The dagger struck the air where her heart had been half a second earlier. It clattered against the obsidian floor.
Aeryn turned, slowly, as if the motion were part of a ritual older than time. Her hair, streaked with crimson gold, caught the torchlight like fire unfurling.
Behind her, the would-be assassin writhed, a man instantly reduced to a slippery, broken thing, like a snail sprinkled with salt. His face was gone, his features contorted and slack. Blood, thick and unnatural, leaked from his ears as if a statue were weeping gore. His limbs trembled violently, pulled taut by invisible strings.
Aeryn had not lifted a hand. The entire court, assembled for the Tribunal of Houses, watched in horrified silence. They had come for order and old ceremony, not to witness a blood rite. Yet, here it was.
........
Hours earlier, it had seemed a normal court day, normal in the tense sense of a taut battleground locked in cold war since Aeryn's recent questions had exposed the court's cowardice.
Aeryn entered the Jaw of Judgment in a gown of raven black, crimson-gold ringlets wound in her hair. Her eyes, pale brown like honey over cooled steel, scanned the seated nobles.
As she crossed the court doors, the whispers started. Not the rustle of silks or the songs of the minstrels, but marrow-hushed voices beneath the palace stones. The bones spoke to her now. She didn't know how; perhaps they always had, but only now, in the silent chaos, could she finally hear them.
One among them comes to spill your crown, they whispered. It is one of your own guards. He has been paid.
As she reached the throne, she smiled, dismissing her maid Sakina with a feigned task. She sat, waiting.
She let him lunge.
The moment his blade swung, Aeryn turned with an unnatural, chilling calm, like a prepared priestess. And in that instant, something inside her didn't break, it opened.
It was a well bursting open after centuries of drought. A howl of red fury. A roar in her ears that was not sound, but blood calling to blood.
The guard's veins instantly lit up beneath his skin, glowing red-hot like molten metal in a forge. He dropped his weapon, shrieking, and clawed at his own flesh. His blood did not spurt; it rose, spiraling from his wounds in ribbons of scarlet, caught in the invisible grasp of a twelve-year-old girl.
When the body dropped, Aeryn said nothing. She looked up at the frozen court, her expression conveying a devastating emptiness: "What is this? Are you playing with me? This is all you have got?"
No tears. No screams. Only the silence of someone who had just remembered what she was made of. She looked at the twisted corpse, waved a hand, and turned her sight away, a look of utter disgust on her face.
"Clean this up!" she commanded. "If you ever wish to play games like this, at least choose better players, or play me directly! Do not spoil my court with the foul blood!"
.......
As she settled back onto the throne, they bowed.
It was not a show of unity, but a chain reaction of terror. It began with Lady Marrion, whose pale lips trembled as her knees creaked, forcing her stout body down. Then Lord Innos, hand to his heart, his expression blank with shock. Even Lord Vael bowed, though his neck twitched, visibly resisting the weight of the gesture.
They bent low, not in loyalty but in absolute dread. A child queen had survived assassination and responded with a display of power so primal and absolute that the ghosts in the walls held their breath. They knew now: she was not simple, and she would not be easily dismissed.
That night, the Jaw of Judgment closed early.
Aeryn locked herself in her chamber and stared into the mirror. Her hair had changed drastically. The red that had once only kissed the tips now bled and ran upward, strand by strand, like her roots were catching fire from the inside out. Her light brown eyes glimmered faintly, now more gold than amber. Something deep in her blood was waking, making her feel flushed and feverish.
She threw herself onto the bed, desperate to sleep, but the cold memory of her sudden murder kept her awake.
At midnight, she went to the mirror again. This time, she whispered, "What are you?"
The girl staring back was silent.
......….
Aeryn was done trying to please them. After the murder, all possibility of common ground was lost. She made a commitment to her reflection, to do no more flattery, No more courtly performances, No more polite smiles over honeyed bread.
The next day, she went to court and gave a single, terrifying command:
"All Houses will bind blood to me. Publicly. No more ancestral oaths on parchment want you all to bind your loyalty to me!"
They gasped. They resisted.
"Your Highness, you are too young!" "The weight of the blood will break you!" "Blood demands blood, it will retaliate!"
Their resistance lasted exactly two days. They knew her power now, 6 years ago they were not sure but now it was clear what she was, small, yes, but potent enough to haunt their dreams. One by one, the Great Houses stood before her in the Tower of Names, where ancestral records were etched into silver stone.
Aeryn stood at the heart of the ritual circle, barefoot, her red hair unbound, while the storm she carried thundered behind her, a sound not born from clouds.
She watched them prick their thumbs and drip their noble blood into the flame. Watched the sigils blaze red across the silver stone. Watched their magic, their power, their lineages, all bind to her.
She was no longer just their queen. She was their anchor. Their leash. And their curse.
But not all Houses complied in truth. One house rebelled went against her command and maybe used a beast's blood instead of nobles's or heir's that reversed the magic binding. Unfortunately no one found out until very later.
That week, her terrified mentors begged her to soften. "The court fears you, Your Highness," one whispered, hands shaking. "Fear is not the same as loyalty, my Queen! Its soo sudden my queen!"
She dismissed him with a flick of her fingers. The mentor instantly began to bleed from the nose and did not stop for three days. No physician could staunch the flow.
The new names spread like wildfire: the Witch Queen, the Redborn., the Blood Heiress of Hawasa.
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