This is a planned series (co-outlined with tinytoffeebean) and will be my first one in a long time. While I do have the story planned out in its entirety, I am learning from my previous mistakes, and will continue writing this series only as long as there is interest.

The fantasy element will be given very light treatment, and will likely only be apparent in the later part of the story. For most purposes, this story is heavily based in realism.

No other character death is planned except for the single one that happens here.


The attack happens in the middle of the night.

The screams reaches her before she can see the light of the palace on fire, a blaze carved against the black sky, raining ash and soot over their heads. Panic whipped the air, and below her, the streets are quickly overrun, stampeding the weak and slow, a mass of churning bodies slogging over the red-slicked stones of the crushing mobs. It disappears into the descending maw of a war that followed them home, a war they had thought over and vanquished, steel-toothed, rapacious, and smiling.

As she watches the smoke from the palace fire climb towards the sky, Fareeha realizes there's another life she hasn't lived. It belongs to another world, beginning at another time when she had been someone else, when she had been a young girl, kinder, softer, unbloodied and clean. It is a life lived by someone more deserving, images from a fantastical world that disappears on the wind, traced from flames and cinder, melting into the sky and stars.

There were certain truths to Fareeha's character that transcend the possibilities of the universe, their commonalities pulling together as mirrored fragments of herself she has left behind, a mosaic of the person she should have been, the one she could have been. Through their pieces, they sing clear, rising above the clamorous din of a dying city. It's a resonating eulogy mourning the ends of every branching possibility her life could have taken her, every alternative except the one before her, where it all could have taken her: her love for her country, her love for her people, her love for her mother, and a fourth, the one possibility lost to her before she could put a name to all the things she wanted to bring Angela.

She hadn't seen her in years, years spent hiding in a war she so desperately thought would have been her vindication, one she would eventually return from, triumphant in her crusade to prove her wrong, that she could become the person she set out to be. She wonders what Angela looks like now, if she still touched a hand to her hair every time she lowered her head to a microscope, if she still followed her schedules down to the last minute, if she still laughed at the same jokes, if she still smiled the same way.

She wishes it were different, that she had been different somehow, less hasty and stubborn, less prone to rashness. It had created a rift between herself and her mother when she was young, the same way it caused Angela to turn her away on the day of her enlistment (the way it made Fareeha leave home before she was sixteen, angry and full of resentment).

She wishes she had been braver, returned the letters she received, brave enough to put aside her pride and childish ego, to make amends and acknowledge she had been wrong. She wishes she had the courage to go home with the knowledge that it wouldn't have been a defeat, that it still would have been the momentous reunion she wanted. A prodigal daughter returning home.

She wishes she could have been brave in other ways as well. She wishes she could have told Angela how she felt, for the girl who loved Angela for so long, so long ago.

Now, Fareeha directs her horse over the bodies of an old woman and her son, trampling blood and dirt onto pristinely-dyed golden saffron and embroidered indigo as she races towards the palace. The whole city had been caught in mid-celebration (all military forces and auxiliaries called back to the capital, as she had been), all of its people enrobed in their most colorful clothes, eager to revel in the dizzying heights that came with the victorious end to another war (lies, a ruse, what was thought dead in fact revived and strong).

When she was younger, Fareeha had loved celebrations. She imagines in her other life, she musters the courage to invite Angela for a visit just for themselves (when she's older, when Angela looks into her eyes and sees a woman's sincere intentions, sees that their betrothal was more than a paper engagement, that Fareeha's was a real love, enduring and true). Yet the length of her bravery takes her only as far as shy glances, faltering at the space between them as they walk between prize booths and ribboned curtains, her ears flushing hotly as she wastes each opportunity to grasp her hand. Angela's encouraging smile would have ruined her. She would have been happy; the feeling of Angela's hand in her own would have been enough. It would have lasted an eternity.

Fareeha's own campaigns have carried her for miles, ten years spent under the yoke of the military (she had so longingly wanted to join, romantic and idealistic, ready to show them all there could have been a noble cause in its ranks) chasing warlords and would-be princes from one country to the next, the swath of her sweeping war maul carving boundaries and borders into lives too numerous to notch into the handle of any weapon. A priced burden exchanged for miles of land in someone else's name. She wonders if her actions amounted to anything.

As she witnesses the last of a hundred-year-old dynasty fall, she hopes it has, hopes her bloodied hands helped in some way to keep Angela clean of the world, that her time traversing the empire has helped secure the borders containing Angela safe. There is comfort in knowing that in the end Angela would never see the person she has become.

When Fareeha finally rallies her men and they break the doors of the palace into splinters of wood and iron, she realizes that this, too, can be a homecoming.

Outside, the air had reeked of desperation, wet and sickly with fear; reminding her of an open latrine on a hot day, the city sitting with its guts open under the desert night. Inside, the palace has been turned into a charnel house, the air foul with smoke and the tang of blood. She loses half her regiment (what little surviving from the number she was able to rouse) to the task of warding off the advancing fires scaling the palace walls. The other half looks no better, exhausted and minimally equipped for what was to come. They ravenously set upon the bodies, scavenging what small arms and armor they can find.

The marble steps of the grand ballroom is steeped with a muddy hue; Fareeha's heavy footsteps leave streaks across the brilliant stone. Clothed only in the scant protection offered by her leather jerkin and summer cloak (turned sticky and dark), she feels naked without the comforting weight of her chain mail (left behind for a night's entertainment in a moment of carelessness, a lapse in her duty that leaves them all exposed). Someone hands her a bow and quiver (retrieved from a dead soldier, one of too many in a mountainous heap left in the wake of the marauders) but her hand keeps returning to the empty space around her waist, her arm longing for the familiar heft of the weighted chain and spike that had been her constant companion through the war.

Looking around her, she feels the rest of her confidence flee in droves, replaced with a grim reality that she is among the last of an era, standing in the middle of a torrent before it swept her under. When she sees her soldiers finally shatter the siege and break into the inner sanctum, she realizes that she has been tired long before this moment. It has been eons, a lifetime of waiting to reach here (twenty-five years too short, people will say, when to her it has been ten years too long). The war has bred in her like a tumor in her organs, devouring her from the inside, blighting the things that she once drew strength from. She longs to rest, she aches to close her eyes.

When she leads her men to approach the throne room, Fareeha realizes that death brings the same look of fear on the faces of nobility and commoner alike. Without the uniformity of their armor (lost and forgotten in the middle of celebrations made too early, the taste of joy and relief turning into ashes in their mouths), it's difficult to discern her allies from her enemies. The invaders wear the clothes of their people, the same disguise that granted them passage under the victory parades that now camouflages them amongst the servants and palace guards. Each true royal bodyguard and fellow soldier they encounter is a welcome comrade, but they are still too few altogether (too weak) for them to survive.

When they arrive at the final door, she pauses to look among them, seeing the same knowledge in their faces as well.

Lead from the front, someone had taught her once, so they know the example to follow.

For the final push, she positions herself with the lancers and shieldsmen. She thanks each of them for their service, humbled in turn when they respond with their indebtedness to her leadership. The weight of their hands upon her shoulders and back honors her more than any gaudy medal buried at the bottom of her dresser, lifts her higher than any commendation given by a queen. In a flickering moment (gone before she can hold onto it, before she can draw strength from its light) she feels invincible.

Someone offers a prayer, but she has already made her goodbyes (and if there really was a God somewhere in the vast indifference of the universe, surely they would grant her a small forgiveness and allow Angela to live out her long years, safe and happy).

When the throne room breaks open, she attacks with hesitant purpose, second-guessing the identity of every man and woman who comes into range of her bow (a deadly talent she intensely repents for leaving unpracticed for so long, a gift from her mother, taken without gratitude). She strikes limbs and joints, giving quarter when she can, picking off the bulk of the would-be usurpers in quick succession in the blink of an eye. When she shoots a man in the head, there isn't time to think about who he might have been before another sets upon her with sword in hand. She counts her arrows with her fingers grasping hungrily at her quiver, growing fewer with every step up the palace stairs. Each one takes a monumental effort and she wipes furiously at a cut in her brow she doesn't remember receiving.

They find a bloodbath, pushing into the cavernous belly of the court, setting upon the insurgents like a wave breaking upon the shore. The sound of armored bodies smashing into each other is deafening, a thunderous clamor of bone and armor crashing over weak skin and muscle.

She stands above it, raining volleys of arrows over the phalanx before being shielded again by the steadfast eaves of their shields. She has been incredibly lucky for coming this far without pause, and grows too daring. A stray arrow slips through the cracks in their barrier, answering her in the thigh, striking her deep and narrowly missing her kneecap (there's no time to assess its damage, no time to do anything except reach down to snap the shaft as close to the wound as she can, her vision tilting wildly as the arrow eventually breaks, digging into her flesh and unleashing a fresh stream of blood).

Behind her, her regiment surges with renewed vigor when they see her at the frontline, heaving against the repelling body of the rebel's fighting force, their battle cries rising in unison in the dark, the names of their country, queen, and lords upon their lips. She recognizes the name of her own house answering back through the chaos. For a long time it seems almost impossible to see anything except the endless wall of armor and rended flesh in the rolling shadows of the low light. For every soldier who falls (pierced through with black fletching, cleaved into pieces) another springs up to take their place.

Her heart stops when she finds the small figure on the ground of the throne room, surrounded by a flagging retinue of a dwindling auxiliary force. She recognizes the colors of their heraldry, the familial pattern of the cloak that covers the woman's shoulders, the same that covers Fareeha's own.

"General!" Fareeha's voice is hoarse, parched, her throat and mouth smacking of blood as she summons the last of her stamina and punctures a hole through the line, allowing her men to follow, galvanized (as she was) by the sight of their country's greatest commander. The two forces join together, encircling their officers in disciplined formation. Their backs pressed together as they meet in the center of the throne room, a meeting years overdue.

"How many arrows do you have?" Ana's voice is clipped, her self-restraint belying her appearance, disheveled, strands of gray hair whipping in currents of hot air. her headscarf torn and stained with splatters of blood (not her own, Fareeha noted thankfully). Fareeha is unsurprised to find that, between them, she is the one who has arrived at the palace more worse for wear.

"Three." Fareeha reports, before spying an archer standing in the gap of their defenses. She dispatches him with a well-placed shot into his eye socket. "Two." She amends grimly. She doesn't dare ask anyone around her for another weapon, afraid that she would be ordering them to surrender themselves to their deaths. She grips the bow tighter in her hand, notching another arrow and taking a deep breath in a concentrated effort to keep her mind present in the battle. The room is spinning; the arrowhead in her thigh weeps blood down the leg of her trousers and pools inside her boot, leaving red footprints from where she walked.

Ana sees through her deception with all the experience of an esteemed army general, all the wisdom of a mother seeing through the lies of her child. "Fareeha, listen to me. The kingdom has fallen. The king is dead." She pauses to pull her bowstring to her cheek, letting loose an arrow from her longbow that puts down a plate-armored warrior through his breastplate. "Take who you can and get out of here."

"I'm not leaving without you!" Fareeha protests fiercely. There is another way, she knows it. They look at each other without words, the urgency of their situation pressing down around them with gleaming blades, swarming with lethal purpose. The moment is too short to hold all the things Fareeha wanted to tell her, all the things she'd seen, all the things she learned. She wants to tell her that she had been wrong. She had been so horribly wrong. She has regretted all their parting words. Looking into Ana's eyes, she knows her mother feels the same way, knows that their years spent apart had been with each other in mind. It's a delicate fringe of solace, her only comfort in knowing that she could have been brought here for a reason other than to die.

In her mind, Fareeha pieces together the routes that have guided her here, what it would take to trace their way back. Ana is small and her armor is light; Fareeha is sure they can make it if they're smart about it. They will, even if she has to carry her. The small light of hope ignited by the sight of her mother flames into a beacon, growing bright and blinding her from her true fate, the one she had recognized so clearly before. The hope brought by their reunion poisons Fareeha's reason, driving her mad with all the fervent desperation of a drowning man clawing for flotsam.

"Don't be foolish!" Ana retorts angrily, her face a desperate mask of horror and anguish. It is the same face Fareeha had seen countless times before, innumerable throughout her battles in her career, endless times through her fight up the city road. It has never been a look she has seen on her mother. It's a clawed hand of fear curling a fist around Fareeha's heart, suffocating and sobering. Its grip tightens into a stranglehold when she sees Ana's eye grow wide, fixed over her shoulder at a sight she couldn't see (too slow, too careless, it will haunt her until the day she dies).

General is how Fareeha had always seen Ana, an unflinching, unyielding woman, forged by her years at war. Mother is who she sees when Ana shoves her aside, stabbed through by a pike meant for Fareeha's back.

It felt strange that she had seen so many people meet their violent ends in horrible ways, but it's the sight of one person impaled helplessly at the end of a long spear that makes Fareeha lose her mind. She stares at the barbed metal tip that erupts from Ana's body. It didn't make any sense; metal and wood didn't belong inside people. Human bodies weren't supposed to be broken like that.

"Mom!" Fareeha screams.

She's rising, pushing through the chaos, her wounds forgotten. In a single whirling motion Fareeha pulls the shortsword from the sheath at the spearman's waist and decapitates him through the skirt of his helm with a single-handed stroke, unfeeling the burst of red mist that splashes across her face as his head tumbles to the floor with his body. It's an action that is too little, too late. It doesn't amount to anything.

She catches Ana before she drains away. Fareeha's staggering knees finally collapse as she carries them to the ground. She's surprised by how light Ana's body is (how heavy her own felt), how the whole of Ana's person could be so well-contained in her arms.

"You've grown so strong." Ana's voice is barely more than a whisper, her smile breaking through.

The hand that touches Fareeha's cheek is bloodied, trembling with fast-fading life. It feels so frail in her own, so unlike the unfailing steadiness that had walked Fareeha through the sunlit and callow days of her youth, that guided her on horseback through the desert riverlands. Fareeha would die a hundred times to return her mother back to the person from her memories, the one who loved her all those years ago. Without equal, unparalleled, forever.

She wants to tell her mother she doesn't even know what strength meant, wants to ask what it should have looked like. She wants to tell her how much she hates the callousness of her own body, the unfeeling layer that protects her from the rest of the world, how after her enlistment how easy it was for her to grow hardened and pitiless, how different it was for herself (how unlike they were, in the end). How Ana would have been ashamed if she knew the truth, that war became easier for Fareeha with each life that disappeared beneath her hands.

She wants to say she would have traded all of it away (given anything) to be weak again, to be five years old, small and innocent, curled in the surety of her safe embrace, never knowing what it took to be the person to order men to their deaths, the whole of her good intentions never amounting to the cost of hundreds of souls pressing down on her.

Instead, she sobs, begging her not to go, to not leave her here all alone. Her pleas fall on unhearing ears, the light in Ana's eyes fading as she rocks her until she's gone, before a lieutenant's insistent hands finally pull Fareeha from her mother's corpse. It is another kind of death, Fareeha thinks, to be the one left behind, grasping at an empty husk that had once contained so much warmth.

Sturdy hands pull her to her feet, but Fareeha can't see the person they belong to. Her grief turns her blind and deaf and she stares over him, impassive.

"Hold onto your senses! You can't let your mother's sacrifice go to waste!"

The lieutenant is an aged man Fareeha recognizes from her childhood, an able bannerman who served her mother loyally. (His name is on the tip of her tongue; she could retrieve it if she cared to.) It could not have been easy choosing to remain in the service of the Amari family after they fell out of favor so fantastically all those years ago. It's a loyalty hard-bought, bound solely through the power and charisma of her mother that held together the foundations of their house. The men and women who stand with him are similarly devoted, ardent protectors of the Amari lands and name, faithful and true. Fareeha would throw all of them into the black pits of hell if it meant she could bring her mother back.

Distantly (slowly, painfully) she knows he is right. The minutes bought by Ana's death are precious and few, and there are still miles to go. The rest Fareeha has desired for so long remains elusive.

Fareeha had knelt over Ana's body. Something else rises, something that wears Fareeha's skin, that wears her face, moves her deadened limbs, carries her voice, her sorrow, fueled by a singular hatred. The bow and empty quiver forgotten, it looks beyond the lieutenant, relieves him of his handaxe and pushes past him, deaf to his cries as it stalked toward the frontline again. It swats aside a charging swordsman, numb to the tip of his blade breaking through its leather bracer and forearm, responding by slitting him from groin to neck with a passing blow as the stench of his bowels suffused the air.

There is a fraught lull in the battle, as if sensing its arrival, both lines of soldiers remain locked in a fruitless struggle, neither side giving or advancing. The smoke from palace on fire is upon them now, billowing in through the roof and walls. In minutes there would be nothing left of any of them except for their blackened remains and crumbled bones.

The woman who was Fareeha emerges, a void as empty as the corpses she leaves behind, no longer caring about the people who fell before her. More souls thrown onto a scale that broke in her hands, that subsume the balance of good Fareeha had once hoped to achieve, drowning the person she had once been into the depths. The thing that stands is a revenant, carrying the weight that had broken her, relentless within a failing body, hateful and mourning. It stands fearless in the howling jaws of a sure demise, and roars back.