Contrary to the rather quaint image that the title of ‘reading room’ may conjure up, perhaps that of a simple nook with a bookshelf and lounging chair, the Empress’s variation of the concept was rather grand. A great space, far too large to be deemed a simple ‘room’, stretched almost the entire diameter of the tower, a distance that would normally have been reserved for that of five or six more typically sized rooms. It was filled with seemingly endless rows of bookshelves upon bookshelves, stretching high almost to the ceiling, resembling more that of a small library than a space for any manner of personal use. The shelves themselves were lined with books in a chaotic manner, thrown in haphazardly without any regard to order, presumably the remains of the Empress’s scholarly research material.
To the left of the door, several large windows were cut into the wall, each having a luxuriously plush sofa or velvet lined arm rested chair beneath. The portals were constructed of thick, durable, barely warped glass, clearly the work of some master of their craft, in great contrast to the generally small and uncovered slits used for light in the lower portions of the Spire. Some measure of protection for the books, he supposed, given the general frosty atmosphere seemingly preferred by the Empress in all other places. The great size of the windows was also unusual, likely deemed high enough in the tower to be out of feasible range of battle. They were dark now, filled with the inky blackness of the long night stretching over the rest of the city, but surely during the day they must bathe the room in exorbitant amounts of light.
Nathaniel staggered over to a nearby sofa, the weary Empress limping behind him leaning on his shoulder. With one hand he removed his coat, an absolute necessity in the brisk autumn night, and placed it over the couch, carefully not to bother the woman still leaning on his shoulder. It would not do to mar this hitherto untouched room with blood after all. From the state of the wide table at the foot of the sofa, covered in all manner of dusty tomes with scattered note filled pages poking out of shut covers, it was clearly much beloved.
“Here, why don’t you set yourself down, Your Majesty? I will return shortly with cloth and alcohol. I may be no physician, but I am at least capable of dressing the cuts on your hands. The puncture wounds, however, may be rather… difficult.” Placatingly, he helped her settle down in the chair, careful not to cause undue stress upon the dozens of wounds across her body.
Her hands had some serrations and splinters, but for the most part they could be dressed by the application of alcohol and the pressure applied from a bandage. The wounds on her feet however… He looked down at her bloody feet. Her rage fueled rampage had seen numerous shards of glass and wooden splinters drive themselves deeply into her soles, as if she had no care for pain or damage. Being so deeply embedded into the muscle, it was unlikely she would ever be able to walk properly again. His face grimaced at the thought. The Empress’s privy council, and worse, her handmaidens, would not be pleased to learn the Empress had crippled herself while under his eye. With a sigh, he stood up, intent on at least rendering what little aid he was able. Surely her handmaidens would have bolts of cloth enough to at least stem the bleeding.
“That will not be necessary Nathaniel. I have constitution enough to not require alcohol quite yet, just remove the glass. Do start with my hands, I find them too weak to remove it myself.” Unexpectedly her calm voice came out, crashing over his thoughts of regret as she extended a shaky, bleeding hand towards him.
He frowned, unsure of whether she was actually aware of the severity of her injuries. While she was a learned scholar, far more so than himself at the very least, he had not known her to have a medical inclination. Seldom appearing within a dozen leagues of actual battlefields, he felt sure that, at the very least, she was inexperienced in matters of grave, permanently debilitating wounds. However, as much as he may inwardly complain and doubt her conviction, he relented and took her blood smeared hand in his, delicately picking out small shards of glass with his fingers.
Thankfully, there was little in the way of glass left in her hands from her previous acts. Despite having crushed and torn glass frames with her bare hands, somehow it seemed very little had actually succeeded in lodging itself within her wounds. His deft hands, somewhat practiced in the art of removing shrapnel on the battlefield, moved quickly in removing the shards. Lost in his work, he completed extracting the offending material from her entire right hand before he noticed anything unusual.
Giving her right hand a quick glance over as he finished, it seemed that there were somehow fewer cuts on her hands than when he had started. Perhaps the blood had made it seem like she was more severely injured than she in actuality was. Shaking his head at his evidently poor skills of observation, he set to work on her left hand. With actions more confident, having renewed his rusty skills from the battlefield, he completely removed the glass from her left hand in a flash. Satisfied with his work on her hands, he took an appraising look at the Empress before being struck dumb with shock. She was splaying the fingers on her right hand, now immaculately untainted by the ugly red lines that had crisscrossed her skin only just prior.
“Your Majesty… What is this?” He asked, in awe at her apparent rapidity of recovery. He did know she was a witch of some kind, the black veins emanating from the unnaturally dark eyes of her witch mark had made that much rather obvious. But he himself was far from knowledgeable about the esoteric arts, and had never personally seen her utilize them to conjure anything more significant than the feeble parlor tricks so commonly held as elaborate spells by her lessers.
“Are you surprised? I am a witch after all. While I suppose I haven’t made much of a practice at using my works in battle, surely you hadn’t thought my youthfulness was something just any petty conjuror could maintain?” The Empress was just as shocked as Nathaniel, but in her case in regards to his astounding ignorance.
While the Empire made no practice of utilizing practitioners of the esoteric arts in its legions, they had been seen from time to time during the civil war among the ranks of her enemies. None so powerful or learned as her of course, but they were present nonetheless. Furthermore, many of the scholars she had invited to stay in Maegwyn and collaborate in the Spire had themselves been practitioners. For one in such a lofty position as he, it was unfitting to be so ignorant of the arts employed by their enemies, let alone to be so ignorant of those practiced by his very sovereign.
“Whatever you may have thought regarding that gaggle of halfwits that give my kind such a black reputation in Aachenwald, I assure you that there are those of us with significantly more ability. Likewise to be entirely honest, I’m not entirely sure that I even count as human anymore, not after all of the delicate craft I have carved into this body of mine.” She said nonchalantly, leaning down with her now unblemished hands to start prying loose the shrapnel embedded in her feet.
Nathaniel pondered her confession in silence. While he was well aware that she seemed to age at an extraordinarily slow pace, he had heard stories of some avowed sorcerers, living hermetic lives secluded from society, that had lived well past one hundred years. Since he had known the Empress for at least twenty years, closer to thirty if counting his sightings of her at her very occasional public appearances under the old regime, it had seemed that she had, truthfully, not appeared to have aged a day in all that time. The feat did, in retrospect, seem rather inhuman.
“Surely you aren’t saying that you are truly ageless, Your Majesty? If such a thing were possible, the world would be beset by the everlasting rule of eternal kings.” Nathaniel asked cautiously, the gears turning in his mind over the implications of her statements.
It would explain her seeming preference for wide sweeping and long lived reforms even at the cost of short term suffering at least. His mind turned to the inhabitants of the capital’s outer city, wasting away with no work as their homes crumbled about them, counting their days until a representative of the Empress would come to take them away and settle new lands. If she would live as long as she implied, then the downtrodden peasantry, suffering from her chaotic upheaval of the existing social order without relief in sight, would be dead and buried long before her long term objectives were met. They would be succeeded by their descendants, reaching maturity in a time that had only known the fruits of the Empress’s reforms and never knowing the price. In light of her revelations, all of the policies she had enacted since seizing the crown came into perspective. While a perhaps logical approach, her actions seemed decidedly inhuman, only possible due to a supernatural longevity.
“It is a rare working. Few have the constitution or mental ability to even attempt it. Even fewer are the mortal kings possessing the mentality or time to devote themselves to accomplishing what I have when they are saddled with the taxing responsibility of ruling a nation, no matter how obsessed they are with the idea of immortality. Surely, you have heard the myths of kings, insistent that they will never die, sequestering themselves to engage in study. Such things never last, whether it is improper learning or inability to acquire reagents, they are always too slow, and circled by the waiting vipers of their court, they are always torn from their position and any hope at completing their work. It was by sheer chance that I was able to find the notes of a predecessor, tucked away in a forgotten room in the palace library. As the youngest and least of my siblings, little was expected of me and I was able to devote my time to my great working, and eventually I succeeded.” She spoke assuredly, evidently having given much thought and done much research into the frenetic race for immortality performed by rulers fearful of death, in which all are made equal, since time immemorial.
“The price is also… demanding. While many practitioners of the esoteric arts may remove themselves from society, few have the will to face the progress of time on everything else but themselves. To watch their loved ones, their entire family lines sometimes, even the very walls of their homes and the trees of the forests in which they hide away, wither away and crumble to dust before their very eyes. There is a reason that I have pursued neither consort nor offspring and secluded myself away from everything but my responsibilities to my people as the head of state in this lonely tower. The only one I have been particularly close to in all my long years of life, and likely many many more long years, was my uncle, and well…” Her voice turned melancholic as she considered the price of the things she had given up on her path to pursue her longevity, almost sobbing as her thoughts turned to her uncle.
“I… I had no idea, Your Majesty.” Nathaniel’s jovial relief at the marked recovery of the Empress from her grisly wounds, especially not having to explain his lacking abilities in stopping her from hurting herself, became sober as he was hit by a wave of understanding.
She was not close to her uncle because of simple familial ties, or even that he had stood by her in all of her times of need before. No, she was close to her uncle because he was one of the few connections that she had allowed herself, a being that due to necessity rebuffed all that may try to grow closer, treating them with cold indifference. For her uncle to die and leave her alone, she had certainly already been mentally prepared for. He was already in his late seventies and still active in both governance and military matters. It would have been a surprise to no one for him to succumb to illness at any point, no matter the vitality he was known for in his twilight years.
But to find out that her uncle, the sole human being she had allowed herself to get close to, was not dead, but had betrayed her? That must have hated her? That may have been acting as her close confident for all of her long years, only sharpening the dagger behind her back, biding his time, all of his love and affection being lies? She was devastated.
“I will stand by my oath, Your Majesty. You will get your revenge.” Tamping down his guilt over lack of understanding of his sovereign’s feelings regarding her uncle, his mind once more decided to tread safer waters by swaying the conversation back to their shared dire circumstances.
“You better you layabout. Just last week you failed to convince me to amass my armies in Maegwyn, and let me order them to march with haste to the Duchy of Brackenweir. With the Duke himself revolting against me, I have no doubt that the Duchy will strike against both our men already deployed to Brackenweir, and the two legions sent to search for the Duke. They will not receive the news of our plight in time to help defend the capital, and all the while you have been sitting idly by trying to organize a smattering of green boys to defend us as if they would stand a ghost of a chance against an Aachish invasion.” Her words of criticism were harsh, clearly ignoring that their dire straits were, at least in part, the result of her unreasonable demands. As Nathaniel tried to defend himself, he was stopped by her raising her hand in a motion for him to settle down.
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“Stop right there you fool. Yes, I was obstinate, and yes I did replace you with a sycophant to lead the search for my uncle in your stead. I apologize for being overcome with emotion and acting rashly. But you are the Lord Protector, the commander in chief of my legions, and the defender of the realm. You may have been just a captain at the opening stages of the civil war, but that was twenty years ago. When the losses to your regiment annihilated its command cadre of officers, it was you who rose to the challenge and became the right hand of my uncle during the war. You have not just extensive experience in the affairs of men and war, but also have ably demonstrated your skill time and time again. I did not grant you the title of Lord Protector for you to be cowed like a timid woman by the flexing of my authority. You are my general and advisor and when I, a rank amateur in matters of military import no matter my age or learning in other fields, try to override you in a flight of fancy, I need you to be there to advise me against it. I need you to be willing to call together the privy council and unite them against my decisions if you have just cause to rebuke them. In the days to come, I will need my Lord Protector to be able to operate with as much independence as possible if we are to see this through to the end with our heads intact.” Her voice was solemn, conveying her thoughts in a manner truly befitting that of a king.
“I will agree to that Your Majesty… I am sorry for being remiss in my duties and failing to take command of the situation. It will not happen again.” Nathaniel knelt on the ground with reverence, hanging his head low in shame.
He had never before seen a ruler, or any member of the nobility come to mind, so openly admit their shortcomings. To directly request for a vassal to reject her imperial authority in favor of their own initiative over fields in which she was found lacking, it was unprecedented. Truly, she had the mindset of a great ruler. He felt a deep sense of shame in regards to his tenure as Lord Protector. He had served ably and justly, overseen the adoption of new tactics, arms, and logistics as he presided over the evolution from the scattered remains of hundreds of disparate noble retinues to legions with a firm loyalty to none but the crown. And yet for all that experience and accomplishment, he had failed her in the time in which she had needed him most. As her most important military advisor, he had let her override his decisions and sent away the men which, in current circumstances, may very well have been the last hope of the empire.
“You are forgiven Nathaniel, and as lacking in your duties as you may have been as advisor, I do thank you from the bottom of my heart for tempering my rage. In this time of crisis, my mind must be as focused steel, ready to be driven into the heart of my enemies.” The Empress broke her mask of neutrality as her lips formed a genuine smile, a rarity Nathaniel had not seen in years.
“That letter was from one of my secret police. Yes you heard correctly, and before you ask, no they are not members of the soldiery and were it not for the current dire circumstances you would still have remained ignorant of their existence.” She spoke of the missive from the member of the Occuli, dismissive of his confusion. They were an organization formed by and directly answered only to her, with no other form of supervision. It was only right that the very people upon which they preyed and acted as her eyes and ears against would have no knowledge of their existence.
“My uncle has assembled the cream of the martial might of his entire Duchy into that army, although I am sure he has far, far more men of lesser quality already amassing back home. Regardless, he, along with a complement of Aachish mercenaries, are marching towards Maegwyn as we speak, along a route I had never even conceived of in my preparations for the search. They have fortunately been set back weeks by sudden rains along their chosen route, but will surely be striking against us within the month. We have no hope of reinforcement in the time we have remaining. I would request you send messengers to each of the remaining legions we have in the field, but I have neither hope that they will arrive in time to affect the battle, nor do I want our borders weakened in a vain attempt to save the capital. I will not have my people, still recovering from the scars left by the civil war, laid defenseless like meat thrown to the slavering jaws of vicious wolves just to save my reign from internal schism.” The Empress spoke melancholically, her earlier fire fading as she acknowledged the reality of the almost hopelessness of the situation.
“I need you to do anything and everything you can to ensure the protection of Maegwyn, and to the greatest extent possible to ensure the survival of its people. Will you be able to?” She inquired, her eyebrows raised in challenge.
“In all honesty Your Majesty, no. The young men of Maegwyn are soft and weak, they have not lived through the hardship of the civil war like we have, nor have they known struggle for survival, not with their current malaise lying down and hoping for good fortune to be granted to them like a miracle. The harder men have long ago left for more distant locations to pursue their fortunes. Even if we completely emptied the treasury, it will take time just to teach these green boys how to wield a spear, let alone to turn them into effective soldiers. I can only recommend abandoning the city. We can order a general evacuation, moving the court to the east where we may yet hope to be reinforced by the local legions. I do not find it feasible to defend this city, and as stricken by economic hardship as it is, is there even a reason to remain here at all?” His tone was questioning, eager to redeem the honor of his title by convincing her otherwise and preventing another disaster.
His suggestion was solid. They would be able to recruit more able bodied and experienced men, if not necessarily at war than in other practical trades such as hunting if they abandoned the urban sprawl of the capital for the more rural lands in the east. While Maegwyn did have an extensive industrial base built by generations of artisans that had only grown greater as it became the hub of production for the legions, the rest of the city was in shambles and it had only barely survived the civil war. If they destroyed the furnaces and foundries that made the core of the inner city, Maegwyn would have precious little to offer any conqueror. The only reason he surmised that the Empress had remained within its ancient walls was her feelings of pride over any sense of practicality. With the sole exception of the imperial treasury sealed in the under levels of the palace keep, there was no great accumulation of treasure or material within Maegwyn that would be worth preserving at the cost of a night impossible to win fight.
“I understand your point regarding the city, but there is something of which you remain ignorant. While the city itself is, from the perspective of the rest of the Empire, of little consequence, that cannot be said about the Spire. Here I have stored the accumulated knowledge of ages, recreated and restored through my meetings with like minded scholars for decades. It is with this knowledge that I make my plans to guide the kingdom. I may myself be long lived, but what is my paltry lifetime of a mere fifty years compared to centuries of human experience and hundreds of perspectives on what it means to rule? It will take many, many years, but these vaults of mine I believe will be the foundation for the revitalization of our people for centuries, if not longer.” Lips pursed at his frank assessment of the worth of the city, she regaled him with her plans for the future, her voice growing lighter as she shared her deeply held hopes and dreams.
“That being said, there is also a darker, far more practical reason that Maegwyn, and specifically, the Spire, cannot fall into the hands of anyone but myself, let alone those of the greedy treacherous snake that is my uncle or those Aachish apes with which he is in league. Within these repositories I have also stored my accumulated research into the workings of the esoteric arts. You may find me powerful, perhaps unusually so amongst the others of my kind, that you have seen throughout your life, but I am far from alone. While my longevity may be vanishingly rare, power gained through the callous sacrifice of others in the pursuit of destruction and death is much more common. I was already suspicious when I received word that there were not even foot prints left of the Duke’s army, and here we have a report confirming a further ten thousand men from Aachenwald that had somehow crossed the border and travelled hundreds of miles to the capital region with nary a trace. I do not trust any of my fellow practitioners with the dreadful things that I have studied, let alone ones that would sell themselves out to my treacherous uncle and the black mercenaries of Aachenwald. We cannot let them have this Spire.” Her light voice dropped lower, almost despairing, her hands reaching up to cover her reddened eyes from his sight.
“Is there no way to move your treasures, Your Majesty? Or if the worst should come to pass… to destroy them? You may have your hopes set on using these as the foundation for our Empire, I am neither scholar nor ruler and I admit my shortcomings in regards to your high minded policies, but if you have built them up once then surely you must be able to do so again? To start anew someplace else where they would not be under threat? I see no feasible way to save this city, not with the resources and time at our disposal, unless perhaps you have some working with which to set things in our favor?” He asked, trying to understand her perspective.
While he now knew that the great tower was of vital importance to her plans, he struggled to take that into account when considering the state of the city. No matter the strength of the defenses, it was indefensible. It could never stand with the vast numerical disparity against which they were arrayed.
“You are right of course, at least about my treasures. Old tomes and stories, accounts from lives well lived across the centuries. Mine are hardly the only copies and the network of scholars with which I have assembled these works still stands, hale and hearty and could put together another of its like again given enough time. It may push back the progress of our Empire for decades to come, but it is still feasible.” She was visibly saddened at the notion of the destruction of her treasures, the undermining of her hopes and dreams.
“But it is not my treasures for which I shall draw my line in the sand. My research into the esoteric arts has assembled more than mere words on parchment. Exotic reagents, vile concoctions, and rare artifacts of terrible power have found their way into the vaults within the tower. You may have even seen the rooms in which I store such, their labels coded in script only I may understand. They have been invaluable to me as I have developed my own workings, but that same value to me would also prove of dire consequence if they were destroyed. The conflagration that would result from the destruction of all of these items of fell power would mar the land for generations to come on a scale that even I, learned as I am, struggle to comprehend. It would ruin the Empire and destroy far more lives than even the sacrifice of every single person in this city in its defense. Even worse would be smuggling them out piecemeal. Every piece, impossible to track, would scatter to the four winds if even one man knew of their value. Such power of their destruction would be magnified tenfold if placed into the hands of the more belligerent of my kind. No, the city, or at least this Spire, must stand. I will accept your superiority in all other matters of military import, but I will brook no argument over the need to defend my tower. She felt somewhat guilty over imparting her expectations of him to overrule her decisions, only to overrule his own so quickly, but she could not afford to be soft hearted here. It was difficult for anyone not learned in the esoteric arts to be able to comprehend its nuances and the consequences of its misuse, but it was essential that he understand the consequences of letting this city fall, no matter his ignorance.
“I understand, Your Majesty. Will that be all?” Getting up from his kneeling position, he looked down at the seated Empress, his voice terse.
It seemed that she was willing to let even more of her people to suffer in the vain hope of preserving the city. He hoped that by some miracle, she would be able to prepare some working with which to even the odds, if not save the city outright, but he remained doubtful. It would seem that he would have his work cut out for him in the coming days. Thinking back to her earlier request for the needs of an advisor willing to go over her head, his mind turned. While he understood that the consequences of the Spire falling would be great, if all hope seemed lost either way, it would only be natural to try to save the situation as best he could, and the best part was, she had already given him her explicit permission.
“Yes. You may go. I hope you have taken my words to heart. I promise that I will do my utmost to craft a means of aiding you in the trials ahead. I expect great things of you, Nathaniel.” Her voice, weary from the burden places upon her shoulders of being the only one able to understand what is at stake in the trials to come, brightened once more, a brilliant smile cresting her face as she saw Nathaniel off.
“Before your leave, take this.” Her bright voice called from behind his back, tossing something over with the sound of wind. From behind his back, his left arm shot out, grasping the object, pulling it closer to him to inspect. It was his coat, covered in bloodstains. He let out a sigh of disappointment as he accepted that his once fine coat was no ruined beyond repair, before leaving through the door.
The Empress pondered her loyal vassal as he left. He had performed brilliantly in the civil war, beginning the war as a mere captain of foot commanding a company of polemen, an ad hoc configuration of billhooks, poleaxes, and flimsy pikes crafted from the barely modified blades of peasants farming equipment, and ending it as the right hand man of her uncle, the supreme commander at the time of all of her forces. He had fought against all odds in some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire war, seeing his superiors cut down before him time and time again, only to take their place and lead on. His company of peasants had grown into an entire army by the end of the war, an integral part of the final victories. Perhaps in their current predicament, where all hope was seemingly lost, he would be able to pull off a similar miracle.