One week later; Sunday, September 11, 2022

Throne

“Saddle up!” Ella yelled and pulled on her mask and grasped the scepter and dagger. Across her back was the her rifle. Her crown began to manifest, her tactical gear disappearing into gold lace and her imperial wear.

The subway tunnel was lit up with massive floodlights. Aqrabuamelu soldiers lined the hallway, the broken tracks being the only indication that this used to be a subway that carried millions of people a year.

They went down the tunnel to the turn and the remembered hallway to an open portal. On the other side was a green grass field, the burnt battlefield of Ella’s nightmares having healed over the months.

The castle stood across the field, more Aqrabuamelu soldiers were patrolling the field, half scorpion in form, wearing hastily-painted gray and gold tactical armor and masks. The masks had been painted in the same tiger stripe pattern as her partially crystallized mask.

As she stepped through the gate, she stepped into a bubble. The area surrounding the castle was calm, serene even. There was a beautiful field, bucolic, with the recovering trees lit in the moonlight.

And outside the perimeter, was chaos. The sound of gunfire, roars, flashes of light, explosions. Troops out of Fort Hood were engaged in a battle against something — a large, amorphous eldritch creature from nightmares. Purplish-black gelatinous tentacles would erupt from the ground and spear through hapless soldiers. Periodically, a strange light, just on the verge of ultraviolet, would flash out, striking an aircraft or guided missile out of the air. The Aqrabuamelu named it the Hecatoncheires.

The mask made her dispassionate and she contemplated just killing everything on the field, but part of her kept her to the plan Arcsa and she had hammered out in the past week. Her prosthetic arm clicked against the scepter shaft, her control over it in the past week improving as she constantly linked in magical nets and controls over the electronics. It was still terrible, and Zaidu kept putting her to the ground every morning. Her jaw ached from this morning when Davcina, now her bedroom guard, clocked her when her prosthetic arm had failed to move in time to block correctly.

The dagger began to whisper suggestions which she also ignored. She didn’t trust the dead emperor’s soul. It had told her one useful thing about this creature. The most important useful thing: It was hers.

The scepter made her vision sharpen, and she could see the battlefield and understand the ebb and flow.

This world you vermin made has so many interesting things. Maybe magic stunted our ingenuity. The dead emperor’s voice was musing, but always mocking. Better than the mad ravings it sometimes engaged in. I used to dine on your kind; they were good in a home-cooked meal sort of way, hardly a delicacy. What did you think of human flesh?

Ella managed to not quite flinch. Images flashed before her and she felt a bead of sweat and a bit of trembling in her arm. But wearing the mask, she could push it down and focus back on the field.

Zaidu looked over at Ella and hissed, “US military has been engaged with this creature for months. Brass would have carpet bombed it if it wasn’t obviously valuable and if they didn’t want the castle for themselves.” He spat to the side, “Armaments seem to do just enough damage to the creature to keep them hopeful. They’ve been spending lives like water.”

She looked back at her troops. All of them were in that same spray-painted tactical armor - gray and gold. No identifiable unit badges. The loss of her arm by the hated Emperor: her prosthetic arm had become a symbol of her sacrifice in their cause and the Aqrabuameluhad become ecstatic. For some reason they had adopted the prosthetic arm's colors as her colors. There were hastily sewn pennants in a variety of gray and gold of all sorts making the rounds, and she was supposed to care about flags at a time like this?

Arcsa had suggested kidnapping a semiotician or heraldric expert to create her flag. Ella had almost said yes in exasperation at the stupidity of the issue, but Xu had stepped in and suggested a marketing agency instead. Apparently companies were tripping over themselves to offer her their services.

Ella dismissed it entirely from her mind and promptly have Charlie the assignment.

As she surveyed the field, she could feel the strangeness of magic that the Emperor had now started to initiate her in. Lacking the framework of physics, she could feel tentacles in her mind, slithering over her and making her shudder in their alien nature. An image of her brain being covered in spaghetti noodles came to her, and she almost retched in disgust.

She watched as a soldier almost made it to the barrier, running and dodging purple-black tentacles that shot upwards from the ground. She watched as he made it to the barrier and, in panic, ran through it. He dissolved into a bright glowing ball of light that dissipated.

Bullets and other weaponry did the same as it intersected the castle's shield. Periodically the field outside would light up in flame as the military would napalm different zones in a somewhat random pattern.

Arcsa laughed, "It would be a clever strategy. They lure out as much of the Hecatoncheires as they can using soldiers as lures, then drop thermite plasma onto the field to burn it. Too bad it does not matter if you hurt its arms, but they will never find its body, so it doesn't matter."

Ella watched for a moment later, "This is intentional, right? Encourage the spending of assets thinking you are getting ahead, and you keep bleeding the enemy."

Arcsa turned to her and smiled, "The Emperor said almost the exactly the same. Although more eloquently. Belatsunat, who was once the most famous of our poets, lamented that she wished she could have phrased it as nicely."

Ella shuddered and tried not to touch the dagger at her side. She had refrained from talking to the Emperor's soul trapped within, but the temptation was so strong. She had kept the conversations focused and limited with clear-set agendas to avoid going off track. She wanted to know so much more but she couldn't afford to get sidetracked, and, more importantly, she didn't trust that voice one bit.

She pulled off the mask and fought off the wave of nausea and self-loathing that came from removing it. There was no threat here within the castle's penumbra.

Now was time for the first act…