Early hours, the next day (Wednesday, July 20, 2022) Throne, The Hidden Kingdom of the Emperor

Ella was woken abruptly by Zaidu, she had fallen asleep in her gear again. Her mask felt comfortable against her face and she had long ago ceased to take it off, she couldn’t sleep without it. The acrid smoke and ash stung her eyes but it had been a long time since it truly bothered her. As she stood up she absentmindedly brushed off dried blood from her gear, it flaked off and stood up and looked where Zaidu pointed.

There was no cover after the trees had burnt away, but ash and smoke lingered. They were in the field in front of the castle now. The proud pennants that had flown above were blackened with soot. She could almost hear the pennants flap in the wind.

Across the field stood the Emperor and a small army, orcs flanking him. These orcs were better armed, looked harder. Elites.

They held up their riot shields in defense. But the four guards, all orc elites, merely stood aside to let them through. Ella almost tried to burn them to ash on the spot. Her soul ached, and she felt exhausted, what was more sin now?

Her crown settled on her head. That ethereal connection to the crown of the Emperor felt stronger now that they were closer; it was almost tug-of-war between them — drawing from the same well of power.

Her face smiled cruelly behind the mask and she gave a strong “pull” on the tether and watched the crown on the Emperor dim. Did his eyes narrow in surprise?

Ella knew the Emperor now after talking to Kothin, he would wait for her to speak first in a show of subservience. As if meaningless political games meant anything here. Ella did not care.

“My Emperor,” her voice was hoarse from smoke and yelling on the battlefield. Her tone was mocking in its supposed sincerity. She swept a curtsy, looking ridiculous in her torn and bloody tactical gear.

The Emperor thought they were playing the game. He inclined his head and nodded as if he was receiving his due.

He spoke quietly but the waves of sound were subtly sustained, reverberating through the air without decay.

“Our wayward princess returns. We welcome the return of Our Dagger and hope to save you from yourself.”

“Why would I need saving?”

The Emperor stood across from her, regarding her. His eyes glowed in the distance much like hers. His stance was proud, his posture straight, so different from that time not so long ago in the throne room: the act he had put on of being decrepit and tired.

“We see you do not know. Have you stumbled onto both Appropriation and Investiture unknowingly?”

He began to laugh in a way that didn’t match the formality of his previous speech.

“Our young foolish princess. You have been partaking in the blessing of the Aqrabuamelu, eating the dead and taking their strength, their vitality… and their cruelty.” He was struggling through the laughter to get the words out. It grated on her.

“And to compound it further, you took that cruelty and began to Invest it into that mask you wear. It is nascent and when you wear it you will be powerful but far, far more vicious than We have ever been.”

The person that had been Ella but was mostly the mask knew it was true somewhere. Over these past weeks, she had been screaming inside. That voice was just distant though, a hollowed echo of the truth of what she was now. She couldn’t even remember what she had done yesterday, but she occasionally got flashes of memory, of blood and torture, orcs screaming as she eviscerated them.

“For all your bravado, you are turning yourself into another monster to defeat us, like so many others…” The Emperor mused, almost to himself.

“Are you even in there, We wonder? Or are you just the mask” The Emperor’s mocking voice did not matter to her, but the truth of that statement penetrated through the haze she had been in.

Ella stood there in equipoise with the mask she wore. The truth had forced the acknowledgement of how she needed the power she had put into the mask, the ability she had with it and the viciousness had gotten her this far. But the horrible acts she had committed had eaten her soul. She knew pulling it off now would force a reckoning that she could not afford now.

The mask stood there quietly. Was she trembling a bit?

A sudden torrent of force appeared, a battering ram of air slammed Ella and the surrounding area, She had been too distracted with her inner turmoil and went flying back. Ribs broke under the pressure as she landed in the ground, and the force pinned her down.

The other Aqrabuamelu were sent flying back. She heard screams and sickening squelching noises and cracking as bones broke and bodies were flattened into pulp.

The effect was so great that nobody noticed the Emperor’s slight stumble from the power he had brought to bear.

Ella was flat on the ground as the Emperor and his orcs advanced. He strode forward to stand over the pinned Ella, flat on her back and bearing untold pressure pushing her into the ground. She gritted her teeth and pushed with her magic, setting up a web of her triplines to block his advance.

The Emperor stopped and tsked, almost humming to himself as he began to pick apart the threads of her barrier.

Ella had to split her focus while a crushing amount of pressure was brought to bear on her. The mask pressed down on her face, the skin shearing off underneath, blood began to pour from the eyeholes and around the sides. Ella couldn’t think, the pressure was intense, the pain excruciating. And she couldn’t see, her vision clotted with blood and the effort to stay conscious.

She reached out and used her magic to feel around her. Aqrabuamelu were scattered everywhere, there were sickening collections of flesh, blood and tactical gear where she had been standing, dead and splattered. She turned her head to see Arcsa sitting up to the side, his left leg was a mess of flattened tissue, and another Aqrabuamelu was putting a tourniquet on it.

The pressure on her increased. She was forced to put her attention to it, using raw unformed force to press against it, but the pressure was excruciating. She began to scream and she heard a crack as the mask split jaggedly down one side.

There was something, a weapon she had thought about but had never used. Desperately, she reached for it, pure creation and destruction as a small thread of antimatter was brought into the world, drawn from a long ago collapsed quantum state where the universe may have been made of antimatter instead. It appeared as a small ball between them, and instantly reacted in annihilation, the explosion throwing eh Emperor away and the pressure suddenly released.

It all went black.