Interlude IV – A Life Poorly Lived

Lukman remembered when he had been young. When he had been strong and whole and alive.

He’d been the greatest fighter of his generation, winning brawl after brawl, and battle after battle. He was skilled and strong, and won glory for his family and home. When his name was spoken, great warriors fled in fear of his might.

But those days were long past.

He’d grown weak before he’d been disfigured. His muscles began to wear out, straining with tasks he had once found easy. His back began to hurt constantly, a dull ache that grew excruciating whenever he moved in certain ways. His eyesight began to go, things turning blurry and harder to see with each passing day.

He grew old, and his body grew weak. But his heart was still young and foolish.

He couldn’t accept it back then, that he was growing weaker. That he was growing less necessary. He grew wild, picking fights for petty reasons and letting his already short temper get the better of him. He grew cruel and mean-spirited in ways he was too ashamed to think of these days.

Everything slowly began to just… fall apart.

He returned home one day to find his wife gone. She’d eloped with a man from another village, and she’d fled with him.

It should have been a wakeup call. It wasn’t.

He raged. He threw a tantrum, running from the village to chase after his ex-wife. He wasn’t sure what he was planning to do if he caught them, and these days he was glad he never did. Instead he had lost their trail, forced to return to the village.

Later, when he stopped on the way back for a drink in the river, a crocodile emerged from the waters. He grew irrationally angry by its presence, and attacked it in a fit of rage.

The crocodile won.

He returned to the village, wounded and dying, barely saved by his grandson’s kindness.

Of course, this wasn’t the end.

His children began to shun him after that. No, they’d begun shunning him long before, he just pretended everything was fine. That was all he had done, just pretend everything was fine.

The wounds he’d sustained had soon become infected, and he’d been forced to have them amputated. After that, even the thrill of a good fight was forever lost to him.

He stopped moving after that. Stopped fighting and raging and living. He stopped caring about anything, and simply laid down and prepared to die.

Only the kindness of his grandson allowed him to live after that, bringing him food and water each and every day. Nowadays, he was more grateful to the boy than he could properly express.

It had felt like the end. Like the story of Lukman the Warrior had ended, leaving just the sad old man left in its place.

But it wasn’t the end. Not yet.

A new leader arrived, a young man with oddly yellow skin, sent to them from the gods to be their immortal ruler until the end of time.

He lasted a little over a month before being overthrown.

Then there was a new leader, Queen Meixiu. And she came forth and asked for not the strongest, but the smartest warrior the village had. The most competent, who had fought in many battles.

The village didn’t have anyone like that.

Except for him.

He was never sure who recommended him. Maybe it was one of his children. Maybe an old friend who he hadn’t spoken with in a long time. Maybe she had just seen him and instinctively understood who he was. At that point, it didn’t matter.

She appointed him as her general, a leader beholden only to her. She respected his competence, his experience born of a hundred battles. Once more he led battles—this time from the back—but at a much grander scale than ever before. Once more the thrill of The Queen returned to him his lost glory.

He hadn’t realized how much he had missed it.

And then the Queen was gone, and an opportunity arose. A chance, and a choice.

Down one path laid guilt, and down the other laid stagnation. Betrayal or irrelevance. A chance. A choice.

He chose.

--

The ‘conflict,’ if it could be called that, was short and mostly painless.

‘Or,’ Lukman supposed, ‘it just hasn’t begun yet.’

Most people had accepted his version of events. They hadn’t seen their Queen in a week now, and she had been long in the hands of the enemy. Why would she still be alive?

Some people were suspicious, and he was certain they’d become a problem later, but few people had outright accused him of lying. He was just a bit too important and powerful for people to do that so easily. So there was murmurs of discontent, but right now everyone was following him.

This wasn’t a coup, after all. It was just the last surviving general taking command. Completely benign.

That said, there was one glaring issue that had arisen.

“General!” the soldier standing in front of him asked, barely repressed rage in his voice. “What should we do with the traitor!?”

In front of Lukman was Hemede, the old elder held into the dirt by two soldiers, while another six stood around them, spears at the ready.

Hemede himself was staring up at him with hope, his eyes practically begging for Lukman to save him.

But should he?

Lukman could say some pretty words, make up some lies about how this was all a big misunderstanding, probably kill a bunch of witnesses, and accept Hemede back into the fold. He could free him from this and give him the power he’d been promised.

But Hemede had publicly and obviously killed Amon. He’d fucked up. Enough to be imprisoned, with everyone knowing of his crimes. If he let the former elder go free, there would be hell to pay. He’d mostly managed to stir up the army in his favor—a couple dissenters had cropped up, but nothing that required more than some mild threats and beatings to stamp out. At this point, everyone was too shocked and confused to oppose him.

He’d won, more or less. And if he let Hemede go free, he’d be undoing all of that work in a heartbeat.

In the end, freeing him now would be… inconvenient.

“I see,” he breathed out, accepting what he was about to do. “Then, by order as the last acting man of rank in this army, I order this man executed for treason.”

Hemede’s face flipped from relieved hope to shocked horror in an instant.

“Wha—You can’t do this!” he snapped, lunging at Lukman, only barley being held back by the soldiers. “You can’t! I’ll—I’ll tell everyone about what we did! About what we—”

Lukman spun around, kicking the older man in the face, knocking him to the ground with a cry of pain.

“You have committed treason, and so you must be executed. That’s all there is too it.” The armless man said calmly, before lightly pressing his foot against the older man’s windpipe. “And as the friend of the man you have wronged, it will be an execution by my hands.” Then, with only that as his warning, he raised his foot up, before slamming it down on the man’s throat. Once, then twice, then one last time, just to make sure.

With one last pained choke, Hemede died.

It was best not to leave any lose ends lying around, after all.

--

It was a few hours later that he gathered together the whole army for a speech.

“My people!” Lukman called to his assembled troops. “We have been dealt a great blow this day. The Queen is dead, betrayed by her generals, with her life having been sold to our enemies for power! However, this is not the end! She brought us together, united our disparate people into a single force, more powerful than anything else in the world. No longer are we small tribes, squabbling amongst our neighbors, but one people, united in purpose! And in that, her legacy lives on! So I make you this promise—it will live for all time! But to do that, we must finish what she started—an enemy sits behind those walls, who will stop at nothing until they’ve destroyed us. So for a little longer, we must fight. We must defeat the evil tyrant beyond those walls, to protect ourselves, and avenge our Queen!”

The people roared, slamming the butts of their spears on the ground, the wall of sound before him making him grin in elation.

This! This is what he had been born for! What he had lost and suffered for! This moment, right here!

However, just as the cheering was dying down, a voice called out from behind him.

“A beautiful speech,” the feminine voice called out, her clear, familiar tone echoing through the clearing. “I’m moved to tears, truly. In fact, the speech was so beautiful it seems to have brought me back from the dead!”

Lukman froze, a pit opening up in his stomach. With an agonizing slowness, he turned around, coming face to face with the woman he’d just declared dead.

‘Fuck.’

“How shocking it is, then, to see only one of my generals left alive. I’ve been only gone a week, Lukman. And yet here you are, standing before my army and declaring yourself King.”

“My Queen,” he stuttered, before improvising his ass off. “I thought you were dead! Thank the gods you are alive!”

“Save it, Lukman,” she waved away his words. Even now, as she spelled out his death sentence, he couldn’t help but admire how calm and collected she was. He doubted he could have acted the same in her position. “I already know what you’re trying to do. A coup, really? I expected this from Hemede, not you!”

“What!?” he exclaimed, putting as much outrage into his voice as possible. “I would never betray you! I am your most loyal—your second most loyal servant, behind Amon! I have even brought his killer to justice, and executed him myself! Everything I have ever done in this life is for you!”

She waited patiently for him to finish, arms crossed with a bored look on her face. Behind them, the army looked back and forth between the two leaders, collectively confused as they watched the back and forth.

“If you really are so loyal,” she drawled, rolling her eyes. “Then step down, and give me back control of the army. After all, a general is below a Queen. So I’ll give you an ultimatum—stand down and publicly swear yourself to me once more, or die.”

Lukman paused, torn. On the one hand, that was a way to get out of this alive. Just a simple, ‘of course ma’am!’ and it’d be like nothing ever changed. He could go back to being a general just as he was before, the two of them pretending that this was just a misunderstanding and not an attempted coup. On the other hand…

No, there was no lying here. She’d kill him for this, his own excused be damned. His only way to survive was to fight back, here and now. But to do that, he’d need the army. And in that case…

“I see!” he whispered, pretending like he had just been enlightened to some grand secret. “I understand what’re been off about you! Tell me, are you really the Queen?” he questioned, doing all he could to keep his voice from wavering.

“What?” she asked, looking confused for the first time in the conversation.

Lukman forced down his grin. ‘Gotcha.’

“I’ve noticed some things that are different about you—the way you talk, your stance, your skin—it’s not natural, is it?”

“What?”

“No, now I see,” he shook his head, putting on a mournful tone. “My information wasn’t wrong—the Queen is truly dead, there’s no doubt about that! You’re an imposter! You are not the original Queen, but a magical puppet! A false corpse created by the evil warlock of that city, brought here to trick us into letting our guards down! Once we accept this creature into our hearts, we will have lost! Quickly men, I implore you! Turn away from this foul demon, before it ensnares you with its lies!”

She stared at him, genuinely baffled. “What? No, just, what?”

“I shall not fall for your wicked lies, demon!”

She stared at him for a moment longer, before closing her eyes and sighing. She then turned to the rest of the army, calling out to them. “This… farce has gone on long enough. In the end this is quite simple,” gestured to the two of them. “Who are you more willing to follow? The Queen who, as Lukman just said, brought you all together? Or the man who lied about that very same Queen’s death in a bid for power, unaware that she was immortal?”

There was a pause as the army collectively froze, indecision etched on their faces. In truth, if given the time to think about it, most of them would have chosen the Queen. Lukman was influential and a general, but he had just been publicly shamed. Few people wanted to follow someone like that to their possible death. But at this point, any decision would more be down to mob-rule. Whoever spoke first would lead the pack towards one or the other.

If given time to calm down and pick a side, this coup could be solved with relatively little bloodshed.

Of course, it was at that moment that Domenic’s army attacked.