Tabitha
The throne knows me.
That’s the first thing, and it happens the instant I sit and mean it.
For a year this chair has been cold stone that shrugged me off like an ill-fitting crown.
Now it wakes under me, warm, alive, and I feel the realm pour up through it into me the way my fire pours out of my hands, a current running both ways at once, Queen to realm and realm to Queen.
Every demon in Sanguisca, high and low, near and far, feels their sovereign take her seat at last.
I feel them turn towards me. All of them. The whole realm, lifting its head.
It floods in, more than I know what to do with.
Every fire geyser in the wastes, every demon huddled in every ruin, every scrap of the living dark that’s been leaderless and starving for three centuries, all of it turns towards the throne room where I sit and feels, for the first time since Tabeitha fell, a Queen who means it.
The cold shadows in the corners of the room pull back.
The great hearth roars up gold. Outside, I can feel the courtyard where my men are fighting, and I feel the shades falter, feel Mordecai’s borrowed army lose its footing as the realm they’re standing on remembers who it belongs to.
And deep inside me, in the dark at the root, Tabeitha screams.
Because now I go deeper. Now I do the thing the Oracle’s been trying to hand me since the first pond.
I stop thinking. No strategy, no clever plan, no clawing for the wheel.
I just close my eyes on my own throne with my realm running through me, and I go down, down, past the fear, past the grief, past every story anyone ever told me about being the box, all the way to the place where she lives.
She’s waiting for me there, and she’s furious, and she’s afraid.
You can’t, she hisses. This is mine. The throne is mine, the fire is mine, the realm is mine, I ruled it for a thousand years, you’re nothing, you’re a scrap, a descendant, a bookseller, you’re nobody...
And here’s the thing. A year ago that would have landed. A month ago it would have. She’s said versions of it every time, and every time some cowardly part of me has believed her, has thought, she’s right, it is hers, I’m only carrying it.
Not anymore.
She sees me not flinch, and for the first time the fury cracks and I see all the way through her, to what she actually is.
Not a Queen. Not for a long time. A frightened fragment of a woman who died badly and couldn’t bear it, who’s spent three centuries clawing at the descendants of her own line trying to get back a life that ended the day she couldn’t hold her throne.
She’s not powerful. She’s not even really cruel.
She’s just afraid, and old, and desperate.
She’s been wearing my fear like a coat because it was the only door I ever left open for her.
Give me the body, she says, and it’s not a command now, it’s almost a plea, and that’s how I know I’ve already won. Please. I’ll be good to it. I’ll be good to them. I ruled a realm, girl, I know how, you’ll only make a mess of it, you’re a bookseller, you’re nobody, let me...
“I’m not nobody,” I say, and it’s the calmest I’ve ever been.
“That’s the thing you got wrong, and Alex got wrong, and I got wrong longest of all.
I spent my whole life believing the most interesting thing about me was that I turned into a small cat.
And then I fell into hell and I found out I could burn a Demon Lord out of the sky, love four impossible men, die three times and get up three times, and walk into my own murder wearing you just to break a circle.
That’s not nobody, Tabeitha. That was never nobody.
I just needed a hell dimension to work it out. ”
“You did rule it,” I tell her, and I’m calm, calm as a cat, in the dark of my own soul.
“A thousand years. And then you lost it. Azazel gutted you from the inside and the Sorcerers folded your realm into a book and you died. It stopped being yours the day you couldn’t hold it.
You’ve spent three centuries a fragment, a ghost, a grudge, waiting to steal a life that isn’t yours anymore.
” I look at her, this beautiful, cruel, white-blonde ruin of an ancient Queen, and I don’t hate her.
That’s what finally does it. I don’t hate her.
I pity her. “But it’s not yours. It’s mine.
It’s been mine since the day I was born carrying you, and I’ve earned it every day since I fell through your book.
I bled for it. I died for it. Three times.
I got back up every time, and you never once did.
So no, Tabeitha. You don’t get to rest in my body.
You don’t get the throne. You don’t get my men, or my fire, or my life.
” I stand, in the dark, and I am so much bigger than her now, because I’ve stopped standing on her ground.
“This is my house. And your name was never on the door. Get out.”
And I claim it. All of it. The body, cell by cell, mine, grown from my blood. The fire, gold and warm, mine, answering only to me. The throne, the realm, the crown, the whole stinking beloved hellscape, mine, not borrowed, not held in trust, mine, mine, MINE.
And Tabeitha, with no ground left to stand on, no frayed edge left to grip, no story left that says any of this belongs to her, simply has nowhere to be.
She goes out like a fire with no fuel.
Her power stays. That’s the mercy and the strangeness of it.
Everything she ever was, all that ancient strength, it became mine generations ago, woven into my blood, into my line, into me, and it doesn’t leave with her because it was never really her, it was only ever the inheritance she left behind.
It settles into me, deep and permanent, part of the whole I’m becoming.
But the ghost, the fragment, the cruel snide voice that’s ridden me through three deaths, the thing that wanted to erase me and wear my life like a stolen gown, that has nowhere left to live in a body wholly, finally claimed by its rightful Queen.
You clever, she whispers, and for the first time there’s no cruelty in it, just something almost like respect, and then almost like relief. You clever little cat. You’d rather die than lose, and get up every time. I never could. Perhaps that’s why it was always going to be you.
“Go and rest,” I tell her, and I mean it kindly, because I can afford to now. “You’ve been fighting for three hundred years. It’s over. I’ve got it from here.”
And she’s gone.
Just gone. The dark at the root of me is quiet for the first time since the day I was born. No second voice. No cold twinge in the claw-marks. No passenger. Just me, whole, on my throne, with a thousand years of a Queen’s power settled into my bones and none of the ghost that carried it.
I open my eyes.
The throne room’s changed. It’s warm. The shadows have pulled back.
The fire in the great hearth burns gold instead of red, and the whole realm hums around me, awake, aware, mine.
Through the open doors I can see the courtyard, where my men have felt what just happened, where they’ve stopped fighting because the shades have stopped coming, because every demon in Sanguisca just recognised its Queen and Mordecai’s borrowed army of the dark has nowhere left to draw from.
I stand up off my throne, a claimed Queen at last, whole and unafraid. I walk back out to my family, and to the man wearing my dead love’s face, to finish what we started.
There’s still a war coming. I can feel it on the horizon, cold and white and close.
But first, there’s Alex.