48

48
MORVANA’S POV

The enchanted looking glass that hung on the wall of my bedchamber had been a gift from a witch I’d slain in 1347, and it had served me well over centuries with its tendency toward brutal honesty and unexpected sarcasm. Tonight it shone back at me with its typical cruel accuracy and opinion I had not asked for.

"You seem fatigued, Your Majesty," the mirror chimed in with its crystal voice. ‚Maybe hours of machination through eight centuries are starting to wear me down.

"I don't seem to remember asking you," I answered, appraising my reflection for signs of the stress I still wouldn't own up to.

“You never do, and yet here I am with awareness and the misfortune of the responsibility to mirror truth you’d rather avoid. Now that truth is that your well-planned plans are unraveling quicker than you can adjust.”

The mirror had not been mistaken, which made its observation all the more irritating. My infiltration networks were being found out, my courtesans were growing rebellious, and an ancient force I’d believed dormant had been stirred in response to a five-year-old werewolf child.

“It is but a temporary disturbance,” I told my reflection, more trying to convince myself than the glossy surface. "And when the Crimson Council meeting wipes out werewolf leadership, and then we have got fullbreed executions showing us vampire domination —"

“You’ll have martyred the rebels and you’ll bring about a power vacuum that destabilizes every supernatural level of the hierarchy,” the mirror had said in conclusion. "Brilliant strategy. Very 1347 of you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

“You are trapping modern problems with medieval solutions. The world is different, Your Majesty, but you are still in “preservation mode,” as France calls it, channeling principles that made humans think the earth was flat.”

I turned from the unsettling revelations of the mirror to view tactical maps of vampires in stations all over the supernatural world. The stage was set for my magnum opus— eliminations organised, the political screws turned, the mutineers all lined up to be purged….

But at this meticulous planning, I found myself feeling something I had not felt in centuries: doubt.

“The young vampires are calling it a ‘mid-immortality crisis,” he mirror added helpfully. “Your little Tessa’s rebellion has prompted a great deal of philosophical discussion among your people. You know, they're apparently wondering whether genocide is a reasonable answer to inter-species tension.”

“Genocide is such an ugly word. I prefer 'strategic species management.' "

“You can call it what you want, but the kids are right. You're starting to have doubts if the techniques that held your power in place for eight hundred years will still work in the supernatural environment of modern day."

The admission I had wanted to sidestep came clear in the mirror’s easy estimate. When did I people become the reason nothing progresses, rather than an architect of progress? When had fear-based rule ceased to also be the mark of a true leader and instead become just the flailings of someone who'd outlived their time?

"They ought to be afraid of me," I said, and the words felt hollow even in my own ears. "Fear creates order. Order creates stability."

“Fear breeds behavior,” the mirror said, correcting him. “But compliance isn’t loyalty, and without loyalty your empire is just waiting for the first person it ever insulted to get brave. Like, for instance, a young vampire haunted by his memories of being human and wondering if maybe healing was nobler than hunting.”

Tessa. What she’d begun was a small revolution: some dozen vampires gathering in a supply closet to discuss ethics and non-conventional uses of vampire abilities. But the fact of that rebellion revealed fissures in a foundation I had thought unshakeable.

"Execute them all," I decided. “The public display of the cost of defiance. Maybe the rest of them will remember the value of obedience after they’ve seen their friends die.”

“How very 1347 of you,” the mirror said again. “Like, how did that go with the witch rebellions? Oh, yes, you murdered them all and caused a power vacuum that plunged two centuries of wizardkind into magical anarchy. History doesn't repeat, but you do"

Before I could come up with an appropriately brutal retort, the room temperature plummeted. The ancient awareness that I had been on the threshold of but a moment ago blanched fully into existence and spilled over my sanctuary with a depth of power that even those eight hundred years would have been hard pressed to overcome.

"Queen Morvana," it murmured; its voice skipped over sound to find your consciousness. “We need to discuss what you’ve brought back from the dead.”

For over twenty years we’d taken great pains not to touch the ancient presence, even as I had built my palace around its slumbering body and went to great lengths so our actions never disrupted its sleep. Now it was fully awake, and the intensity bearing down upon me had weight behind it that felt like it would crush what little calm I'd tried to build around myself.

“:I woke nothing,” I said, adding authority that no longer belonged there to my voice. “The tiny one was a bloodline and it reacted to something I had no control over.

"You orchestrated those circumstances. You schemed to relocate and manipulate things to get bloodlines converging here thinking you could control the outcome. "But you've only fulfilled a prophecy long predating your ownkind—one that will mean the end of vampire domination for all-time.

The words landed like punches in my stomach, each one dismantling assumptions I had maintained for centuries. "What prophecy?"

The one that says when Alpha blood and Alpha King blood mix within a baby born out of love rather than duty, when the ancient spirits find their heir, when the First Blood awakens—no more need be predator in an age of balance.

And through the ancient being’s gaze, I saw the bigger picture that I’d overlooked. Linda was more than just a hybrid girl feeling her power. She was a genetic and supernatural switch the key that would turn changes in their very being for each side. My attempts to kill her only hastened the onset of her awakening, guaranteed that she would develop abilities that would compel cooperation over continued infighting.

“You mean I’ve been slaughtering myself?”

“I’m telling you you’ve been a pawn of forces that are beyond your comprehension, moving pieces upon a board created by powers that predate vampires walking upright. It’s not Linda’s awakening that is the threat — it’s the solution. The price of hundreds of years of inequity and oppression.”

The mirror decided to throw in its view: "Put more simply, your highness, you've spent the last eight hundred years working very hard to make yourself obsolete. It's actually quite poetic."

I approached a window that gave me a wide view onto the empire below, of this empire built on fear and force and the hope of an afterlife. How much of it would outlive what was coming? How much of me would survive?

"What happens now?" I asked the ancient presence.

"Linda completes her transformation. The bloodline awakens fully. And the supernatural realm has entered an era in which partnership isn’t a choice — it’s mandated by forces that predate your whole notion of species separation.”

"And the vampires? My people?"

"Will adapt or perish. As will werewolves. Just like all the beings who have thriven from imbalance but insisted that it wasn’t ‘unsustainable.” There was a pause in the presence, and I thought I detected a note of something like pity in its regard. "You're old enough to have witnessed the fall of an empire, Morvana. The issue is whether you can serenely embrace evolution or violently oppose inevitability.”

As if my words had conjured her, my own security told me that Linda was in the bowels of my palace. The child—hardly a child any more, really—was talking to someone; her voice held the harmonics of lost power, and reality rippled around it as she spoke.

“Queen Morvana,” Linda said in my chamber, somehow despite the fact it had to come from distance and not address how I didn’t know, “I need to tell you what happens next. And for the debt your kind owes for centuries of taking from this place without putting anything back.”

The ancient voice echoed through her, the child being nothing more than a conduit for a judgement that had festered over the millennia. “The age of vampire ascendancy draws to an end this night. The bill for your repression is payable in blood and transformation. Your tribes will be given a choice—transition or die out. No third option exists."

I looked at my face in the enchanted mirror, seeing not only my reflection but the shadow of every choice I’d ever made over eight hundred years. Every creature I’d slain, every uprising I'd quelled, every peacemaking gesture I’d sabotaged to maintain my power.

“Umm,” the mirror drawled, as only it can when being as bitchy as possible, “This is awkward. Watching your wicked empire crumble before your eyes. How very... 1347 of you."

I had no reply, for the first time in eight centuries. And what did you say when it dawned on you after all this time that your campaign to become God's equal, it was about to end in nothing more than being dog meat?