Nathaniel stood aghast as he swung the door wide, revealing a sight of utter devastation. What had once been a lavish sitting room of richly finished wooden furniture, tastefully collected and exquisitely crafted paintings, and luxuriously soft and warm plush carpets, was now almost impossible to recognize as such. The paintings had been torn from the walls in a violent frenzy, the glass frames protecting them having shattered scattering wickedly sharp fragments of glass into the fibers of the carpet. The paintings themselves had been torn out of their broken frames, the canvas rent asunder by what could only have been the work of vicious hands as evidenced by the droplets of fresh blood indifferently coating the tattered remains of both glass and canvas. Fractured furniture lay about the room in so many pieces.
In one corner, a half torn chair with cracked legs and missing a back rested, having clearly been swung with vindictive force against the uncaring stone of the wall. Over the carpet, the shattered remains of a wooden table lay limply, the massive slab of polished mahogany that had served as the tabletop having been roughly cracked in two by what must have been great force from above, the two halves of the table sagging down into the carpet. The fine felt of a series of sofas had been ripped and torn with wild abandon, bearing tear marks both from the flying glass shards or wooden splinters that peppered the lining and much deeper furrows, stained scarlet by blood, of what could only have been the work of human nails. White cotton stuffing was ripped out, dyed red with gobs of yet more blood and strewn about the room haphazardly like a coating of plush red snow. Over everything, a layer of chill frost clung, sapping the heat from Nathaniel’s lungs as his breath became mist in the air.
In one corner of the room, the terror herself stood, one hand clutching a detached chair leg, presumably the companion to the remains of the chair that had been hurled against the door just prior to his arrival. Her face was contorted in an expression of rage, her skin dyed red and a visibly throbbing vein atop her forehead. Her hair was rough and frazzled, its formerly luxuriously smooth strands becoming tangled with sticky sweat. Her eyes were dilated, seemingly unable to focus on Nathaniel at all as they darted madly looking from one end of the destroyed room to the other. She wore a simple gray robe, now torn and split, covered in the debris borne from her frenzy and stained with fresh blood. Her hands were dry and cracked with many of her nails torn out, covered with dozens of tiny cuts, still oozing blood and dripping down onto her robe. He noticed that she wore no shoes, her feet awash with yet more blood, sharp fragments of glass and wooden splinters still embedded in her parched flesh. It was apparent she had cared naught for her own well being while prosecuting this vicious rampage, Nathaniel noted, his expression turning grim.
“What in the name of the gods are you doing, Your Majesty?” He cried aloud at seeing her pathetic state. The crazed creature that was the Empress spun to face him as he spoke, her eyes still unfocused, clearly reacting more from animalistic instinct than human intelligence. However, she seemed to calm somewhat as he spoke, perhaps reassured by his presence as requested, her ragged breathing slowing down.
“Is that you Nathaniel? Have you finally come to help me clean these odious rooms of mine? I’ve been waiting so long you know, and this is such toilsome work…” She asked nonchalantly, her unfocused feverish eyes reflecting the dim light of the chamber with intensity.
Her voice trailed off, clearly expecting an enthusiastic cry of support from the Lord Protector that was not forthcoming. Her lips started to curl into a snarl as the silence stretched with no affirmation from Nathaniel. He recoiled, unnerved by her mundane reaction to his cautious probing and doubly so by the speed at which her mood shifted as he diverged from her expectations.
“You’ll find what you seek there.” She finally answered his original question with an angry, terse reply. Her hand waved in a dismissive gesture, pointing to the far corner of the room by the door to the rest of her chambers where a solitary wooden writing desk stood, seemingly untouched by her gale of destruction.
Upon the desk lay a flickering lamp, by some miracle not turned over by the relentless crashing violence around it. Illuminated by the lantern was an unfurled scroll, held open by a dagger impaling the parchment deeply into the desktop. Nathaniel cautiously walked over to the table, rubble crunching loudly beneath his boots as he crossed the room. He scanned the parchment over, a report from some manner of spy, the ink on the page was smudged and running from dozens of wet droplets that had soaked into the page, tears.
The brief message was instantly digested and already beginning to turn in his mind. His eyes narrowed as he felt the implications, his body trembling in shock, a hand roughly grasped his heart as he fought to contain its wild throbbing. Betrayal! Not just any traitor either, not the dozens of petty nobles that had tried and failed to defy the Empress and Empire with varying degrees of incompetence, but the Duke of Brackenweir! The Empress’s uncle, who had stood by her side through all manners of trials, as the Empire burned around them, as her siblings turned their swords to her heart, as even her very people rose up against her. The situation was dire he realized in a flash, his eyes taking stock of the Empress. The situation was dire, and unless she was brought back to her senses, it could not be dealt with.
“I understand your anger, Your Majesty… But I’m not certain you are in any state for us to address it. Please, just put the stick down and let’s lie you down… preferably somewhere still intact.” He spoke placatingly to try and assuage her anger.
While he could now at least understand to a degree why she was so wrathful, he knew naught why it had affected her normally stoic and wise mind to such a great degree. Lacking the ability to truly understand, he could only offer his arm to support her. If he could set her down, he could at least work on what he did understand, her wounds. Hopefully not every room in her chambers had been beset by such utter devastation.
“No! I must destroy. Every. Last. Piece. Every gift, every recommendation, every compliment. Nothing tainted by his traitorous hand shall remain!” She shrieked, aggrieved, firmly clutching the dismembered chair leg to her chest. She stepped back from his offered arm, ignoring the stinging pain and trailing blood from the wounds on her feet, clearly unwilling to be taken from the room.
“Is this… not destroyed enough? But if it is what you desire… Please Your Majesty, just stay right there, I will call for one of your handmaidens.” Nathaniel replied, to her outburst, his face donning a look of sheer incredulity.
The damage to the room already must have totaled into the tens of thousands of crowns, and yet she was still unsatisfied? While he understood that she was angry, and obsessed with destruction, this was too far. She needed help, someone to calm her down and dress her wounds. Nathaniel was a wise and experienced man, a general, a lord even. He was comfortable with assuming control and directing men numbering in the hundreds of thousands, but he was no physician of the mind. Surely no other than her handmaidens, her trusted servants, and more importantly fellow women who may be able to understand her and address the crux of her turmoil, would be what she required to rouse her mind. Just as he was backing away, attempting to beat a quick retreat to fetch one of the Empress’s handmaidens and make the incensed woman her problem, he felt the chill wind brush against his face as the chair leg formerly brandished by the Empress passed mere inches from his face, firmly impacting upon the closed door.
Stolen novel; please report.
“Stop right there you ungrateful bastard. It was you I called for to help me deal with this disaster. Not for you to pawn your oath sworn duties off to my maids!” Her already wrathful face contorted further casting a wicked glare directed at Nathaniel. His heart catching in his throat from the close call with the chair leg and now her evil gaze directed at none other than himself, he unconsciously took a step back. His timidity clearly displeased her, and he saw her sifting through the debris for another weapon.
“Please Your Majesty, will you see no reason? You are unwell, overcome by anger and destroying your own possessions with wild abandon even as your body is ripped to pieces, its lifesblood draining with every act. You must put aside your anger for now and take hold of yourself!” He pleaded with her, begging for her to cease her self destructive rampage. Merely antagonized by his outright refusal to help, to understand her pain, her expression hardened and this time it was no mere makeshift missile scavenged from destroyed furniture she wielded, but an icicle, its point wickedly sharp and gleaming in the dim light.
Nathaniel’s eyes widened, his shock at the Empress’s apparent state of mania giving way to fear as her sudden escalation threatened his very life. With every instinct in his body screaming for flight in the face of this imminent peril, he dove to the side. Flung with unnatural swiftness far faster than the meagerly muscled arms of the Empress could possibly have accomplished, the icicle flew through where he had been standing mere moments before, shattering on impact with the stone wall behind him. Having rolled through the debris on the ground, and now been showered by unnaturally cold shards of ice, he felt the heat in his body being sapped at a dangerous pace.
He had never before seen her so enraged, willing to take out her anger on even the closest of her advisors. Looking back to his past experiences, from back when he was a mere captain in her service during the civil war, she would never have even thought to lash out physically against her followers, even after suffering some of her bitterest defeats. No wonder the handmaiden that had guided his way up the Spire had made such a hasty retreat after their arrival. He knew she had been tightly knit with her uncle, but her current rage was on another level. He had personally attended the Empress’s execution of her elder sister, heard the woman’s desperate pleading and begging for her life, the snot and tears running down her face in a disgraceful display before the headsman’s axe had silenced her for good. The Empress had not even batted an eyelash of the sight. This degree of hatred was toxic, poisoning her from the inside as she ineffectually attempted to quell it, not by focusing on the root cause productively, but by lashing out at anything that even reminded her of her object of hatred. It seems it would be up to him to snap her out of her manic fugue, much to his chagrin.
“Why can’t you just… help me?! No trace of that man must be allowed to survive, I shall not abide it!” She cried out, entirely given over to rage as she conjured another icicle with a flourish of her hand.
“Your Majesty, please forgive me for the presumption…” With an exasperated sight, Nathaniel squared his shoulders and prepared to charge.
The foolish Empress had decided to play with fire as she brandished deadly weapons towards her own servants, and it had fallen to him, as her most impeccably royal retainer of course, to teach her that fire burned. Nathaniel began to run, his feet finding easy traction on the scattered debris of the floor despite its icy coating, his body kept low to minimize the target he presented. So swiftly did he move, that the Empress, eyes wide in surprise, failed to make her attack before his heavily muscled bulk caught her by the waste and tackled her to the ground. Mercifully, she had already been standing at the edge of the disaster zone, and the tumble had merely knocked the wind from her lungs instead of falling hard against the debris strewn about the floor.
“Is this how you want to take your revenge against your uncle you fool? Locked away in this glorified prison of a tower, terrorizing your servants, tearing yourself apart impotently destroying mere objects while the world burns around you?” Pinning her to the floor with his body, Nathaniel shook her shoulders, desperate to get his message through her impressively thick skull.
“I… I don’t…” She started mumbling, her expression of blind rage subsiding into one of sorrow as she sobbed in his arms. Nathaniel, knowing the Empress would only seldom choose to display emotion, preferring solitude to overcome her inner turmoil over the support of others, felt out of place and unsure of the appropriate way to comfort her.
“You’ll get your revenge, Your Majesty, I will personally ensure it. Remember, you aren’t the only one that your uncle has betrayed with his reckless actions. But… your people need you to weather this storm, and you need to be strong for that.” His mind, caught off guard by her unexpected moment of weakness, settled on reminding her of her duties to her people. Hopefully, his promise to help her in her inevitable quest for revenge had not fallen on deaf ears. Her crying ceased as she digested his words, her hazy eyes starting to refocus on his face looming just above hers. Her sorrowful expression collapsed into a careful crafted mask of neutrality, her lips drawn in a thin line. It seemed that she had returned to her senses at last.
“Nathaniel?” The Empress inquired, her voice sickeningly sweet, her face a mask from which no emotion could escape.
“Yes, Your Majesty?” He responded, carefully ignoring her sweet tone, his voice hearty with his lightened mood as he saw that he had chosen the correct path to bring her back, despite the… affronts to the Empress’s dignity.
“Get off of me.” Her neutral voice became vaguely threatening as she became aware of their positioning.
“Of course, Your Majesty!” Sensing danger, far more so than when her anger addled mind had merely tried to skewer him with an icicle, he jumped right up. Never before in his life had he obeyed an order so quickly, shooting to his feet like an arrow. The Empress got to her feet far more leisurely, wincing as she put weight on her feet.
“Shall I call for one of your handmaidens now?” He asked, glad that she may finally be amenable to receiving medical attention. Given the contents of that message, it would be a disaster if, in the final hour, she succumbed to an infection.
“No you fool, none shall see me so weak. I do have a reputation to uphold. Although at this point it is likely a lost cause in your case. Just help me to the reading room next door, the chairs in there should still be intact.” An uncharacteristic smile graced her pleasant face as she pointed at the unblemished door on the far side of the room, well away from the destruction.
“I know naught what you mean, Your Majesty. You were truly fearsome when you almost skewered me with an icicle four feet long.” Nathaniel offered his arm to the Empress to lean on as he helped her limp to the adjacent reading room.
He very carefully did not comment as, barely perceptible, he heard her mutter, “I knew you would dodge it.” The gods only knew what she would do if she knew that he had heard her professing her weakness openly. Making sure to kick away the debris from the floor, he carved a path through the mess guiding the Empress behind him into the next room.