Anastacia didn’t really recognize anyone in the group kneeling to her, but that didn’t mean none of them worked in the castle while she was being kept there, because most of the time she was focused on hating the royals in charge and barely noticed anyone else. She didn’t exactly have that many positive experiences with the servants either and in her mind, they were a lesser evil, with the exception of the ones that had actually worked as her handlers, but none of them seemed to be present. The group greeting her were probably just errand boys, cleaners and whatever counted as a chef in Mournvalley.
“It was starting to look really bad for us.” The man who had spoken earlier laughed nervously and slowly rose up while still staring at his feet.
None of the other servants looked directly at Anastacia either and it took a second for her to realize that not only was she out of the uniform she was supposed to wear as The Anchor, but also still drenched from her quick swim earlier. As far as etiquette went, she could have just as well been naked and anyone who laid their eyes on her would have been put to death on the spot.
“It got really bad for a while there and people started to wonder if you had defected… but we always believed that you’d come back to wake The Immortal King and deal with those pesky rebels!” He said, sounding extremely relieved.
The blind faith of the servants caught Anastacia a bit off guard. “Wh… who told you I’d be coming back?” She asked. Her words caused the crowd to kneel once more, since hearing her speak wasn’t common at all and they didn’t really know how to react to it.
“The royal messengers told us that you had been sent to train somewhere and would return as soon as the red inquisition could reach you, but the rebels were making it difficult.” The servant explained and kneeled even deeper.
Anastacia now understood what Coquelicot had meant with her last reminder. Most of the people in the castle still didn’t know what was actually going on, and the royals had kept feeding them lies about the realities of their situation, how Anastacia had been sent to train instead of escaping, how there was absolutely no chance of them coming out of this alive and how the war was already all but over. Perhaps it was just to keep things calm inside the castle or maybe the royals just wanted to drag the rest of their followers down with them for some reason, there was no telling with them.
She could simply lie her way inside the castle by smiling and saying things were going to be fine, but somehow that felt unfair, and so, she sighed and stepped forwards. “Get up you idiots, The Anchor is no more so you don’t need to bow to me.”
The low-ranking necromancers looked confused by the order, but slowly stood up and began whispering to each other about what this could have been about.
“We have something in common, so I feel like I need to be straight with you guys. We have all been played here. I escaped this shithole, thinking I’d be free, but no! Somehow I end up doing Coquelicot’s dirty work for her. Just like you idiots believed all the lies you’ve been told and now you’re stuck here, when it’s only a matter of time before the rebels get here and paint the whole castle red with your insides.” Anastacia stated without sugarcoating the truth.
After the initial confusion had settled a bit, an older lady in the front of the group stepped forth and addressed Anastacia still without looking directly at her. “But… but you’re here to save us, right? You came back!”
“Weeeelllll, no. We’re here to kill Amaranth and get this whole revolution nonsense over and done with so I can live in peace.” Anastacia shrugged and started to clear a way past the crowd.
“But… you’re The Anchor! You’re supposed to help The Immortal King to protect us, not let blasphemers and heretics like Coquelicot take over!” The woman pleaded with tears in her eyes.
Hearing the woman call her that annoyed Anastacia and she had to turn back around. “I’m Anastacia, actually, and if I were you I’d look for a nice place to die, because you guys are not long for this world. Or you could just run out there and get it done quickly.”
When the fact that there was not going to be a rescue started to slowly sink in, the servants reacted in three ways: a few of them departed towards the rebellion’s frontlines to hasten their demises, some disappeared back into the castle grounds to presumably wait for their deaths in some corner, but five of them stayed on the drawbridge.
Anastacia assumed that they would try to take out their frustration and fear on her but was surprised as the servants kneeled to her once more.
“If what you say is true and as the The Anchor you have deemed us unworthy of these lands, can you at least grant us our deaths? Surely there is no better way to go than through your mercy.” One of them pleaded with a shaky voice.
This was something Anastacia had not expected to run into. Even after she had broken their illusion of false hope and told them to forget The Anchor, these five still considered it an honor to be killed by her. She glanced at King, looking for ideas on what to do with the zealous fools.
“I don’t recognize you people; did you work in the castle?” Anastacia asked to give herself some time to make a decision.
“No, we work outside the castle, cleaning mostly. We’ve only been allowed to the few rooms around the entrance…” The servant answered, clearly on the brink of tears.
“Yeah, you didn’t seem the type I’ve mostly come across while living inside. Apparently not comically evil necromancers are a thing now, so I honestly don’t know what to do here.” Anastacia said and started to pace back and forth in front of the kneeling necromancers. “I feel like I should help you, but at the same time you chose to stay here, so you kind of brought this on yourselves. This is exactly the kind of shit I don’t want to deal with. I don’t want to have a policy on mercy killing, but it turns out that having one is a must these days. Is it too much to ask for the universe to give me like clearly marked good guys and bad guys and none of this in between bullshit?”
While listening to their supposed savior rant, the five servants realized that they had probably asked for more than what they had initially thought.
“Just go. We’re nothing more than commoners, so if our request causes you distress, please ignore it and just carry on.” One of them said as the others left for the frontlines to join the group who wished for a quick death. “All glory to The Immortal King and his anchor, wherever her path may take her.” He said with what was clearly a forced smile and hurried away to join the others.
Anastacia watched them slowly walk away with their hoods up and heads hanging low. She found herself thinking that she would still be able to kill them and raised her hand briefly but ended up doing nothing, for one reason or another. They had been a loyal part of the cult that kept her imprisoned but didn’t seem to be aware of what had been going on behind the scenes, so whether they deserved their deaths or not was anyone’s guess. The paladins she had laid waste to in Crescent had been clearly evil, just like the royals she was about to meet once more, and Anastacia hadn’t been too bothered by their deaths. Yet something stayed her had this time, even if it was to fulfill their wishes.
She let out a muffled scream and threw a fireball into the moat under the drawbridge. “Why hasn’t anyone written a book on when it’s okay to kill people? Things were simpler back when I had to do what I was told, I’ll give them that.”
King gave her a pat on the head and pointed towards the castle’s entrance.
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“Yeah, we should go. I’ll just bother Emilia about it when we get back.” Anastacia sighed.
The castle’s main gate was made out of some kind of greenish metal and covered in extremely detailed engravings that Anastacia hadn’t had the chance to fully appreciate before. Because they were over three meters tall, opening them proved challenging to the frail necromancer. They used to have handles made of bone, so that any able citizen would have no trouble opening them, but those had been ripped off, no doubt to slow her down, and If it wasn’t for the simulacrum with her, the gates could have actually stopped Anastacia for a while, but King had no problem pushing them open with his shoulder.
“How did I even manage to get anywhere before I met you?” Anastacia asked and peeked inside. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s waiting for us, but you should probably go in first, just in case they have poison arrows or something dumb like that. There’s a big staircase almost immediately behind this gate, if we go up, we’ll get straight to the throne room that’s full of fuckheads. There’s probably a way to get to my room without going through it, but I don’t know it – and honestly, I kind of want to see their dumb faces now that they’re doomed.”
With King in the lead, they stepped into the dimly lit castle and started climbing the stone stairs that would lead them to the people who tormented Anastacia for her entire life. Climbing there to rub her freedom in their faces did make her feel slightly victorious, though she regretted not writing and rehearsing a speech to ridicule them further, it was truly a shame there was no time to stop and think about that, they still had a red inquisitor to kill and the stone stairs felt extremely cold under her bare feet so finding a chair wouldn’t go amiss either.
At the top of the stairs, they came across a second pair of doors, though slightly smaller this time. Anastacia could feel the heartbeats of the royals on the other side get faster and faster as she got closer. “Can you kick them open? Maybe we can give one of them a heart attack.”
King drew his sword and took few steps back to get some momentum behind his kick. With an ear-shattering crash, both of the doors slammed open as the simulacrum smashed through them with all his weight. Equally loud were the screams of terror from the other side as they realized that it wasn’t just Anastacia who had come for them. King took one look around and after making sure everything was safe, gestured for Anastacia to enter.
She pranced in with a wide grin on her face. “I’m back! That’s what you idiots wanted right?” She laughed as the lower-ranking royals fled to the other side of the hall, towards the leaders of the remaining ruling families. “What? I thought you’d be glad to see me again, after all I’m here to save all of you, or whatever the story you fed to the poor fools outside was.” She hopped to King and gave him a hug before addressing the royals again. “Oh! This is King, he’s… a friend of mine, I brought him along to punch things.”
One of the lords of the ruling families stood up, Anastacia remembered him well, as he was mostly in charge of finding handlers for her. “H… how dare you!” He yelled, visibly regretting all three of those words the second they came out of his mouth.
Anastacia burst into laughter. “I can’t believe someone actually talked back! Oh, Victor! You haven’t changed in the slightest.” She mocked the man and merrily skipped over to his and his wife’s table. “What are you going to do, call one of your servants to drag me back to my dungeon?”
The man quietly sat down and lowered his head in shame.
Anastacia looked around to see whether anyone else had anything to say, but when her eyes spotted a familiar white shade of hair, she knew she had to say something. “Mother!” She exclaimed and sat down on the table in front of a woman who looked eerily similar to her. “How’s it going? I’ve been doing good, other than having to deal with a bunch of murderous necromancers that is. I’ve been meaning to write to both you and dad but then I remembered that this place doesn’t really do mail, and that I want to strangle you both, but mainly the mail thing.” She said and laughed.
Her derision was met with an equal amount of disgust from her mother, who promptly spat at her and turned to look away from her daughter. “Do not call me ‘mother’, you are nothing but a vile mistake.” The woman scoffed.
“Yeah, you’re not wrong.” Anastacia sighed. “Must be awful to know that you two screwing somehow fucked up the entire country a few years down the road, but that’s life, isn’t it?” She said and patted her mother’s shoulder, feigning compassion.
Her taunting didn’t go unpunished, as the woman slapped her hand aside and punched Anastacia in the face, or at least would have, if her fist hadn’t frozen still about ten centimeters before actually hitting anything.
It didn’t take a full second for King to react by pulling Anastacia away either, and with her out of the way, he swung his sword once and cleaved the royal necromancer in two, all the way down from her shoulder to her waist.
Terrified screams filled the room again as King kicked the freshly made corpse to dislodge his sword from the chair she had been sitting on. As the necromancers tried to flee for their life Anastacia started taking over their bodies one by one and stopping them before they managed to escape. None of them were even comparable to Periwinkle, so stopping them was barely a challenge.
Anastacia stared at the ceiling to avoid seeing any of the blood pooling under her feet and stumbled away. “Did… did you just kill my mother?” She stuttered and sat down on one of the other tables. “I’d be blushing so hard right now if I wasn’t about to pass out, so can you not kill anyone else for a while? Just remind me about this next time I’m cleaning you.” She laughed and fanned her face with her hand.
After walking on the cold stone floors without boots, the warmness of the blood her feet had touched made it really hard for Anastacia to not focus on it. She closed her eyes and laid down on the table. “I wasn’t even going to kill anyone here because all these idiots deserve Coquelicot, but that was totally worth it.” She laughed, took a couple of deep breaths before slowly getting off the table.
Carefully avoiding the blood on the floor, she walked up to the throne itself and stared at the skeleton sitting on it. For years she had hated the damn thing with burning passion because her only purpose had been to make sure it stays reanimated, but now that she knew a bit more about the person it had once been, she mostly felt bad for it. “Hey, Alabaster, I know you won’t hear any of this because that’s not how this works, but I just wanted to let you know that I’ve read your letter about Ivory. I’ll do what I can… But now it’s time for you to finally get some sleep.” She whispered to The Immortal King and touched his hand. Slowly the skeleton crumbled to dust and its fancy white robes slid down on the floor.
Anastacia cleared the bone dust from the seat, carefully lowered herself on it and looked at the throne room from the one angle no one else had ever seen it from. “Hmh, looks like shit, even from up here.” She muttered and started to wipe the blood from her feet with the gold embroidered robes of Alabaster The White. “Now then, what to do with these guys? I’d rather not have them run to Amaranth, and like I said, don’t really want to kill them myself either.”
King walked over to one of the frozen necromancers and pointed at their legs with his blood covered sword. Anastacia could feel the necromancer panicking as the simulacrum loomed over them.
“Hmm, good idea.” She nodded and leaned back on the throne. The combination of the muffled screams of the frozen royalty and the noises of their tibias cracking sounded like something out of a nightmare, but it did satisfy Anastacia’s hunger for revenge. “Hundreds, if not thousands of times, I’ve sat right there and dreamt of doing this… Did it seriously never cross your mind that treating me like you did wouldn’t come back to you?” She asked from the royalty as she broke their wrists as well. “It’s a miracle Amaranth didn’t wipe you all out herself… oh crap! we should probably get back on that. Well, it has been fun seeing all of you again, just hold still until I release you when we’re far enough away.”
She got up from the throne and headed towards the smaller door that led to the lower floors, some of the royals had tried to escape to it, so she had to push them out of the way with King before they were able to get to the staircase.
Seeing the route to her room again gave Anastacia shivers and she had to constantly remind herself that it wasn’t like before, that she would leave just as soon as they were done. They stopped by the door she knew all too well and after a deep breath Anastacia opened it to reveal the darkness she had lived in for years. “There should be some bedding in the other cells here, could you gather them for me?” She asked from King before stepping in.
Everything in her room was just like she had left it, one of her old uniforms was still on the floor where she had thrown it while gathering clothes for her escape with Gilbert. She took her wet dress off and wiggled into the uniform. Wearing it again felt terrible, but at least it was dry. It wasn’t exactly suited for the situation, so she modified it slightly, starting by ripping off the high collar covering her mouth and the long sleeves that made moving her arms difficult, she also used her knife to cut off a good part of the hem so that she could run unhindered if needed.
Just when she was done, King returned with a large pile of hay filled pillows and bedrolls.
“What do you think? I think I’ve gained weight, it’s a bit tighter than I remembered.” Anastacia asked and spun around quickly. “Just throw them over there.” She nodded towards the wardrobe and sat down on her bed to strap the knife’s scabbard back on. “Oh! This is Wall, he was my friend when I lived here. Really good listener, like you. Actually, you two have a lot in common…” The necromancer said and tapped the stone wall next to her bed.
“Now then, let’s get out so I can light this crap on fire – again.” She laughed.