The Last Breath

The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished. They say the gods abandoned the woods that day, and everything became twisted. The birds ceased to sing, their calls warping into screams. Animals wept, and flowers turned black. The earth itself soured, and soil started to bleed.

Some folk, usually those whose eyes had grown glassy with age, swore that there was no magic that had changed the earth, that it was people who had done it to themselves. They swore magic died long ago, and they were only partially wrong. Magic had always been sewn into the world, braided into strands of life. Each breath taken, each bud’s bloom, as well as each life’s end was an act of magic, and it wasn’t that magic was gone as much as humans forgot how to use it. Sorcery was an art that was lost to the complacency of peaceful times. For thirty years, there had been peace among the three kingdoms, and monsters had become bedtime stories as they faded in the elders’ minds. The prophecies that arose during the Battles of the North became tales before slumber.

They say the battles threaded time through space, and centuries of fighting happened within days. The men returned to their homes the same age as they left, but their minds had broken. The last of the battles lasted four days, a final assault on the holy ground of the North, but for each man it had been half of a millennium, and many of them collapsed during the trek home or gave in to the images imprinted behind their eyes and the prophecies that still rang in their ears. Three thousand men had marched on the North, and only four hundred returned. It was a sad victory, a peace full of mourning.

The Queen had been but a child when her father returned from the North, eyes distant with a constant shake to his hands. She had ruled since his homecoming, her mother having been lost to the dunes decades before. It was a quiet rule, not unchecked by occasional unrest and dissent, but it was easy enough to calm a people who had been saved from the savagery of the North. Things were still within the kingdoms as wounds began to slowly scar.

For years there was peace, and yet even calm winds can wear away at sandcastles.

As rumors of a sorcerer in the west were sweeping across the dunes, and the frozen giants in the tundra grew weary of their chains, the daylight’s throne had suddenly become empty, the Queen nowhere to be found.

It was the river that was noticed first. Word spread like wildfire, whispers of curses soaring over the kingdom, eventually reaching the Chancellor’s ears. He was a decidedly unmagical little man with ears half the size of his head, but what he lacked in personability, he made up for with intelligence. It was in his hands that the kingdom continued to survive even after the King had taken the men to war.

But magic was by no means his area of expertise, so he endeavored to find the daughter of the Ice-cleaver, the Stone-scorcher herself, but her room was empty, the guards still stationed outside. Quietly, so as not to cause panic, he began to search the palace walls, but when a handmaiden had entered the empty room to collect her bedding, alarm began to rise.

There was one knight unaccounted for, the Queen’s sword protector, and it was three days of increasing chaos before they found him. Just to the south of the kingdom’s gates lay a field. He was found there, one hand severed from the wrist, the other clutching a bloodied and dented crown. The same words fell from his lips again and again, the last lines of the prophecy of old. ““They will come for us all, starting with her.”