III. The Royal Guard
This was the most delicate. And the most delicious.
Not a spectacle of bloodshed—not yet. This was the slow corruption of the sword arm that once dragged her through stone halls, shackled and silent. The men who saluted lies. Who bowed before the king while betraying truth.
Vex knew better than to challenge the Guard head-on.
She didn't need to.
She whispered instead.
One morning, three captains failed to report for inspection.
The first was found slumped at his writing desk, dagger sunk to the hilt through his eye—notes still drying in ink, a confession half-scribed beside his body.
The second wandered into the sea. Fully armored. No note. No screams. Just a slow, deliberate march into the waves until the tide took him under and never gave him back.
The third slit his throat in the palace courtyard. Midday sun. Dozens of witnesses.
He bled out against marble steps, whispering to no one, "She showed me."
The question, of course, echoed through the halls like thunder.
What did she show them?
Only what they already knew.
Their hands, their oaths, their voices—each had been used in her trial. Each had sworn falsely that they'd seen her poison Valoeria. They'd accepted coin for perjury, turned blind eyes toward forged testimony, and marched her down to be erased like a stain from silk.
Their silence once bought.
Their deaths, now public. And pointed.
⸻
At first, the Guard tried to hold formation.
Discipline. Honor. Protocol.
But soon, beneath polished breastplates and starched uniforms, crimson feathers began to appear—tucked discreetly into sashes, tied into braids, stitched inside collars.
A red mark. A quiet rebellion. A reckoning.
Some left bloodless notes on their bunks: We serve fire now.
Others tied red ribbons to their blades before vanishing in the night, reappearing weeks later at the edges of the Hollow, eyes fierce, unafraid, already loyal.
One soldier spat at Alaric's feet during inspection. He was dragged away screaming:
"She comes with flame and teeth!"
The king ordered feathers banned in the capital.
But the rot had already spread.
⸻
The Guard was no longer a single sword. It was a fractured mirror—each crack reflecting a different guilt. No one knew who to trust. Loyalty became suspect. Brotherhood became myth.
Commanders reported paranoia. Some refused to speak Vex's name aloud. Others slept with blades beneath pillows. There were reports of soldiers waking screaming, their dreams thick with fire and her voice—not yelling, not threatening.
Just whispering:
"I remember you."
The elite force meant to protect the crown now flinched at its shadow.
⸻
In the Hollow
Night wrapped the Hollow in mist and quiet, the kind only born from exhaustion after precision war.
Vex sat by the hearth, her cloak draped over the back of a weathered chair. Her fingers moved with quiet ritual, pouring deep red wine into two mismatched cups. The firelight caught her face—sharp angles softened only by focus.
Rhydir leaned over her shoulder, gaze half amusement, half admiration.
"They crumble beautifully," he murmured. "Church. Coin. Command. The kingdom's holy trinity."
She slid one cup toward him. "Three legs of the table."
"And now it wobbles."
She didn't toast. She simply watched the wine swirl, dark as blood, before sipping once—deliberate. Poised. Dangerous.
Rhydir raised his cup. "To collapse."
"To rot," she corrected. "Collapse is too clean. Too visible. This—" she gestured vaguely toward the cracked maps, the fire, the silent victory "—this is infection. They don't even know where the disease began."
He smirked, then sobered. "You're winning."
"I'm exposing," she said. "I'm not breaking the kingdom. I'm pulling back the silk and letting them see the maggots."
A silence settled between them, comfortable and razor-edged.
Rhydir set his cup down, watching her carefully. "You've been quiet all evening."
"I'm thinking."
"Of him?"
He meant the king. Alaric.
The man who smiled as she was dragged. The man who watched her scream her innocence and signed away her name.
Vex looked up.
Eyes aglow like coals. Calm. Cold. Measured.
"Of what's left to break."
⸻
Far across the realm, in the highest tower of a kingdom now hollowing from the inside out, King Alaric dreamed.
In his sleep, he saw phoenixes circling his throne—feathers red as war, eyes bright with knowing. He heard the fire crackle in his curtains, saw his dead wife's face whisper behind mirrors.
He woke screaming.
No one came.
The Guard no longer answered screams.
———————————————————
The rot began quietly. As it always does.
Not with swords or screams, but in the pause between them.
A forgotten ledger. A vanished priest. A nobleman who drank poison before dawn and left only a note that read: "Forgive me. I believed the king."
In the capital, the air grew thicker by the week. The skies above the palace hung low with smoke from distant fires, and no one could say whether the scent of ash was from burning wheat, bodies, or holy writ. Whispers passed faster than plague, and no one trusted mirrors anymore. Not since the stained-glass saint blinked red and wept.
The Church had begun to fracture.
They called it divine retribution at first—old men with quaking hands preaching louder and louder from cracked pulpits. But when the High Cleric burst into flame in front of his congregation, it stopped being prophecy. It became proof.
Now, shrines stood abandoned. Temples were boarded shut. And a new kind of worship took root—quiet, private, heretical. Mothers lit candles not for saints, but for a woman with fire in her eyes. In the alleys, whispers called her the Phoenix Queen. Some said she had risen. Others claimed she never died.
Either way, faith had a new name. And it burned.
The economy did not scream when it died. It choked.
Gold, once sacred as gospel, now felt too heavy. It bore new inscriptions—veiled messages stamped by unseen hands. Merchants refused the king's coin, and silver turned to rot in the chests of nobles. A single note, found nailed to a city gate, read:
"You cannot bribe fire."
No one could track where the real coin had gone. Only that it vanished—like water draining through a cracked basin. The Queen Regent tried to quell panic with treasury reserves from Velgrave, only to discover them emptied weeks ago. Rhydir had bled it dry the moment he pledged himself to Vex.
And the Guard? The great wall of steel that once protected Elaria?
Gone soft at the core.
Three captains dead in as many days—each with secrets carved into their throats. Soldiers whispered of dreams they didn't ask for and visions that left their blades shaking. Feathers—crimson and cursed—began appearing beneath armor, tied to hilts, tucked into boots. Silent declarations of loyalty… not to the king.
One soldier spat at Alaric's feet during inspection and said, "She knows." They hung him from the palace gates. But two more vanished that night, taking weapons and maps with them.
Every institution—Church, Coin, Command—was infected.
The Crown still sat on Alaric's brow. But it rested on a trembling man in a dying room, surrounded by traitors too polite to say so aloud. The High Council met in whispers and wrote in cipher. Several of them had started sleeping in different quarters every night, afraid their mirrors might speak.
The empire did not crumble all at once. It was not a thunderous fall from glory.
It was a slow, methodical decay. A skin peeled back.
And underneath it all, fire.