Chapter 200

Neia stared at Thalren in disbelief. "You can't be serious?"

"Aye, I am." Thalren said with a grim face, his broad mouth beneath his thick round protruding porcine nose, was turned down at the corners in a frown.

"The humans on the wall are specially nasty now, don't know where they got 'em, but they put some bodies on display. Buncha different types… guess they warning us." Thalren grunted.

Neia stopped dead in her tracks, the dark dwarven supervisors were teaching some of the orcs how to build stone paved roads, while the spriggans were planting rows of trees to guide the path. From atop the hill where she now stood, she could see the edifices of buildings beginning to rise and with her dragonid hearing and sense of smell, she could detect the growth and fast paced activity of the first 'industrial metalworks' of her Kingdom. The demihuman tribes were still reticent about working together, she could see they tended to stick to their own groups.

'But the power of unity isn't lost on them. Never before has there been a single united Demi-human alliance of this sort, past invasions were of isolated tribes and those were hard enough for the Holy Kingdom to fend off. A single united Kingdom?' Neia pondered what that would mean for the Roble Holy Kingdom if such a force invaded, it was difficult to imagine that the land would survive such an invasion. 'I wouldn't want to be on that side of the wall if it happened.' She suppressed a shudder and rubbed the side of her head where the small horns of bone were just beginning to emerge, each inch a reminder of her lost humanity.

But it mattered less and less to Neia as the days passed by and her city continued to grow. The brutal display of contempt for non-human life was a warning to her in particular, or so it felt. That was what concerned the Queen of Frost. 'They must have worked out what's happening here, though I can't imagine how… no, some kind of magic would account for it.'

'I still need to establish a court system and rule of law that isn't dependent only on strength, and to do that I need a firmer unity than I have right now…' She turned her eyes away from all the construction and toward the distant wall, it was such a large and imposing structure that its mere existence discouraged most demi-humans from invading the Holy Kingdom.

Having seen it up close from the other side, she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, 'That is the point. As long as it stands, it's a mark of human supremacy, domination, and security. It is there to tell us 'we can do what we want, and you can't beat us.' More importantly, it was the truth.

Neia folded her hands behind her back, Thalren just looked at her, waiting for judgement. "The wall has fallen before, but back then, it didn't have the fortress city there to support it. If we prepare properly… with a little help… we can take it. With luck, that will give us a position of strength to bargain from."

"You would kill humans?" Thalren asked rhetorically.

"Humans tried to kill me first. Twice." Neia pointed out, "and if they got a chance, other than my parents," Neia put a hand on the green armor over her chest, "they would definitely try again. I'm not a human anymore, and not a squire anymore, now… I'm the Frost Queen, Mistress of the Kingdom of Demalbion. My duty is to that, not to them." She answered her first follower.

"Then what do we do, My Queen?" The orc chief asked.

"Call the dark dwarf foreman to me, tell him I need to see him about some siege equipment, and summon the chief of the Bladers. I need to know how he feels about night battles… and the Pteropus chief, I need to know how much their strongest fliers can carry." Neia gave the order and he pounded his chest twice with a mailed fist.

"Yes, My Queen!" He grunted.

"We'll have to teach them a harsh lesson about the value of life, but when it is over… we should have both a Kingdom of our own, in the truest sense of the word, and peace that no stupid paladin bitch will dare to breach." Neia said, more to herself than to anyone, and went to inspect another project.

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"The atrocity was terrible, you have no idea, the Holy Queen let them execute every captured Southern noble as well as her administrators and soldiers…" Skana whispered with hushed tones to the rapt tavern audience.

They were the fourth one that day and the ninth one in the last two, and even without seeing them, Skana knew beyond a doubt that the doppelgangers were busy spreading the word like wildfire elsewhere.

Flames from candles licked the air and cast dancing shadows that made the green eyed Skana appear all the more fierce. Using every oratorical skill she acquired in telling stories, she relayed the word of the collapse of the Northern government, from among the crowd of the upscale tavern, nobles and merchants listened with expressive eyes and open ears.

Skana's stomach didn't even rumble when she smelled the stew reaching its state of near perfection. "The nobles, they defleshed, the officials, they lashed, I only barely made it out of there myself." Skana touched her hand to her chest where the fine silk garment rested. The feel of the expensive scarlet cloth was such that she made the gesture purely for the pleasure of touching it again.

With her hair neatly brushed and bound behind her, and her lips painted red and her cheeks touched with rouge, she appeared every inch the wealthy daughter of a well-to-do merchant. "My friends and I hid in the sewers the whole time, sneaking out at night to grab food, and…"

On and on the story went, the lurid pictures she painted of the brutal indifference of the Holy Queen to Southern lives and the horrible deaths that met those who resided in Hoburns were laid out to haunt the dreams of those who heard the green eyed woman speak.

When she was done, Skana accepted a few free drinks, some sympathetic hugs from those who believed she was of their class… and then she made her exit. The door shut behind her and she ventured out into the night to rejoin the Lady Albedo.

Illyana shouted into the dense forest, "Do not shoot! I am an elf!" She heard nothing, her ears twitched, the foliage and trees were so thick and plentiful that there were no shadows to speak of, only the solid sea of night through which she moved. "Do not shoot! I am an elf!"

Still she heard nothing.

"I am Illyana, once a whore of Wenmark! Please do not shoot me! I come with words of my Savior!" She announced again into the empty night and stepped forward. Despite a long life in the dark city, she still remembered the art of the silent step, and not even several human lifetimes surrounded by stone could tear her away from her love of the deep woods, no matter what borders those woods lay within.

Her feet fell noiselessly over leaves that should have crunched, she avoided branches that she should not have been able to avoid, only her occasional words shouted into the nothing would alert anyone to her coming.

The signs of elven presence were clear to her piercing eyes even in the dark, invisible even in broad daylight to the clumsy humans that might have thought to pursue them into their own ground.

So, forward she went, until a voice finally shouted back.

"We see you! You are safe, come this way!" It was a soft, but urgent and insistent voice.

Illyana followed it until she found herself in the midst of a clearing, in the high branches, a number of elves sat clad in mixes of human peasant clothing and leaf-woven materials. A few wore animal skins and furs, such as wolves, bears, and others.

They were well fed, which was different from when they were in bondage, but they were also armed, which was a vast difference. Many were armed with bows, some with captured swords, their faces were hard and often scarred over from the abuses suffered in mines or within the private hells of the ruined city.

It was also noteworthy that those with bows had them drawn and arrows aimed at Illyana.

She kept her hands up and slowly sank to both her knees. "I am one of you! I swear!" She cried out.

"Then explain your clothing?" An elf atop a branch said and hopped down, he landed on one light foot and approached, he was towering, broad bodied and thickly muscled.

Even at a glance it was obvious he was one of the Elf King's get. Not that the bastard would have cared about the fate of his son.

He pointed a finger down at her, "You're dressed in fine clothing, like one of the collaborating house whores that would see one of us lashed for the reward of a honey cake. You're well fed, and I haven't seen you, any elf that isn't with us by now should have been dead a long time ago."

Illyana looked up the length of his arm and held his gaze with her own, "I was a whore, one of the slaves bound to serve at the Golden Roan in the wealthy district of the city. I am dressed this way," she touched the black and white garment, "because I serve someone else, the one to send me to you. She's not a human, but a demon, and more importantly, she is the demon who destroyed Wenmark."

Voices buzzed at that. "A meteor shower did that, and an earthquake…" He began to say, but stopped when he saw Illyana stare at him like he was an idiot.

"I was with the demon when she did it, she used her Master's scroll and some power of her own to destroy the city. I gave her my soul in exchange, my life, my everything… and now she sends me to you, or are you so great a fool you believe that the quake and the meteors came together by chance?" Illyana hurled the contemptuous denial at him like a rock, and he grew quiet.

"Say we believe you, why are you here now?" He demanded.

"Chaos is about to consume the Holy Kingdom, my Mistress is offering you a choice, there is very little chance that you can form an elven homeland in the forests here, even if you could, there is no way it could last, but there is a place you'll be able to go, and soon, if you're willing to work with others who are not elves." Illyana promised, and seeing the bows slowly lower and the tension in the strings go lax, she lowered her hands and began to breathe normally again.

"What would we have to do… to get land for ourselves?" He asked with a tightly furrowed brow.

"Kill humans." Illyana said with a gleeful smile.

It was matched by the others of her race almost immediately.