Queen of Mirrors, Queen of Arrows
Innocence Lost
By: Brenli

King Setsuna had pushed the ceremony along with such speed that everyone's heads spun from it... One moment vows, the next crowns, a cup of wine, and they were gone. The King had even made some joke about eagerness...

No one laughed.

"It's strange..." He murmured between kisses on her collarbone, fingers pulling on the lacing of the bodice of Sara's coronation gown, worn over Queen Azreal's body. He hadn't allowed the handmaidens to help either of them undress.

"What is, My Lord?" Her voice was placid as still water in a lake, patient with his hands upon her skin.

Setsuna paused in the kisses to lightly pant out, "My need for you... I haven't felt this kind of need in so long... Not since-"

"Ah, then you must be aching fiercely...!" He was still fully-dressed, and the gown only fell from the upper half of her body, but she pushed him, making him fall back onto their marital bed.

A laugh escaped him, loud and bewildered. "Azreal, you will be the death of me...!"

Smiles seemed to come rarely to the woman with hair blue like sorrow, but one turned up the outer corners of her scarlet lips. "Indeed, My Lord..." She climbed upon the bed, sleek as a cat, her thighs parting over his. Azreal's hands passed along his chest, still adorned in the golden doublet. "Funny... you seem so different from him..."

"From who?" Setsuna asked with shut eyes, reveling in the feel of her hands traveling up his torso.

"Another man, My Lord... a man who would be King. But you see, My Lord..." Her fingers rested at his throat, "I am as smart as I am beautiful... and I don't fall for lies, anymore."

His eyes opened, confusion wrinkling his brow, giving way to wide-eyed shock when her fingers quickly fanned across his neck and gripped tight.

"You are all the same in the end. Easily bored. Roaming eyes. A new girl at court. Women are made to give everything to their men and they get nothing in return except for empty, aching hearts!" Gone was the chilly smooth voice, replaced with sharpness, like the placid lake had shattered into shards of mirror. "You would eventually do the same, My Lord; already my hold on you wavers...! Or is that you just fighting for air?" One hand released his neck, even as his hands clawed at her own. His strength would never match hers. She had the power of ten men, easily, and so much more...!

Setsuna coughed and sputtered and gave out a strangled cry, staring at the glinting ceremonial dagger she took from his own hip and held high above him.

"I beat you before you could beat me, My Lord. Thank you for the kingdom... I had need of a new one." The dagger descended, rose-red blood issuing forth from seven deep wounds, bubbling out of Setsuna's groaning lips. As life slipped away from the King, a shudder ran through the Queen's body, her silver eyes briefly lightning-white as she took that life into herself. Oh yes... she had been overdue for killing someone. Her bones felt lighter, already, and the relief made her purr. "Mmm... thank you, My Lord. That was nice."

"F-Father...!"

Azreal left the dagger lodged into the King's chest as she looked at the snowy-haired Princess standing in the doorway, a small platter with cake in her hand. "Sweet child, is that a reconciliation present?" She watched the cake fall to the floor with a splat that reminded her of squishing flesh. "Oh, now look what you've done, you messy girl!"

Nemaelle's shock finally gave way to desperate action, her white dress fanning out behind her as she ran and screamed, "Kira...! Kiraaa!"

But her urgency didn't faze the new Queen. A quiet, patronizing little chuckle filled the room, giving way to a laughter louder, more sinister, cutting into the air like the mirror shards that began to pour in through every window. Stealing the cracked, colored glass, mirror-shard ravens tainted them and turned them dark, assimilating them into an army of mirror-men.

The Princess' panic hadn't bothered Azreal because she knew there would be no chance for those ridiculous people who loved their ridiculous, dead King. There was no time for the donning of armor. Nearly all the women had been cut to pieces... some of the men were lucky enough to grab hold onto a shield. The Lord Chancellor was one of those lucky few, crashing his way through the monstrous mirrors to Setsuna's armory. He needed the bow. He wasn't sure how much good it would do, but he needed that bow...!

Warfare had not prepared Kira for the likes of that level of gore. Shreds of flesh and muscle and bone... blood was a horrible combination with stone; he had slipped twice on puddles of deep red, fallen hard against the door into the King's armory before he burst inside and shut himself in, locking the door. "... Moonlil!"

The maid's skin was torn to ribbons and hanging loosely from her body. Her hand planted against the standing wooden chest in some last-ditch effort to protect its contents... it slipped, leaving a horrid arc of blood on the double doors as it fell against the ground and grew still.

Kira's mouth held a quivering frown, silently mourning the little maid who had looked after the Princess so well, trying to give the girl someone akin to a mother. She did not deserve that kind of death... He heard sniveling from within the chest, and instantly knew that Moonlil had been trying to save more than just the bow. So much more than just the bow...

"Kira...!" Nemaelle wailed as soon as the doors parted, and she dived into his arms. "Father is...!"

"Shh, shh. Right now we need to focus on getting you out of here. Do you understand, Snow? I'm going to keep you safe!" He reached out, immediately pulled the quiver over his shoulder, took the crystal bow into his hand. He grabbed a dagger Setsuna had often used when hunting and held it out to the little girl, watching her recoil from the blade. "If I have my way you won't need to use this, Princess, but if you must, don't hesitate. You strike sure and strong!" The girl wept as he put the dagger in her hands, and Kira knew that they were losing their Princess on that day, even if she lived. She would never be the same... He pulled her tight against his chest, partly for safety, partly because he wanted to hug the innocent girl just one more time before she was lost to the gore all over the palace floors and walls. "Hold on tight, Snow. Hold on with all of your strength!"

She held on so tight that her little nails were making gouges in his skin, through his blood-soaked doublet, but he took them for signs that she was still with him as he threw open the door and pressed into the deadly sharp fray. The mirror shards had been waiting, as if seeking them out on purpose. Kira could hear the scratches they made upon his metal shield. God, he needed to make it outside. At least outside. Surely there would be someone out there who could take her if those mirror-men were to swallow him up from behind...

So close...! He could see the nearest exit from the palace and ran for it, feet slipping on blood. Glass bit and sliced into his back. He had to pull out his ceremonial sword and swing it wide to parry a wave of mirror shards and finally sprint into the yard. Now the gate. If he could just get her to the gate...!

The huntsmen were all there, no doubt hearing the trumpets calling out for help before those men were cut down. They saw less of war but knew enough of killing... though Kira knew that knowledge meant little in the face of those enchanted monsters. He saw the Chief Huntsman swinging a broadsword through a misshapen wave of glass, briefly splitting it just enough for him to pass through. "Jinsang!" Kira stumbled and ran toward him, dropping his shield just enough for Jinsang to see the top of the Princess' snow-white head. By the time Kira reached him, he dropped to his knees. Those shards of mirror had managed to cut him deep, low on his back... and he realized he might not make it.

"What is this witchcraft?" Jinsang yelled in bewilderment, immediately trying to help the other man to his feet.

"That blue-haired bitch has murdered the King!" He hissed, holding out the bow. "Keep this safe. Take Snow to your home and keep her hidden there!"

The Chief Huntsman's dark brows arched together as he slipped the quiver over his back and took the crystal bow. "I'll be back soon to take care of this!"

"No, you stay with her-" Such a horrible irony that in the midst of arguing over how best to protect the Princess, she was stolen from them, a crowd of mirror-men descending upon the group and ripping the child from Kira's arms, leaving him with gashes.

The men cried out for the girl as she wailed for them, her pale body swallowed up in dark glass, and for a long and dreaded moment all they could do was fight mirror-men while a glass cloud carried Nemaelle away. From between his shield and his sword he could see the girl trying hard to cut her way out with the dagger he'd given her, stabbing and sweeping at the air. Finally one white arm reached out, and she screamed, "Oppa!"

Jinsang was dismayed to see his foolish son running after the glass cloud, reaching for her. "Jinho, no!"

The distraction was enough to get the better of the men, feeling the terrible bite of mirror shards cutting deeper and deeper still. How were they going to live through those wounds? Against the odds, the boy managed to grab onto Nemaelle's hand, and so Jinsang clung onto him, hoping to pull the Princess back to safety...

No such luck. The glass cut hard at Jinho's little tan hands, and the pain made him let go, even as he cried out for his friend. When his body hit the ground, he looked at his father, covered in gouges so thick it seemed that chunks of his body had gone missing...

Jinsang held the crystal bow and the quiver of seven matching arrows to his son. "Bring these... home... Hide them..."

"A... appa, I'm sorry, I'm s-"

"No." His bloody hand rested on his son's cheek as he pressed the quiver and the bow against his son's chest. "You got... closer than us. I am so proud of you..." And then he pushed his son away from him. "Go...! Run...!"

Jinho obeyed his father with tears in his eyes, clutching the weapon with wounded hands as he ran past the gate. Jinsang stumbled and tried to follow Kira, who was already using his shield to push his way back into the palace. A suicide mission to try and save the Princess of Assiah, even as he bled out... But Jinsang's dark eyes kept turning back to his foolish, brave son. He had to make sure the shards wouldn't come after him... he had to make sure...

Kira heard the hard thud of the Chief Huntsman's body hitting the ground, and glanced back to see Jinsang wave his hand at him, just once. Pushing him forward. Urging him to continue... and then that hand fell and went still, just as Moonlil's had done.

There was something so horribly wrong about it... that a father – two fathers – should die, but somehow he was still living. The rage tore a hurting roar from the Lord Chancellor's bloody throat... He barely made it to the door before collapsing on top of his shield.

Glass pinched at his bloody skin and began to pull at his limp form, dragging him into the palace, through blood and flesh. The mirror-men were looking for bodies and gathering them into neat little piles... but that one. That one still had a heartbeat. What to do with that one...? The uncertainty showed in the way the shards that comprised them bristled, unhappy for something beyond the norm. Still alive, but their Queen had been content to end the flaying of the palace. So they continued dragging him through the muck and gore, deep in the center of the palace. Straight to the throne room, where Azreal stood in a different gown, one the mirror-men could appreciate more than the white and gold coronation dress – dark and satin and littered with black jewels that looked like shards of themselves, jutting up from her shoulders like a threat. And yet her face was calm, her voice placid again as Ezekiel knelt before the Princess of Assiah and dabbed blood away from a gash upon her soft, pale cheek.

"You wouldn't have been cut if you hadn't struggled so hard, sweet Snow." Azreal's hands neatly folded together in front of her. "That may leave a scar..."

"I don't care." She really, truly didn't care. Nemaelle felt her insides break apart, today... had lost her father and countless others... What was one scar in the face of having her life utterly dismantled?

The Queen knelt down and rested her hand upon the wound, and with a little sigh and lightning-white eyes, healed it, leaving no scar behind. "You should care. Your beauty is your biggest weapon, in this world... you must guard it."

"I don't want beauty if it makes me like you." Ezekiel had taken the dagger from her already, but her hand clenched as though she still held it. Tears, silent ones, traumatized and broken ones, tracked down her face, and she felt... old. So much older than she really was...

Azreal's brother merely laughed. "The mouth on this one...! Why don't you just take her life, now, dear sister? I think she might have a death wish!"

But the Queen merely shook her head. "No. She's too young for me to get the most from her. She's not even a maiden, yet..." Her nail traced alongside a tear trail, and she asked, "Are you sad for all the lives I've taken, child?"

Nemaelle's nostrils flared at the question. The answer should have been obvious, but Azreal asked it as though there might have been an alternative. "Yes..."

Azreal scoffed and roughly turned the girl's face away from her, standing to take her seat upon the throne.

"And for you."

Ezekiel sneered, and Azreal's head tilted thoughtfully. "Is that so?"

"It is so. It takes a lot of hate to kill innocent people. And I think it ate up everything else inside of you. No wonder you like your beauty so much. It's all you have left." Little white fists shook, and tears kept tumbling, but mature words kept spilling from her seven-year-old mouth. "And I think that's so sad... and I pity you."

Azreal's eyes had grown hard as silver arrow tips. "... Hmm." Her fingers drummed on the arms of the throne, golden and carved with rosettes all along it. "Innocent. Tell me, child – as you seem to think you have the wisdom of a woman so much older than you are. The fact that your father brought me home with the express intention of taking me for his wife... is that innocent? He had known me for all of two minutes before he got this idea into his head. He wanted to fuck me, child. Do you understand that word? He wanted to put his privy parts between my legs and do vulgar things, though he knew not the slightest thing about me. Perhaps your father is not so innocent as you thought."

"It was witchcraft!" Nemaelle's cheeks bloomed red in anger, in shock, in embarrassment for the dirty words Azreal had told her plainly. "I know my father better than you do!"

"I know men better than you do!" In a swirl of dark satin and sharp dark shards, the Queen descended on the Princess, taking hold of her, gripping her. "But if you love your father so much, perhaps you should join him, hmm? Would you like that?" Nemaelle whimpered and shrank under her hold, rose-red eyes shutting tight. "No, of course you wouldn't." She released her so roughly that the girl stumbled back into Ezekiel's legs, and he steadied her by her shoulders.

"I'm telling you, dear sister. She has a death wish."

"Beauty can't fix the foolhardy, it seems." She dusted off her skirt. "What is this?" Her eyes turned to the mirror-men holding up Kira by his bleeding shoulders, letting him groan his way back to consciousness. "Oh, yes... This is Kira, isn't it, sweet girl? The man you were screaming for when we brought you in. Still alive...! Quite an accomplishment." She motioned for the mirror-men to bring him closer, and they dropped him at Azreal's feet.

Kira felt his face being cupped by the Queen's hands, and it jolted him back to alertness. The first thing he saw was the poor Princess... softly crying, and the Queen's brother had his arms wrapped around her shoulders. "I'm so sorry, Snow..."

Her lips pressed together in a defeated frown. "This isn't your fault..."

"How sweet, Lord Chancellor." Azreal's fingers caressed his face, the metal of her rings biting into his skin. "Strange, to see such a good heart paired with a face like this..."

Kira's dark brows furrowed together, but before he could begin to think of a reply, her brother pointed out with surprise, "Another one lives...? How strange!"

The Princess suddenly scrambled and cried out, "Oppa!"

He tried to look, but Azreal forced his face forward, nails leaving crescent moons impressed on his flesh. At least he had managed to see that the boy didn't have the bow... He could only hope that meant he'd hidden it before his capture.

"Ah, yes... your little friend." Kira watched as the Queen offered a chilly smile. "I see your hands are wounded..."

"I tried to save Snow from you." Jinho's voice was cracked and weeping.

"A silly waste of effort."

"Stop it..." The Chancellor's mouth grumbled between fingers that had begun tracing his lips. "Stop torturing the poor boy; you've killed his father today."

Azreal only shrugged her slim shoulders. "Fathers leave their children every day. It doesn't matter whether it was by death or not."

Her words had sent Jinho into a struggling rage, spluttering a handful of foreign words at the Queen. None of them sounded nice.

"You have such a lovely little face, sweet, angry boy." A light chuckle punctuated his struggling. "I'm sure your mother had some part in that."

"I look like my father, not my mother!"

"Ah, then your mother is not beautiful?"

The question took him off guard, and Kira watched Azreal's silver-star eyes... calculating. "Don't answer her, Jin-"

"Hush." The Queen slapped her hand over his mouth.

Jinho struggled and hissed in childish ire, "Umma is more beautiful than you!"

The malice was palpable... all three of them knew he'd made a grave mistake. "Is that so? I must have her brought to me, then."

Suddenly both children were weeping and begging a sad chant of "No...! No...!"

But the woman only laughed, and Kira fought against the mirror shards biting into his arms, restraining him. What was a little more blood loss compared to all he had spilled upon the floor, already? "Leave his mother alone; she's all he has left because of you!"

"Bring him back home and have his mother brought here. I'd like to decide who's more beautiful, myself."

"He's a child!"

"He's a hunter's son. He'll find his own food."

Though the glass ripped at his flesh, though blood poured from him like flowing water, Kira tore himself from the mirror-men. "Heartless whore!" Adrenaline guided his hand to the sword at his hip, and he unsheathed it, leapt forward and drove it clean through the Queen's middle.

The sound of glass shards clanking against each other as they bristled grated on his ears, made them feel like they were about to bleed. But nearly every other part of him was already bleeding... He knew he would die, but God...! He would die killing the woman who had ruined the lives of those children! So shocked was she that his half-dead weight allowed them to crash into the throne, her body sinking into it as she gasped and stared up at him with wide silver eyes.

"I should have done this when we first found you..." The Lord Chancellor twisted the blade in her stomach.

But her hand gripped onto the metal... and slowly, delicately pulled it out of her body. "So like a man..." The sword left her flesh, and she suddenly tugged the hilt right out of his hand and tossed it aside. "To think that stabbing me with your sword will be enough to conquer me!"

One hand pressed against her wound, and her eyes went white as lightning again, taking Kira by his chin and pushing him away from her, standing, forcing him onto his knees. He knew... he knew it was over.

"This face... I once gave my heart to a face like this." Her hand left her stomach, repaired but blood-smeared, and clasped on firm to Kira's face. "He ruined it. Devoured it... You are right, Chancellor."

The cries of his name came through distant in his ears, but he turned his head... and gave the poor Princess a smile. A smile despite everything that had come undone...

But Azreal forced his face forward once again, her eyes burning into his as she plunged her hand right into his chest. Clear through the bone... taking hold of his heart and crushing it. "I am heartless."

The children's screams were piercing as Kira's body fell to the ground, and Azreal sat on the throne with his bloody, fleshy heart in her hands. "Send the boy back to his home. Fetch his mother."

"And the Princess?" Ezekiel asked, his hold firm around the girl who flailed and cried and reached for the dead man.

The Queen's head tilted as she thought over it. "... Keep her. Lock her away in the tower until I have some use for her."

"Some use...?" Her brother's aqua eyes blinked. "It'll be several years until she's a maiden."

"That's fine. I'm sure we could set her to work cleaning the blood off the floors and her beauty would still keep. Lock her away for now. She's a little bit hysterical."

"Yes, dear sister."

The children only had each other, in the wake of that terror... but they were pulled apart, mirror-men taking the boy, Ezekiel taking the girl. They could feel the world growing dark and cold as it closed in on them, even as Jinho cried out, "Snow...!"

Even as Nemaelle wept, "Oppa...!"