Post by StaolDerg on Jul 25, 2022 20:51:40 GMT -5
Her mother had given her a garden for her twentieth birthday.
Though there was a sunroof for light to illuminate the plot, it didn’t need it. The petals and leaves were made of delicately crafted metals, from copper to gold. Not one was alike to another, and most were crude - only a few, it seemed, were made by skilled artisans.
The silver-gold lotus she held was one such of the many former. Several petals were misshapen, and small holes and voids dotted the terrain of the ornament here and there, but it was visible that great effort had been made to fix it. The voids and holes had been painstakingly covered with leaf and the burn stains around lumps in the metal told Palki that the maker had breathed their fire gently upon the surface, trying to flatten and smooth the mistakes.
She smiled sadly.
This was the last present her mother had given her. If she had to sell the lot, this piece would’ve been worth the least. But then again, that was why it was here, wasn’t it?
She leaned forwards and set the flower back in its place among the other lotuses upon the colored glass pond. There weren’t a lot- only a handful remained.
That was her fault.
Kumo soldiers, when they had first arrived in her palace, ransacked the place. They’d found the garden and made off with countless artifacts, made off with memories of her family, of her status as Queen. The lapis tiles that had lined the entire plot had been torn up and put into satchels, the fragile glass and platinum bulbs modeled after exotic flowers stuffed into rucksacks, and even the birds hewn from marble and redwood had been looted off their perches to end up in some flea market in Kumosenkan, undoubtedly.
Most of what they had left was simply what they could not carry, or whatever they had found to be worthless.
It was surprising, really. Were the makers of these pieces materialist-minded, they would’ve been flattered to know that foreigners liked their craft so much. Or, she realized with a familiar, sinking resignation, the looters were just after the precious metals that made up the pieces.
The door to the garden clicked open.
“Your Majesty?”
Palki looked up, but did not turn around to look at her visitor. “Yes, Captain?”
“There’s someone here to see you.”
“Is it a messenger from the High-Crested again?”
“It is.”
“Tell them I am busy.”
“Of course. Any specific?”
The Queen got up, taking a final look at her metal garden.
“No.”
Metalworking was a skill taught early in life to every Elenrian. If one could not make even a horseshoe, they at least knew how to conduct a basic melt out of a broken pot or engrave a iron pot with their name. The ancient history annuls in the royal library that Palki had spent much of her childhood exploring had long given up trying to understand when it started, and instead dedicated their pages to the recording of techniques for the art of metalworking.
Palki took a look around the forge, breathing in the fresh air of the outdoor workplace. It was hardly anything glamorous, and certainly nothing that rivaled the sophistication of the steel mills that she had heard of being built in Pactstei. No, here the equipment was old, worn, and honestly an ugly kind of plain, with simple ceramic tiling covering the roof and plain brick for the floor. That was to say nothing of the building’s main feature: it was almost entirely built around a blast furnace that was nearly twice Palki’s height, with rails and winches that led from it to the workspace, alongside coal scuppers built into the floor to fuel it.
The shelves were lined with all manners of containers, containing everything from piles of broken farming equipment and crates deformed crockery to bins of slags and jars of powdered metal. They were organized like books- neatly sorted in order of mineral and size, kept tidy by the occasional servant, but otherwise wholly left to the Queen’s decisions for organization. In no hurry, she paced around, examining each shelf with her hands tucked behind her back, restlessly tapping her dress.
She liked to think of her problems like scrap and slag. They were misshapen accidents sometimes, consequences of carelessness, and other times they were simply byproducts: unavoidable results of a project that were necessary to make another project succeed. By themselves, problems were obstacles. Useless thoughts that blotted out her mind like how they took up space on the shelves. Sure, she had plenty of space, but she kept piling up more and more by the day. If she sat down and wallowed, she’d just watch a mountain of problems build until it teetered over and crushed her.
She picked up a cracked pot from a bin of scrap, examining the worn handles and scorched underside. Spots in the metal where previous cracks had been patched by the last owner, but nonetheless those stopgaps had evidently not prevented the pot from deteriorating further. An enormous breach had eventually opened from the lip of the pot to the middle, maybe from temperature deformation, maybe from being dropped. In any case, it had been thrown out, and here it was now.
But it wasn’t as if she couldn’t solve those problems.
She hefted the pot and an armful of steel slag into a bucket and lifted it onto a hanging scale. There was enough for seven ingots, not counting however much would end up as slag or what would be lost to heat. She scavenged some more pieces of scrap metal from the forge’s shelves: some ruined pots someone had thrown out and a breastplate that was probably more antique than just outdated at this point.
A glance at the crucible she had set aside for the forge told her these pieces were still too big. She took an axe from her tools and set the breastplate over the anvil and held half of it down. The sharp end wouldn’t be necessary- she just needed to downsize the piece to fit in the crucible.
A sharp crack and the clatter of metal echoed throughout the forge as she struck the armor piece with the blunt end of the axe, severing it in half. She picked up the fallen chunk and stacked on the other before hacking it in half again. It was hardly a clean cut, but that wasn’t point- all that mattered was that it would fit in the crucible. She took the scrap and flattened it before placing it into the graphite cup of the crucible.
Her lower horns perked up at the sound of something crunching outside.
She instinctively perked up, frowning. Her guards usually didn’t stand near this part of the forge, especially not when she’d be working with a hammer.
It was wintertime outside, and she could see the drifting dots of snow drifting down from the sky from the open oil-paper windows. She shook her head- she must be seeing things. Maybe a guard was just seeking refuge from the weather. She turned back to her work.
She hefted the laden crucible to the furnace, sliding the large crucible within the maw of the interior chamber. She shut the heavy door after it, then piling coke fuel into the fuel basin from the gate at the base of the furnace. The fire needed to retain a constant heat- and accordingly, she needed to make sure the fuel stayed plentiful. She got on a knee and patted about the tiles until the solid reports eventually revealed a handle; yanking it open, she revealed a reserve of coke fuel and a coal scuttle, which she promptly filled and set aside.
Now, fire. Without thinking, she huffed and blew sharply, feeling fluid in her body race up her throat and ignite in the presence of air, only for it to sputter out as she let her tongue move and seal off the fluid. She felt her gut contract painfully as she inhaled smoke, choking and doubling over in a fit of hacking and sputtering. Squinting through the pain, she crawled upright and gulped air into all four lungs, blinking tears out of her eyes.
In the brief moment that followed, the door to her forge flew open with a bang as several wide-eyed royal guards burst in with their weapons drawn, only to behold an equally bewildered Palki on the floor with smoke lazily drifting from her nostrils.
The decorated helmet visors of her guards drifted from the open fuel gate to the scuttle, realization dawning on them even as Palki waved at them. “I’m fine,” she muttered, spitting a yellowish glob into the furnace. “Just… need to get better at this.”
Her guards glanced at one another. “Are you certain, Your Majesty? We can light the furnace for you.”
She shook her head. “No, I was just being hasty.”
Hasty. Everything in her life moved so fast, too fast! How was she supposed to keep up?
As her guards bowed and made their leave, she turned back and looked at the stove.
So fast. Her coronation had been over before she had even arrived for it. Her future had been decided before she had even gotten home to Kesternrim, her mother dead before she had ever said goodbye.
She could feel tears brimming in her eyes. Oh, it wasn’t fair! Why did everything go on without her? Wasn’t she supposed to be a Queen? What kind of Queen just sat there while everyone around her died?
A long time ago she had been a officer candidate in a royal army, deep within a searing desert. She was nobody to the big officers that came through despite the crown on her head, and the title on her name. But yet she had been everything to her fellow soldiers, from captains to privates, from sentries to cooks.
She wasn’t ‘Queen Akel the Second’ to them- to them her she was just Palki. Palki, named after the oasis their outpost was built around. Palki, the little inselni officer candidate , the rookie, who slipped and fell into the oasis the first time she’d been sent to retrieve water. She had friends there, people who grinned genuinely at her bad cooking, not out of flattery, but out of kindness.
Angrily, the Inselni wiped her tears away with a jewel-encrusted hand. Why was she crying? She was Queen! Queen!
Queen of what?
Well? What was she Queen of? She couldn’t even light a fire. What kind of Elenrian couldn’t do something that simple?
Stupid, stupid. If she had more time, she would've known how! Her tutors would've taught her the day she got home from the army!
But she had never gotten home like planned. She'd just gotten a letter that fateful day, summoning her to Aundui Yio. Two days later, she was Queen. Three days, and she was groveling at a Kumo's feet. And here she was, still without a clue, unprepared for anything life had in store!
It was all so unfair. Life was hasty, not her.
She got up and took a deep breath.
A cyclone of emotions turned over in her belly as she exhaled, exhuming a dark plume of smoke.
There was no use being angry. It wouldn’t fix anything now.
As she breathed in again, she felt the fluid once again race up her body. She was prepared this time, and taking one last look at the open belly of the furnace, blew.
Fire gushed out of her mouth in a stream of blue and white flames, bathing the coke fuel in great temperatures that set them alight within moments. In the process though, ash and dust was kicked up from the scuttle and flew directly into her face.
Palki recoiled, coughing, feeling the fluid recede back into her gut as she sat back and watched the fire rise for a moment, then shut the fueling hatch after a moment. She stepped to the bellow system, controlled by a cord that hung from the ceiling, next to an elevated platform. She stepped onto the platform, using her body’s weight as leverage to work the pumps, stepping off the platform to weigh down the bellows, then getting back up to the platform to do it again.
The sighs of the bellows were drowned as the fire within the blast furnace roared and crackled with the constant infusion of air. It took fifteen minutes for the metal to melt, but before it could finish, Palki stepped off from the bellows to grab a mold.
She retrieved and put on her heavy leather metalworking apron, as well as a pair of goggles for eye protection before bringing over a stack of basic ingot molds. She wasn’t really in the mood for a complex project anyway, so regular steel ingots would do. She stepped back to the furnace and waited for the flame to die out in the absence of air, watching the fire slowly flicker out.
Slipping on heavy gloves, the Queen unlatched the doors of the furnace, wielding a pair of tongs to retrieve the white-hot crucible, the contents distorting the heat around it from the temperature alone.
Setting the crucible on the floor of the forge, she scooped the slag off the surface with a steel spoon, depositing the unwanted byproduct into a small pile of embers on the floor before taking up the crucible once more with the tongs.
Wasting no time, she brought the crucible to the molds, which she’d heated up with a quick breath each, gently pouring them in one by one. The glowing bars were slow to cool, and as she poured the last of the molds, she set the still-filled crucible aside to empty the occupied molds of their barely solid bars, depositing the radiant orange and golden bricks of steel on the floor, each with a resounding clatter. She repeated the process until all of the molten steel had been deposited, and at the end she sat down on the floor to watch the bars cool.
There was something calming to her about watching the bars slowly turn from the glowing orange-gold to a darker, greyish hue. No doubt the cold of the mountain was helping cool it faster than usual, but it nevertheless felt like an eternity as Yian looked at each bar.
Then she frowned, noticing how one of the bars was malformed. That wouldn’t do.
It was still fairly hot as she picked it up with her tongs, but not enough for her to reform it as it was. Frustrated, she hurled the bar at the floor, watching it spark against the tiles as it clattered loudly, as if that would solve its problems.
She picked up again with the tongs and brought it to the anvil, desperately whacking at it in the hopes of reshaping it correctly, only to be met with a worse condition.
“Piece of shit,” she hissed angrily, throwing down her tools.
She didn’t know if she was referring to herself or the bar as she threw herself on the floor, hugging her legs as she glared at the metal bar.
“Your Majesty.”
Startled, Palki scrambled about to her feet, seizing a poker for a weapon from its place in the fuel hatch.
“Who’s there?”
She whirled around, breathing hard, wielding the Poker like a baton. The front end was still white hot from where it had bathed in the embers, enough threat for any attempt against her life, at least until she could call for help.
“A loyal servant, Your Majesty,” the voice replied quietly.
The window. She had thought it was a curtain, but looking around, the building didn’t have curtains. No, she’d been looking at someone’s coat this whole time like a complete idiot.
“I’m sure you are,” Palki replied breathlessly. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“I will explain in due time, Your Majesty.” There was an urgency in the intruder’s voice that caused them to shift at their place beside the window. If Palki had to guess, they were trying to avoid being spotted by guards. “I came to deliver a message to you.”
“A likely tale,” the Queen spat. “If one of mine, then you’ve no reason to hide your face. Show yourself.”
There was no hesitation for the messenger to step into view of the window, starting at the burning point of the poker pointed at their neck. They were masked in a bundle of dark fabrics dusted with snow, no doubt for travel to Kesternrim’s location upon the Yasuhiro’s peaks. Nevertheles despite the white point of the poker near their throat, they reached towards their face and removed a metal faceplate, revealing the face of a human Crown. His hardmarks depicted included familiar markings, making Palki frown as she tried to recall where’d she seen it before.
She lowered the poker ever so slightly.
Yian frowned. “Have we met before?”
“No,” the messenger admitted, encouraged by the Queen’s less aggressive stance. He cast a skittish glance behind. “But Minister Sekra sent me to tell you there are still loyalists within the government who support you.”
Sekra. That’s right, the Minister of the Interior Office. She’d seen the older inselni official once or twice at official functions, but that’s her facial markings matched the hardmarks of the messenger: an honorable bond. That bid well for the messenger’s own credibility, seeing how Sekra was a Martial personally sworn to her instead of Takpoe.
“Of course they do.” Palki growled. “Let me guess: they want me to pat their doctrines and laws with my assent so they can go and do who-knows-what while I sit in here.”
So the messenger probably wasn’t here to kill her. That was a nice upgrade to how her mother had died. She let the poker’s point rest on the tiled floor with a solid plink.
“No, Your Majesty. Minister Sekra wishes to restore you to the throne, and to reform the regency to an advisory body.”
Palki was stunned silent for a moment, before suddenly chuckling.
There was no jubilation to it. It was not dry, mocking, or angry. The messenger, surprised, took a careful step back, the Queen tossed the poker aside with a clatter.
“Why?”
“What do you mean, Your Majesty?” The messenger had not expected this reaction- if anything, he’d expected anything but this reaction.
“Why now? They’ve had years to do it. Why now?” Her hands were no longer balled into fists- instead they hung by her side, before her wings as she sank to the surface of the anvil, seating herself upon its surface. She sounded exhausted.
“I don’t know, Your Majesty,” the messenger whispered. “I’m just the messenger.”
The Queen stared at the messenger. “Can I confide in you, messenger?”
The man was visibly taken aback. “Of course, Your Majesty.”
She stared off at the still-warm furnace for a moment before speaking. “I don’t think much will change. Restoration or not, I am figurehead- and a figurehead I will remain.”
“But surely you don’t want to stay one!” The man cried indignantly. She could see a clawing desperation in his face, disbelieving that she would seemingly accept her position as it was.
“That is not up to me.” Palki sighed. “It is up to whoever has the most power afterwards. Maybe the Kumo Governor? Maybe some general? But I have no power. Could I act? Certainly! And I would doom myself and all fifty of my guards to certain death, with precious little to show.”
She turned to the messenger again, sorrow resting behind her eyes. “If you are really a messenger for this supposed clique of royalists, then go and tell Minister Sekra I said no. I will not answer to someone I have barely seen, let alone to someone I have not seen since my coronation. Go- I will not have the guards come after you.”
The messenger opened his mouth in protest, then thought better of it. Resignedly, he bowed before her and made his leave.
Palki watched him go and shook her head. For a brief moment, she entertained the notion of retaking the throne, actually ruling as Queen-
But no. The probable reality of it all was that she’d let someone who was probably at the least a trespasser or spy in, and worst just evaded an assassination.
Nevertheless, she’d given the messenger her word to let him go. She sighed, and made her way to the the door to notify her men. She hadn’t even put her hand on the doorknob when she heard shouting from her guards.
“Captain!”
Outside, she beheld the sight of her guards accosting the messenger at gunpoint. The messenger looked fairly calm, but the panicky way they glanced from the rifles pointed at them to her said enough about his internal thought process.
“Your Majesty,” the Captain replied, their revolver still leveled at the man. “We caught this man trying to sneak about the courtyard-”
“Let him go.” Palki commanded tiredly. “He popped up by my window claiming to be sent by Minister Sekra of the Interior Office. Whether or not that’s true, I gave him my guarantee of safe passage to leave the Citadel.”
Exasperation flicked across the Captain’s face briefly as they looked at the other royal guards. “Escort him out,” she barked. She turned back to the Queen shaking her head. “With respect, Your Majesty, you ought’ve called for us.”
“I should’ve.” Palki agreed sullenly. She put her hands on her hips as she watched the messenger disappear through the doors of the palace, led and followed by several guards.
She sighed.
“What if the High-Crested are right, Captain?”
Her guard frowned cocked their head to the side, looking at her. “About what, Your Majesty?”
“That I’m not fit to lead. I let a potential assassin or spy in, heaven’s sake, and then proceeded to let them go. When the High-Crested coronated me and told me to grovel before the Kumo Empress for mercy, I did exactly as I was told. When they shut me in the Citadel, I willingly told the officer corps of the old Royal Army to do as they saw fit, and now a bunch of them are thugs and bandits out in the countryside from what I know. Just how gullible am I?”
Her guard was quiet long enough that Palki began to figure they were doing so deliberately.
“You were deprived of advisors.”
Palki snorted. “Duly noted, I’ll tell the High-Crested that the next time they show up for a photograph that they should do their job.”
The Captain grunted without humor. “Every Queen was given an assembly of advisors- Martials, primarily. They were to live in the Citadel with you and advise on all matters concerning the Queendom. Each one was hand-slected by their predecessor to fit the next Queen when their coronation came, and many times over the same advisor would serve another Queen.”
“But I don’t have that,” she responded quietly. “I went from the army outpost watchtower to the paving stones of Aundui Yio. My coronation consisted of a certificate with my name on it.”
The Captain looked to the side aimlessly at the falling snow. “You were robbed.”
Palki nodded morosely. “But instead I’m blind and deaf in my own domain.”
“Hardly your fault.”
“Maybe.”
The Queen looked down at her dress. She was still wearing the leather smock, soot coating its dense surface no being sprinkled with the late spring snow of the mountain. She recalled stories she had been told, how every Queen’s dress never matched any other- some more gaudy with jewels and elaborate patterns, others innumerable links of chainmail that lined their clothing from head to toe, and even some who wore the garb of Wanderers, a bizzare mash of fashion, armor, and utility alike.
Their dress had denoted their personality and their focus- over time, what fell apart would be replaced by what felt was appropriate. Jewels would be shed for armor links in the face of war, chainmail discarded for decorative patterns with a prosperous century of successful Expeditions.
Her dress right now was plain- just a simple metalworker’s smock, tied around a plain grey cotton dress She wondered what it would look like in a few centuries.
“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, taking off her goggles. “How I would rule as Queen.”
The Captain laughed.
“Then I hope you’re good at taking responsibility."
"For myself?"
"For others. Especially others."
Though there was a sunroof for light to illuminate the plot, it didn’t need it. The petals and leaves were made of delicately crafted metals, from copper to gold. Not one was alike to another, and most were crude - only a few, it seemed, were made by skilled artisans.
The silver-gold lotus she held was one such of the many former. Several petals were misshapen, and small holes and voids dotted the terrain of the ornament here and there, but it was visible that great effort had been made to fix it. The voids and holes had been painstakingly covered with leaf and the burn stains around lumps in the metal told Palki that the maker had breathed their fire gently upon the surface, trying to flatten and smooth the mistakes.
She smiled sadly.
This was the last present her mother had given her. If she had to sell the lot, this piece would’ve been worth the least. But then again, that was why it was here, wasn’t it?
She leaned forwards and set the flower back in its place among the other lotuses upon the colored glass pond. There weren’t a lot- only a handful remained.
That was her fault.
Kumo soldiers, when they had first arrived in her palace, ransacked the place. They’d found the garden and made off with countless artifacts, made off with memories of her family, of her status as Queen. The lapis tiles that had lined the entire plot had been torn up and put into satchels, the fragile glass and platinum bulbs modeled after exotic flowers stuffed into rucksacks, and even the birds hewn from marble and redwood had been looted off their perches to end up in some flea market in Kumosenkan, undoubtedly.
Most of what they had left was simply what they could not carry, or whatever they had found to be worthless.
It was surprising, really. Were the makers of these pieces materialist-minded, they would’ve been flattered to know that foreigners liked their craft so much. Or, she realized with a familiar, sinking resignation, the looters were just after the precious metals that made up the pieces.
The door to the garden clicked open.
“Your Majesty?”
Palki looked up, but did not turn around to look at her visitor. “Yes, Captain?”
“There’s someone here to see you.”
“Is it a messenger from the High-Crested again?”
“It is.”
“Tell them I am busy.”
“Of course. Any specific?”
The Queen got up, taking a final look at her metal garden.
“No.”
Metalworking was a skill taught early in life to every Elenrian. If one could not make even a horseshoe, they at least knew how to conduct a basic melt out of a broken pot or engrave a iron pot with their name. The ancient history annuls in the royal library that Palki had spent much of her childhood exploring had long given up trying to understand when it started, and instead dedicated their pages to the recording of techniques for the art of metalworking.
Palki took a look around the forge, breathing in the fresh air of the outdoor workplace. It was hardly anything glamorous, and certainly nothing that rivaled the sophistication of the steel mills that she had heard of being built in Pactstei. No, here the equipment was old, worn, and honestly an ugly kind of plain, with simple ceramic tiling covering the roof and plain brick for the floor. That was to say nothing of the building’s main feature: it was almost entirely built around a blast furnace that was nearly twice Palki’s height, with rails and winches that led from it to the workspace, alongside coal scuppers built into the floor to fuel it.
The shelves were lined with all manners of containers, containing everything from piles of broken farming equipment and crates deformed crockery to bins of slags and jars of powdered metal. They were organized like books- neatly sorted in order of mineral and size, kept tidy by the occasional servant, but otherwise wholly left to the Queen’s decisions for organization. In no hurry, she paced around, examining each shelf with her hands tucked behind her back, restlessly tapping her dress.
She liked to think of her problems like scrap and slag. They were misshapen accidents sometimes, consequences of carelessness, and other times they were simply byproducts: unavoidable results of a project that were necessary to make another project succeed. By themselves, problems were obstacles. Useless thoughts that blotted out her mind like how they took up space on the shelves. Sure, she had plenty of space, but she kept piling up more and more by the day. If she sat down and wallowed, she’d just watch a mountain of problems build until it teetered over and crushed her.
She picked up a cracked pot from a bin of scrap, examining the worn handles and scorched underside. Spots in the metal where previous cracks had been patched by the last owner, but nonetheless those stopgaps had evidently not prevented the pot from deteriorating further. An enormous breach had eventually opened from the lip of the pot to the middle, maybe from temperature deformation, maybe from being dropped. In any case, it had been thrown out, and here it was now.
But it wasn’t as if she couldn’t solve those problems.
She hefted the pot and an armful of steel slag into a bucket and lifted it onto a hanging scale. There was enough for seven ingots, not counting however much would end up as slag or what would be lost to heat. She scavenged some more pieces of scrap metal from the forge’s shelves: some ruined pots someone had thrown out and a breastplate that was probably more antique than just outdated at this point.
A glance at the crucible she had set aside for the forge told her these pieces were still too big. She took an axe from her tools and set the breastplate over the anvil and held half of it down. The sharp end wouldn’t be necessary- she just needed to downsize the piece to fit in the crucible.
A sharp crack and the clatter of metal echoed throughout the forge as she struck the armor piece with the blunt end of the axe, severing it in half. She picked up the fallen chunk and stacked on the other before hacking it in half again. It was hardly a clean cut, but that wasn’t point- all that mattered was that it would fit in the crucible. She took the scrap and flattened it before placing it into the graphite cup of the crucible.
Her lower horns perked up at the sound of something crunching outside.
She instinctively perked up, frowning. Her guards usually didn’t stand near this part of the forge, especially not when she’d be working with a hammer.
It was wintertime outside, and she could see the drifting dots of snow drifting down from the sky from the open oil-paper windows. She shook her head- she must be seeing things. Maybe a guard was just seeking refuge from the weather. She turned back to her work.
She hefted the laden crucible to the furnace, sliding the large crucible within the maw of the interior chamber. She shut the heavy door after it, then piling coke fuel into the fuel basin from the gate at the base of the furnace. The fire needed to retain a constant heat- and accordingly, she needed to make sure the fuel stayed plentiful. She got on a knee and patted about the tiles until the solid reports eventually revealed a handle; yanking it open, she revealed a reserve of coke fuel and a coal scuttle, which she promptly filled and set aside.
Now, fire. Without thinking, she huffed and blew sharply, feeling fluid in her body race up her throat and ignite in the presence of air, only for it to sputter out as she let her tongue move and seal off the fluid. She felt her gut contract painfully as she inhaled smoke, choking and doubling over in a fit of hacking and sputtering. Squinting through the pain, she crawled upright and gulped air into all four lungs, blinking tears out of her eyes.
In the brief moment that followed, the door to her forge flew open with a bang as several wide-eyed royal guards burst in with their weapons drawn, only to behold an equally bewildered Palki on the floor with smoke lazily drifting from her nostrils.
The decorated helmet visors of her guards drifted from the open fuel gate to the scuttle, realization dawning on them even as Palki waved at them. “I’m fine,” she muttered, spitting a yellowish glob into the furnace. “Just… need to get better at this.”
Her guards glanced at one another. “Are you certain, Your Majesty? We can light the furnace for you.”
She shook her head. “No, I was just being hasty.”
Hasty. Everything in her life moved so fast, too fast! How was she supposed to keep up?
As her guards bowed and made their leave, she turned back and looked at the stove.
So fast. Her coronation had been over before she had even arrived for it. Her future had been decided before she had even gotten home to Kesternrim, her mother dead before she had ever said goodbye.
She could feel tears brimming in her eyes. Oh, it wasn’t fair! Why did everything go on without her? Wasn’t she supposed to be a Queen? What kind of Queen just sat there while everyone around her died?
A long time ago she had been a officer candidate in a royal army, deep within a searing desert. She was nobody to the big officers that came through despite the crown on her head, and the title on her name. But yet she had been everything to her fellow soldiers, from captains to privates, from sentries to cooks.
She wasn’t ‘Queen Akel the Second’ to them- to them her she was just Palki. Palki, named after the oasis their outpost was built around. Palki, the little inselni officer candidate , the rookie, who slipped and fell into the oasis the first time she’d been sent to retrieve water. She had friends there, people who grinned genuinely at her bad cooking, not out of flattery, but out of kindness.
Angrily, the Inselni wiped her tears away with a jewel-encrusted hand. Why was she crying? She was Queen! Queen!
Queen of what?
Well? What was she Queen of? She couldn’t even light a fire. What kind of Elenrian couldn’t do something that simple?
Stupid, stupid. If she had more time, she would've known how! Her tutors would've taught her the day she got home from the army!
But she had never gotten home like planned. She'd just gotten a letter that fateful day, summoning her to Aundui Yio. Two days later, she was Queen. Three days, and she was groveling at a Kumo's feet. And here she was, still without a clue, unprepared for anything life had in store!
It was all so unfair. Life was hasty, not her.
She got up and took a deep breath.
A cyclone of emotions turned over in her belly as she exhaled, exhuming a dark plume of smoke.
There was no use being angry. It wouldn’t fix anything now.
As she breathed in again, she felt the fluid once again race up her body. She was prepared this time, and taking one last look at the open belly of the furnace, blew.
Fire gushed out of her mouth in a stream of blue and white flames, bathing the coke fuel in great temperatures that set them alight within moments. In the process though, ash and dust was kicked up from the scuttle and flew directly into her face.
Palki recoiled, coughing, feeling the fluid recede back into her gut as she sat back and watched the fire rise for a moment, then shut the fueling hatch after a moment. She stepped to the bellow system, controlled by a cord that hung from the ceiling, next to an elevated platform. She stepped onto the platform, using her body’s weight as leverage to work the pumps, stepping off the platform to weigh down the bellows, then getting back up to the platform to do it again.
The sighs of the bellows were drowned as the fire within the blast furnace roared and crackled with the constant infusion of air. It took fifteen minutes for the metal to melt, but before it could finish, Palki stepped off from the bellows to grab a mold.
She retrieved and put on her heavy leather metalworking apron, as well as a pair of goggles for eye protection before bringing over a stack of basic ingot molds. She wasn’t really in the mood for a complex project anyway, so regular steel ingots would do. She stepped back to the furnace and waited for the flame to die out in the absence of air, watching the fire slowly flicker out.
Slipping on heavy gloves, the Queen unlatched the doors of the furnace, wielding a pair of tongs to retrieve the white-hot crucible, the contents distorting the heat around it from the temperature alone.
Setting the crucible on the floor of the forge, she scooped the slag off the surface with a steel spoon, depositing the unwanted byproduct into a small pile of embers on the floor before taking up the crucible once more with the tongs.
Wasting no time, she brought the crucible to the molds, which she’d heated up with a quick breath each, gently pouring them in one by one. The glowing bars were slow to cool, and as she poured the last of the molds, she set the still-filled crucible aside to empty the occupied molds of their barely solid bars, depositing the radiant orange and golden bricks of steel on the floor, each with a resounding clatter. She repeated the process until all of the molten steel had been deposited, and at the end she sat down on the floor to watch the bars cool.
There was something calming to her about watching the bars slowly turn from the glowing orange-gold to a darker, greyish hue. No doubt the cold of the mountain was helping cool it faster than usual, but it nevertheless felt like an eternity as Yian looked at each bar.
Then she frowned, noticing how one of the bars was malformed. That wouldn’t do.
It was still fairly hot as she picked it up with her tongs, but not enough for her to reform it as it was. Frustrated, she hurled the bar at the floor, watching it spark against the tiles as it clattered loudly, as if that would solve its problems.
She picked up again with the tongs and brought it to the anvil, desperately whacking at it in the hopes of reshaping it correctly, only to be met with a worse condition.
“Piece of shit,” she hissed angrily, throwing down her tools.
She didn’t know if she was referring to herself or the bar as she threw herself on the floor, hugging her legs as she glared at the metal bar.
“Your Majesty.”
Startled, Palki scrambled about to her feet, seizing a poker for a weapon from its place in the fuel hatch.
“Who’s there?”
She whirled around, breathing hard, wielding the Poker like a baton. The front end was still white hot from where it had bathed in the embers, enough threat for any attempt against her life, at least until she could call for help.
“A loyal servant, Your Majesty,” the voice replied quietly.
The window. She had thought it was a curtain, but looking around, the building didn’t have curtains. No, she’d been looking at someone’s coat this whole time like a complete idiot.
“I’m sure you are,” Palki replied breathlessly. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“I will explain in due time, Your Majesty.” There was an urgency in the intruder’s voice that caused them to shift at their place beside the window. If Palki had to guess, they were trying to avoid being spotted by guards. “I came to deliver a message to you.”
“A likely tale,” the Queen spat. “If one of mine, then you’ve no reason to hide your face. Show yourself.”
There was no hesitation for the messenger to step into view of the window, starting at the burning point of the poker pointed at their neck. They were masked in a bundle of dark fabrics dusted with snow, no doubt for travel to Kesternrim’s location upon the Yasuhiro’s peaks. Nevertheles despite the white point of the poker near their throat, they reached towards their face and removed a metal faceplate, revealing the face of a human Crown. His hardmarks depicted included familiar markings, making Palki frown as she tried to recall where’d she seen it before.
She lowered the poker ever so slightly.
Yian frowned. “Have we met before?”
“No,” the messenger admitted, encouraged by the Queen’s less aggressive stance. He cast a skittish glance behind. “But Minister Sekra sent me to tell you there are still loyalists within the government who support you.”
Sekra. That’s right, the Minister of the Interior Office. She’d seen the older inselni official once or twice at official functions, but that’s her facial markings matched the hardmarks of the messenger: an honorable bond. That bid well for the messenger’s own credibility, seeing how Sekra was a Martial personally sworn to her instead of Takpoe.
“Of course they do.” Palki growled. “Let me guess: they want me to pat their doctrines and laws with my assent so they can go and do who-knows-what while I sit in here.”
So the messenger probably wasn’t here to kill her. That was a nice upgrade to how her mother had died. She let the poker’s point rest on the tiled floor with a solid plink.
“No, Your Majesty. Minister Sekra wishes to restore you to the throne, and to reform the regency to an advisory body.”
Palki was stunned silent for a moment, before suddenly chuckling.
There was no jubilation to it. It was not dry, mocking, or angry. The messenger, surprised, took a careful step back, the Queen tossed the poker aside with a clatter.
“Why?”
“What do you mean, Your Majesty?” The messenger had not expected this reaction- if anything, he’d expected anything but this reaction.
“Why now? They’ve had years to do it. Why now?” Her hands were no longer balled into fists- instead they hung by her side, before her wings as she sank to the surface of the anvil, seating herself upon its surface. She sounded exhausted.
“I don’t know, Your Majesty,” the messenger whispered. “I’m just the messenger.”
The Queen stared at the messenger. “Can I confide in you, messenger?”
The man was visibly taken aback. “Of course, Your Majesty.”
She stared off at the still-warm furnace for a moment before speaking. “I don’t think much will change. Restoration or not, I am figurehead- and a figurehead I will remain.”
“But surely you don’t want to stay one!” The man cried indignantly. She could see a clawing desperation in his face, disbelieving that she would seemingly accept her position as it was.
“That is not up to me.” Palki sighed. “It is up to whoever has the most power afterwards. Maybe the Kumo Governor? Maybe some general? But I have no power. Could I act? Certainly! And I would doom myself and all fifty of my guards to certain death, with precious little to show.”
She turned to the messenger again, sorrow resting behind her eyes. “If you are really a messenger for this supposed clique of royalists, then go and tell Minister Sekra I said no. I will not answer to someone I have barely seen, let alone to someone I have not seen since my coronation. Go- I will not have the guards come after you.”
The messenger opened his mouth in protest, then thought better of it. Resignedly, he bowed before her and made his leave.
Palki watched him go and shook her head. For a brief moment, she entertained the notion of retaking the throne, actually ruling as Queen-
But no. The probable reality of it all was that she’d let someone who was probably at the least a trespasser or spy in, and worst just evaded an assassination.
Nevertheless, she’d given the messenger her word to let him go. She sighed, and made her way to the the door to notify her men. She hadn’t even put her hand on the doorknob when she heard shouting from her guards.
“Captain!”
Outside, she beheld the sight of her guards accosting the messenger at gunpoint. The messenger looked fairly calm, but the panicky way they glanced from the rifles pointed at them to her said enough about his internal thought process.
“Your Majesty,” the Captain replied, their revolver still leveled at the man. “We caught this man trying to sneak about the courtyard-”
“Let him go.” Palki commanded tiredly. “He popped up by my window claiming to be sent by Minister Sekra of the Interior Office. Whether or not that’s true, I gave him my guarantee of safe passage to leave the Citadel.”
Exasperation flicked across the Captain’s face briefly as they looked at the other royal guards. “Escort him out,” she barked. She turned back to the Queen shaking her head. “With respect, Your Majesty, you ought’ve called for us.”
“I should’ve.” Palki agreed sullenly. She put her hands on her hips as she watched the messenger disappear through the doors of the palace, led and followed by several guards.
She sighed.
“What if the High-Crested are right, Captain?”
Her guard frowned cocked their head to the side, looking at her. “About what, Your Majesty?”
“That I’m not fit to lead. I let a potential assassin or spy in, heaven’s sake, and then proceeded to let them go. When the High-Crested coronated me and told me to grovel before the Kumo Empress for mercy, I did exactly as I was told. When they shut me in the Citadel, I willingly told the officer corps of the old Royal Army to do as they saw fit, and now a bunch of them are thugs and bandits out in the countryside from what I know. Just how gullible am I?”
Her guard was quiet long enough that Palki began to figure they were doing so deliberately.
“You were deprived of advisors.”
Palki snorted. “Duly noted, I’ll tell the High-Crested that the next time they show up for a photograph that they should do their job.”
The Captain grunted without humor. “Every Queen was given an assembly of advisors- Martials, primarily. They were to live in the Citadel with you and advise on all matters concerning the Queendom. Each one was hand-slected by their predecessor to fit the next Queen when their coronation came, and many times over the same advisor would serve another Queen.”
“But I don’t have that,” she responded quietly. “I went from the army outpost watchtower to the paving stones of Aundui Yio. My coronation consisted of a certificate with my name on it.”
The Captain looked to the side aimlessly at the falling snow. “You were robbed.”
Palki nodded morosely. “But instead I’m blind and deaf in my own domain.”
“Hardly your fault.”
“Maybe.”
The Queen looked down at her dress. She was still wearing the leather smock, soot coating its dense surface no being sprinkled with the late spring snow of the mountain. She recalled stories she had been told, how every Queen’s dress never matched any other- some more gaudy with jewels and elaborate patterns, others innumerable links of chainmail that lined their clothing from head to toe, and even some who wore the garb of Wanderers, a bizzare mash of fashion, armor, and utility alike.
Their dress had denoted their personality and their focus- over time, what fell apart would be replaced by what felt was appropriate. Jewels would be shed for armor links in the face of war, chainmail discarded for decorative patterns with a prosperous century of successful Expeditions.
Her dress right now was plain- just a simple metalworker’s smock, tied around a plain grey cotton dress She wondered what it would look like in a few centuries.
“Sometimes I wonder,” she said, taking off her goggles. “How I would rule as Queen.”
The Captain laughed.
“Then I hope you’re good at taking responsibility."
"For myself?"
"For others. Especially others."