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No, I’d had a lifetime of being trapped and held down by others. I’d spent decades being labeled and dismissed due to their assumptions about their own supposed superiority.
And from it all, I’d learned one lesson.
People only thought they were better than you until you slit their throat and watched them die.
Then they understood. Then they looked at you with fear, which was infinitely better than respect or love any day. Respect was cheap. It got you nothing. Love was a drug for fools. Fear could move nations and topple kingdoms. And fear mixed with power?
That could reveal the truth of the world.
Leadership wasn’t given by destiny or merit or some pure, inherent worth. It was taken by those with the strength to claim it and the focus to never be swayed from the pursuit of it, no matter the manipulation or lie or supposedly innocent sacrifice required. Only the weak crafted rules to say what was allowed and what was not, all in some desperate effort to convince each other they make the world safe. But in reality, no rules applied. There was what you wanted and what it took to get there.
Nothing more.
And now Alaric and his Voidborn would learn that too. The wall was my creation. Alaric would need me to give his beasts passage through it, which would require me to access its power.
I’d burn him from this entire realm before he knew what hit him.
We crested a rise in the rolling terrain, and the base of the Warden Wall finally came into sight. Anticipation boiled inside me, reaching a fever pitch. The wall shimmered like a massive soap bubble, one whose sides stretched away as far as the eye could see. Stone pillars stood at intervals along its edge, each taller than a grown human man and carved with warnings to let the unwary and the idiotic know they would encounter certain death if they came near.
Because this was no fragile membrane. Any giant, witch, or creature of magic who tried to touch it would burn alive, their bodies and their powers alike devoured in an instant. Even humans could only pass with the aid of talismans carried by the guides who inhabited the outposts along the border—or had in the case of the one we’d just left behind. To humans, they looked like mere medallions emblazoned with the crest of the queen of Aneira—an apple tree with roots spreading wide beneath the ground. But in truth I had imbued them with dark spells and the blood of those whose lives had been sacrificed to create the wall.
Not that the king or any of his precious little subjects knew that last part.
A secret smile lived inside me as we approached my creation. It had required enormous effort on my part to create this barrier. Hundreds upon hundreds of lives drained to fuel the magic—not, of course, that anyone missed them. No, I had been cautious, taking only from the poor and homeless, prisoners and farmers too far away from the major cities for their absences to be noticed.
And to be sure, some among the rabble had still questioned what was happening. But the beautiful thing about humans was that they were more likely to adapt to changes than to continue fighting them, especially once those changes were in place and protest began to appear pointless. Their inability to easily leave Aneira simply became a fact of life, one that only fools would question considering all the threats they’d been told existed beyond its borders. And that only those who received royal approval could cross the border became a measure of protection, not control, because surely their trusted king and queen would never deny them passage if they wished it. No, the limits were only meant for those who deserved to be forbidden to stay or go.
Thus the wall cemented me in the hearts of the populace as the queen who protected Aneira from any threat and who wanted nothing but to shield them from the dastardly murderers of their beloved former queen Eira.
When this was done, Aneira would be an engine of conquest controlled solely by my hand. No more pacifying a king still afflicted with some measure of conscience, regardless of how often I reminded him of his supposed enemies’ crimes. No more convincing nobles through diplomacy or bribes to allow me to do what I wished. Anyone who tried to flee would be executed, and any who thought to fight me would find themselves facing a vampire whom even sunlight could not burn.
The people of Aneira would serve me or they would die.
Only to rise again as my servants anyway.
“You’re smiling, pet,” Alaric commented.
“Only enjoying the thought of what’s to come,” I answered, framing the truth in a way he might not question.
He made a considering noise while, around us, the monsters slowed. “Indeed.” He continued on toward the Warden Wall, surveying it with a look on his face like a long-suffering parent observing a disappointing child’s substandard handiwork. “Your little shield would be quite disastrous to creatures of this realm.”
Fury singed the edges of my anticipation. Little shield?
Oh, the ways I would make him suffer before this was done.
“You killed so many to build this, didn’t you?” he continued mildly. “Their screams echo just beyond what those in this petty little realm can hear.”
I didn’t respond. How he could make even a feat of this magnitude seem substandard, as if I’d crafted something barely adequate rather than created an instrument to control an entire nation… it boggled the mind.
I couldn’t wait to watch him burn too.
He turned his back on the wall with a sigh, looking at me as if I’d failed him in some unidentifiable way. “I take it you plan to use this against me too?”
I froze. “What?”
Condescending patience met my eyes. “Did you believe it wouldn’t occur to me that you would try to drain all this power—your power and the power of all these lives—and use it to try to shake my hold on you?” Pity radiated from his expression, but it couldn’t fully cover the ever-present amusement.
Enough of this.
