.

She put her hand to her chest, able to feel her heart thump against her palm. What is this feeling?

Suddenly, the vision of a severed head falling to the ground appeared before her eyes. It had her features, an exact replica of what she saw everyday in the mirror, but she knew it wasn't her. Her sister had always looked harsher, always looked older, being raised to rule from birth. The perfect matriarch till her mind shattered from the strain of responsibility.

"She is welcoming Hermes," Rodholf said with the same tone he would have used to announce her sister's death. The two instances were one in the same to begin with. "She chose this. She chose your survival. If you remain here you will only anger Fate."

Fate, Hermes, Death, what did it matter? Risa was dead. Orse had fallen. There was no hope.

Oris lifted her hand to her face and felt wetness on her cheeks. It had been so long since she had cried; it was unbecoming of a matriarch to show weakness, especially when facing the loss of family she never knew in the first place.

She laughed, a bitter taste in her mouth. This was what she had fallen to, a queen with no family or kingdom.

"You are the last Orsan royal, Oris," Rodholf said softly from behind her. Softly, as though he was afraid of being overheard. As though Hermes might appear then and there or the gods might choose now to smite him for ignoring etiquette and treating her as an equal. "If you die Orse dies with you."

If I remain here only death awaits me. My people would suffer because Hermes was tricked by my sister. If I remain here I will only anger Fate, who has given me a new lease on life. If I remain, Orse will have no hope of restoration. My kingdom will forever remain a tarnished name in the minds of historians.

With the back of her hand, Oris wiped her cheeks and her lashes. She turned to her throne, her queenly bearing recovered, then smiled at Rodholf, her personal guard, former lover and now, the only person who knew of her continued existence.

She extended her arm to him, forgoing the propriety she would no longer need.

"Take me away."

And there, splayed in the center of the throne room, the constitution remained as hand in hand monarch and subject walked out of the castle that had stolen the sweetness of their childhood dreams.

~