Chapter 29: The Queen

Their grey robes matched the hue of the stormy skies above them as they hid in the shadows of the forests, as silent as the spirits of the dead.

T'Challa, Okoye, W'Kabi, Bella, and Bucky stood behind the Wakandan shield and beneath Bella's shield, well protected by both borders and their armor.

A tiny figure broke from the grey robes and walked towards them, golden hair and red eyes glowing from her pale face. She walked in the confidence only bestowed upon those with the blood of many beneath their feet, sure of her own victory.

"King T'Challa, I have come for our exchange," she said with a small smile and a respectful bow. "I assume you received our note and our tribute."

"We have received your gruesome gift and we must decline your offer," T'Challa said firmly, his head held as high and proud as an Axumite obelisk. "I have no desire to dismantle the Volturi and my quarrel is not with Aro. Edward Cullen has been granted asylum in our borders in repayment of a life debt. He saved the life of Lieutenant Barnes at least three times in her human life and Wakanda has reaped the benefit of his actions. As Volterra did not see fit to provide Edward Cullen his sought for death, Wakanda has volunteered to give him his unsought for life. He neither chooses to return to you nor do we relinquish him."

"We are prepared for such an answer," the small zimwi said in return. "If this is your position, I will warn you that as long as you keep him, we will be exchanging the lives of your other companions in his stead until you return him. Our queen has given you a generous opportunity to surrender Edward Cullen and if you refuse her, you will not find her so generous in future."

"Your queen? Who is this queen?" T'Challa said. "I have no memory of treaties forged with a queen."

"Her Imperial Highness, Jadis, Queen of Volterra, Commander of the Undead Legions. In retribution for his foolishness, the queen has punished Aro and taken leadership of the Volturi upon herself."

"I see," T'Challa said. "Wakanda has no quarrel with the Volturi or the members of Volterra who are still loyal to our old alliances. We continue to uphold our side of our previous treaties, as were forged by my ancestors in times long past. As such, I wish to leave you with a parting token."

He held out an ornately carved wooden box and allowed it through the shield to where the zimwi stood. She crooked one eyebrow, a dubious expression on her face.

"What is this?"

"The head of Aro, former ruler of the Volturi. While I may not agree with all his methods or principles, he led the Volturi admirably and maintained order among the mazwimi. If his body is beyond resuscitation, I would still return his head to you that you may give him the honor that is due him as your former leader. Your kind has long memories. Bury him or cremate him as you will, but grant his spirit the peace of a royal ending that is due him for the services he has contributed to the health and longevity of your kin."

The zimwi's red eyes grew as wide as the full moon above them. She knelt and picked up the glossy, lacquered box and proudly spun around to face the waiting guard. She turned and faced the King and his entourage one more time.

"This does not change the message our queen has sent you."

"I did not expect it to," T'Challa replied. "But that does not change my answer."

She nodded and the grey cloaks vanished into the shadows.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Edward sat with four of the Dora Milaje around a fire outside the homestead on the borderlands, waiting for the return of the King. He felt like a coward, sitting and hiding, instead of facing his former captors. But orders were orders, though he found himself chafing against the strict discipline required of soldiers.

He sat and watched the flames flicker up in orange and yellow tongues against the black night air. The air still felt heavy with the recent storm.

He could hear the thoughts of his "guards," though their minds continued their uncanny self-control and provided little fodder of interest, save for a recitation of a recipe for mandazi, a Luganda song, and a multiplication table repeated in four different languages. He sighed and poked the fire with a stick, wishing he were close enough to the meeting location to hear what transpired first hand.

He plotted what he would do if the Volturi forced him to return.

Edward Cullen, a mental voice whispered in his mind. He sat upright and glared. He recognized the tone and he shuddered. The sadistic little Jane, Aro's favored pet, and a voice he despised above nearly all others, continued to call out to him.

I wish to speak with you in secret. I have information I think will benefit you.

Edward scoffed internally and debated.

If you are listening, whistle a tune so I know. Please.

Jane never pleaded. He knew this. What would cause her to speak to him with so much contrition? Was it a trap?

He looked through her mind and saw her sitting with a small contingent of guards a few kilometers away across the border. Felix spoke into a mobile phone to Volterra and they plotted their next steps. Jane appeared to sit in silence, her eyes transfixed on a polished wooden box at her feet. Yet, all her mental energy she fixed on Edward, willing him to listen to her silent communication.

He whistled "Yankee Doodle" to himself, pacing back and forth across the compound, hoping his guards would not get suspicious.

Good. I do not know how long before we will depart.

We are all in trouble, Edward. The Volturi, you, your family, this country, everyone. If we do not do something soon, I fear it will be too late.

Aro was a fool. He dabbled with powers he did not understand and set events in motion far beyond his control.

It was the War that did it. Aro never doubted the unchallenged dominance of our kind until the War. As he watched Europe tear itself apart and then proceed to tear the rest of the world apart, he felt his first twinges of fear. The humans developing weapons capable of destroying our entire city, with us in it. Aro's growing fear nearly paralyzed him and he became insatiable in his quest for discovering means of protecting the power and well-being of our kind.

He knew that physical weapons often destroy more than they protect and so he chose to pursue mystical, esoteric sources of power to protect his order from the technological progress of humanity. He regularly mined the minds of humans he suspected would have access to kinds of knowledge he sought and then dispatched small contingents of guards to follow up on any leads.

He first heard of what he later called "the Lady" from an old woman. It was not long after the War and Demetri was passing through London on a mission from Aro when he came across her. The woman had been hired to sort through the personal artifacts of a dead man in order to prepare a home for repairs. During her work, she came across an old journal, all hand written and full of notes, musings, experiences, and diagrams of a man who fancied himself a magician.

She found his work so humorous that she read it in its entirety and relayed her findings to her friend. She spoke of magic rings and fountains of youth and great ladies and talking lions. Demetri overheard and immediately approached the woman and offered her a tempting enough compensation to ensure her immediate compliance. He brought his prize home, much to the delight of Aro.

Intrigued, Aro determined to discover more. First, he found the journal's author, Ketterly by name, had a living relative in a fine country estate in England. Aro immediately pulled strings to obtain the property that belonged to Ketterly during his manhood. He dispensed his lawyers to concoct some scheme which removed all properties belonging to this Digory Kirke, nephew to Ketterly, and brought them under his ownership. It took a few years to sufficiently siphon away Kirke's resources through untraceable "failures, mishaps, and bad luck," but Aro ultimately claimed them as his own.

Contingents of guards dismantled those houses from top to bottom, inside and out, to look for anything resembling magic rings. They combed every corner of each house that could possibly be a hiding place. Then they began to search the gardens. The country escape proved fruitless, but in the garden of the London estate, he struck gold. The guards dug up a wooden box filled with green and yellow rings.

Aro then systematically tested the rings and found they were, indeed, powerful. With one touch, a tiny ring transported the wearer to other worlds far across the universe. Thus, the exploration of these other worlds began.

Some parties of guards never returned. They simply vanished. Others came with stories of cold, dead worlds, or worlds full of giants and monstrous beings. Others came with stories of golden cities and mighty kingdoms and beautiful, powerful creatures.

Aro found world after world after world at his fingertips-the wealth of the universe was his and it went to his head in exponential ways. After a few dozen searches, one mission finally discovered the world described in the Ketterly journal. They discovered "the Great Lady" he had spoken of ruled the land a thousand years before. She reigned with great power and fierceness until being displaced by some humans from our world who invaded, killed her, and set themselves up as rulers in her stead.

The world our guard found was far removed from that era. We came during a time of great unrest. The peoples from the south, the Telmarines, ruled and the native inhabitants of the land were unruly and restless. They yearned to stage a revolution and bring a new power to the throne but due to their limited numbers and even more limited weapons technology, they did not see a viable option.

Our guard came across a coven of our cousin vampires-similar to our kind, but with slightly different adaptations. This coven lived in a delicate alliance with some werewolves, ghouls, some black dwarves, an ogre and a coven of witches. This little band of rebels thought we would aid them in their exploits and so took us into their confidence entirely. They unanimously agreed that all their hopes must rest upon a plot to magically resurrect their ancient queen in order to save them from their enemies.

They were learned in deep magic. They taught us how to prepare the sacred blue fire, the circle, and the incantations in order call the spirit of the witch into the flames. We listened carefully and then returned to our master to share our learnings with him.

It worked. We stole their queen away from them and left them to suffer in their oppression. Aro faithfully obeyed their instructions and summoned the spirit of the witch to himself in Volterra. She appeared in the flames in all her beauty and power and fierceness.

"My magic will not work in your world if I am bound by your flesh and laws. I must stay a spirit," she told him. Water is liminal; it can morph and change, and water is boundless, anywhere. She chose to inhabit the water and so she became similarly boundless. She could traverse the width and breadth of the world and transport herself to anywhere in the world where there was water and her magic would maintain its potency.

Aro's goal was to empower himself, his guard, and ensure his rule could be sustained. He felt she owed her allegiance to him because he discovered her and contrived the means to bring her to this world from the land of the dead. Aro both feared and worshiped his Lady.

And Aro was a fool.

Soon, the witch began to give orders of her own.

Revenge was her first order of business. I do not understand how it was possible, but the humans responsible for her previous dethronement were still alive. She ordered their deaths. Conveniently, all were heading on a holiday together and staging a train accident did not prove a difficulty. All died, save one, but the witch determined survival to be her punishment.

Then, the witch began to override and overstep Aro, not content to simply serve as the guardian of the Volturi, her ambitions grew. Her first foray on Earth with her magician taught her she could not force her conquest with shows of obvious brute strength but she would need to move slowly and methodically, building her army, and strategically taking down targets from the shadows.

She started slowly and quietly, without Aro's knowledge.

First, she gained powerful allies in what remained of Hydra-becoming a kind of mystical consultant and visiting goddess when it was convenient. She encouraged particular actions and motivations. She pulled on puppet strings to sow chaos and destabilize power structures around the world.

Then she tried a more brash action in the disaster of the N.I.C.E. over in Belbury. However, Merlin's interference in her plots revealed to her what her next steps would need to be.

She decided that, while Hydra provided her with a wealth of human, political, and technological power and resources, she would need to increase her supernatural allies. The witch pursued gifted vampires. She sent Aro to scout as many as he could, convincing him it was for his own protection. Then, without Aro's knowledge, she began to identify the others-the werewolves, the leprechauns, the dryads and nyads, the undead, and the monsters of legend-any she could find and convince to join her in her quest for world domination.

It would only be a matter of time before all would be made open and she could rule through her legions, untouchable by death, age, time, and space. She would be empress forever and once she conquered the earth, the magic rings would give her the power to conquer the next world and the next until they all belonged to her. They would be hers-their lives and deaths, their pasts and their futures-the universe was hers for the taking and she was positively glorious in her lust for power.

One day, she came across a Wakandan artifact in the vaults of Volterra and it changed her entire strategy. Since that day, she has focused all her efforts into the conquest of Wakanda.

She had been working for half a century to conquer Wakanda. All she had to do was snap her fingers and the U.S., the European Union, China, and Russia would immediately obey her. Her operatives were so well concealed throughout the governments of those countries that she already counted them as hers. She could easily take out the rest.

Except Wakanda. The one country she must have before she can hope to rule all the others and they remain untouchable.

She needs the vibranium. She needs it for her armies, her magic. The only way she can hope to take a physical form that can harness her mystical powers on Earth is through weaving a vibranium body. The elements of Earth are still too foreign to her to employ her power, but her native vibranium will not only enable her power but will increase it exponentially. She is bound to the water until then and she cannot leave Earth.

But Wakanda is too strong and too well protected. So, she sought to reach them through their neighbors. She stirred up the hornets nets around them until they were surrounded by war on all sides and still they did not fall or drown in the blood of their surrounding nations. She planted seeds of distrust and discontent within officials she could influence and sought to prevent alliances possibly beneficial to the protection of Wakanda. All seemed to be working in her favor.

Until that day. That horrible day when her operative in South Africa failed her assignment and a vampire with the capacity to shield the entire city from supernatural attack was born and mysteriously delivered directly to the border. This vampire was permitted to not only live but to thrive within the normally xenophobic and conservative population of Wakanda.

Her agents continued to fail her. Nearly a dozen Volturi guards were torn apart when you were taken from us. Now, instead of being guarded by one super human who could have been easily dealt with, especially during the more malleable time of grief, Wakanda is now protected by two super humans and two gifted vampires. She is furious and will do whatever it takes to remove all of the protectors from Wakanda so she can unleash her full powers against the country.

You need to know who you are dealing with. She will not hesitate to kill all of Wakanda to reach their store of vibranium and then she will not stop until she rules this world and all the worlds. She would not hesitate to destroy the entire world simply to come out as the victor.

She is not like Aro. Aro may have been ambitious, but he knew where his strength came from and he could not rule without the guard. He also saw the value of protecting and preserving humanity in order to sustain our way of life. This new one is not like him. She rules for her own pride and thirst for power. She will use us and then dispose of all of us, according to her whims, without any remorse.

The only way for any of us to survive is to send her back to where she came from. Unfortunately, she may need to succeed in creating her new physical form for it to work, but there is a way. I know where the magic rings are kept in the vaults. We can remove her from Earth. It is too risky for my companions and me. She can easily kill us. But you have a shield that even her power cannot penetrate. If you and Bella choose to try, I swear to you, I will help in whatever way I can.

Oh, we are leaving. If you have heard what I have said, whistle again.

Edward complied and he heard their mental voices dissipating into the distance.

Then he paced the length and breadth of the compound, more anxious for the return of the king than he had ever been before.

Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Notes:

Narnia references taken from The Magician's Nephew, Prince Caspian, The Last Battle, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. (The direct quote referring to the loss of Professor Kirke's properties comes from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).

Yes, the N.I.C.E. reference is from That Hideous Strength. I couldn't resist. I have to give a shout out to the brilliance that is the C.S. Lewis space trilogy.