Chapter Thirty One

Adramalak came to her again the following night. This time Mira was sitting up and waiting for him with a pitcher of wine.

He swelled like a cloud out of the shadows of her room, a tide of ember-flecked darkness that coalesced into the form of a man. He wasn’t blonde in those days, but he did have red eyes that shone with red-gold light. Otherwise, he was darkness given the form of a man. Black smoke and red motes of light drifted in his wake when he approached her.

“Have you come to kill me?” she asked and took a sip of her wine. It was a robust red, cherry sweet, and exactly the last taste she wanted on her tongue before the end. Judging by the events of the previous evening, she didn’t think that was going to happen, but she opened a bottle anyway. Just in case. “Or is this your attempt at terrorizing me?”

“What are these?” he asked, instead of answering, gesturing to the ropey blue scars that crossed her shoulders and peeked out through the neckline of her favorite gown. His clawed fingertips came close to brushing her skin and it reminded her of how needle-sharp those claws had felt against her vulnerable throat the night before.

“Spellpaint,” Mira replied curtly. “Do demons not have that?”

“We do,” Adramalak said and this time he did touch. “We don’t use it like this. Do you have any idea what you look like to me?”

“An ugly woman?” Mira guessed. She’d seen female demons and was aware that she could not possibly match their canons of beauty. She didn’t have horns, for one thing, or much in the way of breasts.

“A star barely being contained by a birdcage,” Adramalak said instead, much to her surprise. “Why do you tolerate it?”

Mira could have said just about anything, but what spilled out of her was instead just the plain and unvarnished truth. “I can’t get out,” she said. “Barely contained is still contained.”

Adramalak was quiet for a moment before he asked, “Do you want help?”

She stared at him, stunned all over again. The question fell into her peace of mind like a boulder into still water. She’d never… no one had ever…? She opened her mouth to speak and what came out instead was nothing. A hot tear spilled down her cheek, seemingly for no reason, but just the act of wiping it away led her to shed another and another and another until she was bent over in her seat sobbing into her own lap.

Eventually the storm passed and left her with the same cold reality she’d started with.

“No one can help me,” she said quietly (hollowly.) “So you’d better kill me, if you can.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Adramalak’s voice came from much closer than before and when Mira looked up, she found him kneeling in front of her bent over as though to shield her body from the empty room. From close up, his eyes looked like rubies that shaded into citrine around the perimeter of his slitted pupils. His gaze was alien, but so, so soft. “Do you want help?”

“Yes.” That answer surprised even Mira, even though she was the one who said it. The word just bubbled out of her, like the answer had existed deep inside her long before he’d ever asked the question.

She saw his teeth at last when he smiled and the darkness rose up around them like water. For an eldritch monster made out of living shadow and the enemy of her entire species, Adramalak smiled like a delighted child. She wanted to see him do it again.

That was probably when she first fell for him, in retrospect. Although, really, falling in love with him felt inevitable and it wasn’t like Mira put up a fight.

Adramalak installed her at his side as his queen and not even she would have predicted how well she fit in there. Demons respected strength above all else and Mira had killed enough demon bandits for word to spread among the population that she was very strong indeed; a suitable partner for their lord, just as soon as they could get the spellpaint off her.

While she wasn’t trained for statecraft, the army had inadvertently taught Mira leadership, logistics, and the art of war. Adra never asked her to take command of his armies or directly confront a human opponent. She would have, but that was a boundary he never wanted to cross. Instead, she began to take on more and more of his internal business. Adra’s dominion over the various demon factions was far from perfect and he was always troubled by a certain amount of infighting.

Even if she couldn’t use her magic, Mira became first respected for her abilities as a leader and then, to her surprise, even beloved by her new people. She worked hard. She got results. She didn’t waste lives. The demons saw her and accepted her in a way that her homeland never did. She had a handsome, passionate husband who she liked better with every passing day. She had people who repaid her care with loyalty. Bit by bit, Mira became happy.

It was a good life for a little while.

If Mira had only vanished from her bedroom, her father would have never suspected the demons. He would have assumed that Mira escaped or was abducted by a rival human state or had been left dead in a ditch somewhere to stop him from using her to cow his neighbors into paying him tribute. She could have lived out her entire life at Adra’s side and never been discovered—except that Adra sent out a wedding announcement.

In this context ‘announcement’ meant that a column of black fire erupted in the center of every city on the continent on the morning of her wedding to announce (in the voices of a demonic chorus and at a volume that reportedly blew out the eardrums of anyone standing too close to it) the blessed union of the Dark King Adramalak and Princess Alanamira Harmonia Erzbet Corrine II, now Dark Queen Alanamira the First. Long may they reign.

She didn’t find out about that until much later, when Adra finally had to admit why her father chose to rally his entire army to attack the border.

It was a long war that year, but eventually her father’s forces had to pull back when the weather became too much. There was a second campaign the following spring, but it didn’t go any better. The demons were more used to the cold and Mira had long ago assured that their territory was self-sufficient. The borderlanders might want to go raiding for luxuries, but they never needed to.

On the third year, Mira’s father tried something new.

Mira’s birth had marked the beginning of a new era in the magical potential of humans. There was still no human battlemage that could rival her, but other notable talents had sprung up over the years; brilliant swordsmen who could wield mana as part of their battle arts, healers who could close wounds with a touch, illusionists who could make illusions so real you could touch one without knowing the difference between it and the original, bards who could inspire magical confidence and fervor with their songs, and more. Mira’s father spared no expense in acquiring the best of these new talents and cementing their loyalty to him however he needed to. He created a guild network and bounty system that ensured they could always find work wherever they were in the country and, coincidentally, eliminated much of his domestic issues with monsters and the rampaging magical mutates that sometimes occurred across the land. By the time Mira eloped with Adra, the adventurers’ guild network had become very popular with the common folk and, by extension, so had Mira’s father.

A small team of these adventurers could rival the effectiveness of an entire platoon of regular soldiers and they could move with far greater stealth, making them an excellent strike force. Mira’s father gathered together the best of them by recruiting quietly through the guilds. Eventually, he assembled a crack team of special operatives to embark on a dangerous quest; to save his daughter.

Despite Adra’s announcement, no one really believed that Mira had left her home willingly or that she was now happily married. However, something unexpected happened in her absence. Mira’s people began to miss her; specifically, they missed the way she acted as a deterrent to the neighboring countries—although no one ever came out and said so.

People started writing soppy plays and songs about the Stolen Princess. The Abduction, as it came to be known, was a popular subject for statues and public frescos. Mira was usually depicted as a fragile maiden with miles of hair in a flimsy nightgown that barely contained her generous bosom, dangling in the clutches of a deformed gargoyle thing that was supposed to be Adramalak.

It wasn’t long before Mira became a living folk legend among her original people; more beautiful and virtuous in memory than she’d ever been in person.

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So the adventurers, when they agreed to embark upon this mission, didn’t know they were chasing someone who had never really existed. Mira’s father sweetened the pot further by promising their leader, the young scion of a minor noble family, Mira’s hand in marriage if he could bring her back safely.

Peleon Brightblade was exactly the sort of heir that Mira’s father had been in search of; popular, powerful, charismatic, and handsome. He was also headstrong, but malleable in front of the right father figure so he would do or think whatever his father-in-law told him to. Mira figured that her father planned on taking a partial retirement once his age caught up to him and would continue to hold onto his power as the King Emeritus, while his son in law dealt with the more annoying responsibilities of governance.

He certainly looked the part of a hero with his shining gold hair and broad shoulders, although he was cold to new acquaintances at first. He reportedly was warmer with the rest of his crew, which consisted of Melody the Godservant, Lasol the Bulwark, Markim the Wanderer, Able the Brawler, and Tio the Minstrel.

Peleon’s Blades operated in the borderlands for a while before Mira became aware of them. After all, almost no usable intelligence escaped the territory on her watch so it took them a while to figure out where she even was.