All Hail Chaos (Time of Iron #2)
Prologue Trapped in the Narrative
BEFORE THE FIRST CHAPTER
Trapped in the Narrative
The Emperor offered his claw in marriage to the woman who had betrayed him. He had re-forged his magical gauntlets into sinister weapons, fingers knife-sharp and enchantment-bright, as he had re-forged himself into a monster of shadow and moonlight to be feared by all.
Even this woman. Known as the Beauty Dipped In Blood, false as she was fair. She who kissed the lips that ordered the Emperor’s throat cut. As guilty as if she slit his throat with her own hands.
Lady Rahela could read the future in the night sky, but she never foretold the lowly guard she cast aside would rise revealed as the son of the gods.
None truly knew the Emperor. Not yet.
The world would learn.
No blade could end his life, no tombstone hold his body down. The dead rose from the abyss to serve him, and storm clouds formed his image against the broken moon.
The destined Emperor had returned to take his crown. And his revenge.
Fire and smoke rose in the dark red imperial gaze, fixed upon her face. A crimson ravine yawned wide. She saw her death in his eyes.
The Emperor said, “Be my evil queen.”
The offer sounded like a threat. The night air was thick with the fires of war and the moans of the dead. Any woman with sense, or survival instincts, would hesitate.
Rahela laid her hand in the monster’s claw.
Like the light of wicked red flame dancing on white snow, the lady glittered with terrible new purpose. “I will.”
“Why is this woman still alive?” Alice muttered aloud to the page. “The Emperor murders everybody. I cannot believe he hasn’t killed her yet.”
Lady Rahela was a wicked villain in Alice Parilla’s favourite book series, and she should be dead. Alice could swear she remembered Rahela dying much earlier in the story.
Time of Iron was the first book in an epic fantasy series about shining knights serving beauties, lost duels, lost hopes and dreams of dragons, sacrifice and death.
Casual readers referred to the series as the Time of Iron books, using the title of the first book.
True fans knew it was actually called The Once and Forever Emperor series.
A book by any name can be life-changing.
These books had found Alice at the time she needed them most. When she wanted to cry about her life but couldn’t, Alice read fictional death scenes and knew the release of tears.
These were her comfort books, each page a security blanket for the soul.
At any time over the last five years, Alice would have said she knew the books better than anyone.
Until now.
The door opened. Alice brought her book up like a shield.
Using books as shields wasn’t new for Alice, but it was different here.
Expecting bad news at a hospital made you feel like a hunted animal in a forest, starting at every sound.
Each time she heard a noise, Alice’s head jerked up involuntarily, trying to scent bad news on the air.
The entrance wasn’t a doctor. Alice’s mother appeared in a swirl of black leather coat and the aroma of coffee. She held two paper cups in a cardboard tray.
“I don’t drink coffee,” said Alice.
Her mother blinked. “Good. They’re both for me.”
Like Alice’s sister, Rae, the one who actually drank coffee, Clara Parilla would brazen out anything rather than admit fault.
Her mother sat with a sweep of her long coat, carefully not looking at the bed in the centre of the hospital room, and who lay in it.
Instead she nodded towards the volume in Alice’s hands.
“Enjoying the book?”
Alice let Time of Iron’s pages fly under her fingertips, scenes flickering like the highlights of a TV show during the “previously on” before a new episode began. Alice could almost hear the voice-over.
In the land of Eyam, where anything is possible, a lovers’ tragedy unfolds between a noble knight, an innocent beauty, and an evil, doomed Emperor… Until villainous side-character Lady Rahela hit the plot like a wrecking ball in a silk gown.
Alice had no one else to tell. “I’m fighting the book. Will you believe me if I say something impossible?”
“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” murmured Clara.
Alice leaned forward. “This isn’t the book I remember. I’m not joking. Honestly, it seems like my favourite book series changed into a different story overnight.”
Alice was stunned when her mother nodded with understanding. In Alice’s experience, parents rarely understood anything. It was as if they lived in a world where all the rules were different to the rules in yours.
“Right, the suck fairy.”
Sounds like a sex thing, Alice pictured her sister snickering.
As Rae wasn’t available to comment, Alice said, hesitantly, “Sounds like a sex thing?”
Her mother laughed. For a flicker of a second, Alice let herself glow. Alice always suspected she wasn’t funny. It felt like a victory to make her mother laugh, especially now.
Then Clara Parilla stopped laughing. She looked a little sad.
“It happens all the time. When you grow up, you lose stories. You pick up a book you loved as a kid, and the jokes you remember as laugh-out-loud funny don’t even make you smile.
The scene you recall as haunting and full of tension is a couple of barren lines, signifying nothing. Fairyland becomes a desert.”
A mother was as well known as a favourite bedtime story, the edge of every page curled up like a piece of old bread. Strange, to think there could be more to even the most familiar tale.
Alice eyed her mother with fascination. “I never see you reading books.”
“I was completely in love with a boy in a book about a secret garden.” Clara sighed reminiscently.
Alice was horror-struck. “Mom! Isn’t he twelve?”
“I was eight once. Book boyfriends: you get older, they stay the same age. It gets awkward.”
“Why don’t you read any more?”
Her mother’s face collapsed back into fraying lines of tension. “Who has time?”
Alice could never be like that. When you grow up, you lose stories?
No. Not if you held on to them. Alice knew she would always need stories to live on.
In stories, no matter how much you cried over the middle, everything usually worked out all right in the end.
Even if the ending was tragic, you understood why.
In stories, tragedy didn’t crash into your life with senseless brute force, smashing all you ever believed in.
Alice’s gaze kept being dragged towards the hospital bed, the way a black hole drew in and swallowed whatever came near. She resisted. She didn’t want to see, or to believe.
“Your father and his wife asked to see Rae.” Her mother’s voice went carefully neutral, as if discussing a meeting between political leaders. “They want to bring the child.”
Alice’s dad seldom visited his eldest daughter in hospital.
When Alice hinted he should come more, he said he had his family to think of.
He meant his new wife, and their baby boy.
Alice and her mother and sister had been his starter family.
Once upon a time Alice believed they were his full-story family, the beginning and end of the tale.
Of course, whenever their dad did visit, Rae was an epic bitch to him.
That was her sister’s way.
Against her will, Alice’s gaze found the narrow, silent hospital bed. Sheets as white as a blank page, body beneath still as a grave.
The doctors said Rae wasn’t responsive. Alice kept thinking that couldn’t be right. Her big sister had a response for everything.
Long ago Alice read the same book she was reading now, not in a hospital room but on a park bench.
Her big sister Rae twirled her dark ponytail as she read over Alice’s shoulder and provided a running commentary.
Alice kept her head down, bent over the pages.
There were too many people, but if you had a book, you didn’t have to deal with people.
Until some guy unzipped his trousers, letting his junk flop onto Alice’s page.
Without hesitation, Rae slammed the book shut. It was Alice’s brand-new Once and Forever Emperor collectors’ edition, every book in the series so far bound up in one gorgeously embossed hardcover. It was a very large and heavy book.
The man made a sound like a mouse caught in a door.
Rae bared her teeth. “Look. The world’s ugliest bookmark.”
The flasher stumbled back as Rae came at him in a blur of black jeans and glossy red snarl. Like a vengeful vampire, if vampires used many swear words.
Alice didn’t think vampires would. Vampires were classy.
Her sister, not so much. “Stay away from my sister!”
Alice gasped, “Rae, stop! You’ll get in trouble.”
Alice’s sister paused to toss her a smirk. “Trouble won’t stop me.”
Once upon a time Rae was terrifying, and always on Alice’s side.
When their dad left, Rae expressed her opinion at length.
Their mother kept uncharacteristically quiet, since they needed his help with medical bills.
That was the second year of Rae’s chemotherapy.
The doctors were starting to shake their heads.
Alice never said a word. Her father used to call Alice his good girl. When Alice visited Dad’s new family, she tried to be a good guest. She still feared Dad getting mad at her, though by rights she should be mad at him.
Who was right only mattered in stories. Her father no longer cared, so Alice couldn’t hurt him, while he had the power to hurt her endlessly.
Rae never let anybody hurt her. Rae refused to meet their baby brother. Her dad only wanted to visit Rae now Rae couldn’t talk back. Alice imagined several horrifying things Rae would say at the mere idea.
It was nice listening to her sister again, if only in her imagination. Alice smiled, then caught her mother’s eye. Her mother’s mouth curved in response, as if she could hear Rae too.
“Better not,” decided Clara.