The Queen of Melik was dying.

She took her last shivering breath in the depressing daybreak, as a cold downpour murmured from a dim sky to turn the roads of the old red city into streams. The rain was a sign of the city's mourning. They were not the only ones crying.

The Queen had taken ill of a grave sickness that no one, not even their most skilled potion mæsters, could identify. At first they had brushed it off as a minor fever, but as the days went her hands were becoming stiff as stone and grey as the cement that held the red city walls and buildings together. Living was a grave task to her. It was suffering, you could see it plainly in those once bright brown eyes.

Perhaps there are gods that do hear, Prince Arthur had reflected as he watched his mother from her bedside stool. If death had not taken her now, I would not be able to bear it any longer.

Prince Arthur peered down from the small terrace attached to his mother's room. "You could see the entire city from here," he recalled saying to his mother when they first built the addition. Then, he was no more than a boy of nine name days and his mother, a woman of thirty name days. Not for a moment would they have thought some day, one day, she would be as sick as the dead.

A tear slipped from Arthur's eyes without his consent. She will not leave me, she will not abandon me in a place that is not mine own, he was telling himself, when he heard his mother's heaves from inside.

Arthur wiped his left cheek with his soaked blue silk sleeve and went inside. At his command, Queen Evelyn Thendragon of Melik had been laid out in her own chambers rather than the sick houses the potion mæsters had wanted to keep her in. She was the great queen of Melik, the restorer of Melik's wealth. It was only befitting to let her die in the red silk bed she cherished so much. The bedding—sheets, pillows, covers, mattress, all reeked of blood and smelled of rotten grey skin.

Zhollo, the queen's most trusted bedmaid, a girl of sixteen name days. She was from a neighboring city—Yanzi—that had charged Melik to war and lost. All their wealth and people were brought down to Melik as spoils of war—slaves—to be sold to other cities because Melik did not own slaves since Queen Evelyn had taken the throne fourteen years ago.

The Yanzi wore an earth coloured garment with her city's ropes as a belt just below her breasts. The long dreads she loved playing with were covered in a similar garment. Her copper skin that was always shiny was dull now. Arthur remembered how he'd flirt with her whenever his mother was not looking. No more. I will become a King and she would still be the queen's bedmaid.

Zhollo had been with the queen night and day when Arthur could not, tending to such needs as the queen could express, giving her water and the sleep potions, when she was strong enough to drink, sleeping in her chair beside the Queen. Arthur had asked some potion masters to help, but the sight of a living dead was too much even for the boldest and most skilled of them.

The tiny Yanzi girl looked up at his approach. "Your Grace. The queen is beyond pain now. Your Melik gods have seen her off. She even smiles."

It was true, her once red lips were curved upwards her half rotting face. The black hair on her head were now grey strands. She was always smiling, even on her deathbed she was smiling. The prince took a deep breath. "Cover her."

Zhollo pulled the coverlet over the queen's face.

"With the royal colours if you please?"

The Yanzi gave a small nod and removed the plain white coverlet, replacing it with a silk one, the colours, crimson for blood and dark blue for the Queen's Peace with a lion, the fierce people of Melik, sewn in the middle. Mother, you were everything to me. Everything to Melik.

A sob came out of the prince's lips followed by the heavy downpour of tears on his cheeks. Zhollo stepped toward him, she held both his cheeks and wiped his tears with her thumbs. "No, you must be strong for all of us, my prince," Her voice cracked at the end.

Swallowing the pain and emptiness that now formed in his heart. He held both of Zhollo's wrists still attached to his cheeks and dropped them, "Go and call them."

"But—" she hesitated for a moment, contemplating whether to speak her mind or not, "I will do as you have commanded. I will get the giver’s handmaids." With that she left the room.

The prince lingered around his mother's chambers. Taking in every detail that he could, before it was too late. The brown wood furniture with carved images that were plain and boring when the queen first took residence. Her high windows made from the same wood as the furniture with the same carvings. The dressing table that held Melik's most exotic and expensive scents, powders and jewelries. All these would be gone before the next full moon.

Arthur looked at this mother one last time as he held the door open. One last time before the hot flames of the Giver and Reaper engulf her and her ashes are thrown into the god's pool of mæmoris. It was said that those whose flesh were burnt and sprinkled upon the god's pool would be happy in their afterlife and the living they had left behind could gaze upon the pool and see their dead drinking and dining with other ancestors long gone.

She should be happy. She must be happy. Then he left to his own chambers.