Persia, 1855

He had been more than a little enamored by her laughter before he even knew who she was.

It had been one of days at the Court of Mazandaran when Erik simply could not contain himself. Magic tricks and music and cutting jests flowed from him like a winter sea beating at a cliff face, relentless and suffocating. He was too known now, too feared to be held in check by anyone—even by himself.

He had very nearly gone too far that day, heaping abuse on the Shah himself with such finesse so that most of listeners thought he was spinning out praise. Naser al-Din was a bit too shrewd for that, and he had laughed along with hard eyes. Erik was emboldened and forced himself to manic new heights of cruel humor shrouded with wit and dissemblance. And when the company finally reached utter, hilarious confusion, Erik heard her.

He knew it was a woman's laugh, from the tone and its location behind the carved-wood panels that separated the Shah's women from the rest of the world. And what was more—it was utterly, utterly genuine. Only a liar—an actor— of Erik's caliber could be so certain of the legitimacy of anything as political as a laugh in this quicksand culture. This hidden woman had somehow picked out his cleverest (and possibly vilest) comment of the night and had laughed, long and loud.

It was a beautiful laugh, too, all rose water and the crash of the Caspian Sea.

But how to find a disembodied voice trapped behind a harem wall?

Erik pondered the question for days, and ultimately, it answered itself.

He was summoned.

Not many people in Persia dared to summon him anymore. He probably would have wrought deadly vengeance on the presumptuous individual had the messenger been anyone but one of the harem eunuchs.

He was taken to one of the outer gardens near the women's quarters. The place was positively crawling with the vicious half-men that the Shah had charged with guarding his wives and concubines. It was a different world here, Erik realized. His reputation meant precious little.

At last she came.

She was a tiny woman, barely coming up to Erik's chest, and utterly lost in the mountains of robes a woman was expected to wear in public. She wore the typical white veil, clasped with a decadent gold and ruby broach, and another veil worn across her lower face in the Arabian style. The shape of her eyes was obscured by thick kohl.

She bustled past him and sat at the edge of a fountain primly. "You're Erik," she said, her Persian a little too guttural for fluency, "you're the sorcerer. The Living Death. The Angel of Death."

Erik was positive that she was smiling beneath her veil. "And I know you." It had only taken a moment to place her, with her quirks of dress and accent and the imperious way she disregarded the conventions of the court. "You are the Sultana."

She laughed at that, the same marvelous, pure laugh that Erik had found so wonderfully intoxicating before.

"Don't you find," her posture became girl-child demure, "don't you find it dull, this life? Isn't it awfully dull?"

For all intents and purposes, it was not. Erik had more to occupy himself with than ever before. He was overseeing one of the Shah's grandest building projects, he had the power and the means to amuse himself. He walked this land like a lord, and he had a wealth of knowledge and toys at his fingertips. He had taken to penning the music he heard in his head, and that was anything but dull. And yet… "Yes. It is."

She stared up at him, her gaze abstracted by the sweep of her lashes. "I just knew you would understand."

When the Shah left Mazandaran for other parts of his realm, most of his women accompanied him. But the little Sultana refused to leave, and she was not a woman to be crossed.

She ruled in the absence of her lord and master, and she laughed easily to Erik's delight.

Easily, but she tired quickly of one notion and would demand another in quick turn. Erik obliged willingly and provided whatever entertainment he could devise. It took time away from his other endeavors but— oh, to make her laugh. He could scarcely believe that he could make a woman laugh with little more than his own ingenuity. She always asked for his presence when she was in need of 'something amusing,' and she never, ever laughed at him.

"It's a dangerous game you're playing at," the Daroga had said, in his sanctimonious sage monotone, "this will not end well, Erik."

Erik merely shrugged and made the Daroga's chair scream in put-upon agony.

The Daroga shook his head and blinked watery eyes.

Everything changed on the day the Sultana asked Erik to devise an entertainment that spotlighted three condemned men. It was not an uncommon fancy in the court, and Erik took liberties.

He never did quite comprehend what went wrong. He would think on it occasionally throughout the years, on those nights when sleep eluded him and music offered no solace. He replayed the scene over a thousand times, and all he ever knew was the end result: blood, more blood than he would have thought possible, and strips of a dead man's flesh tangled in his hair.

The Sultana had laughed. Oh, how she had laughed, and it made that scene from hell nearly worthwhile to hear it.

Erik was dimly aware that the rest of the world was horrified, but what did that matter? He knew, with the force of every conviction in his heart, that she was smiling at him from under that white fabric.

She thrived on the violence that Erik could conjure, and she appreciated the art of the execution. Magic with mirrors, Erik worked, brilliance in blood. Deaths that made grown men revert to babbling children and made children stand as stone-eyed as any resigned elder.

When Erik finally lost everything, when the Daroga finally had to put him on a fast horse and play tricks with cadavers to save Erik's very life, he finally realized that he had never even seen her face.

And he wondered, as his hands trembled and he fled away from Persia and all it wonders and horrors, if it had been worth the price he had paid.

So, this short was basically the jumping off point for Sum of Earthly Happiness, though that story ultimately ended up much less dark than this one began. But it's what cemented my vision of the little sultana.