The blade was at her throat before the first cry of alarm reached the gilded palace walls.
Isana did not flinch. She met the shimmering haze of her attacker’s eyes—violet as a glacier and burning with determination. Every muscle in her body screamed for action, but she held herself immobile, calculating. The air around her smelled of peaches and candle wax, a stark contrast to the cold, sharp steel pricking her skin.
"Where is it?" the intruder demanded, her voice low but steady. The words were clipped yet oddly elegant, a trained precision even in the heat of confrontation.
Isana’s lips curved despite herself. "I don’t know what you’re talking about."
"Don’t insult my intelligence," her assailant snapped and pressed closer. The blade, a curved weapon with an iridescent edge, gleamed faintly under the amber glow of a single, hanging lantern. "The Sapphire Scepter. You took it from the vault. Where is it?"
The corridor was empty, save for them. Silent, save for their breaths. Isana’s guards would arrive soon, but not soon enough. Time was thin ice.
The world outside was no less tense. Ever since the neighboring kingdoms learned of the existence of the Sapphire Scepter—a long-lost artifact said to harness the emotional will of its wielder—they’d turned their focus toward conquest. However, it wasn’t brute invasion Isana feared but a subtler war: spies, assassins, blackmail, whispers.
It appeared, she thought dryly, that the latter focus had already breached her sanctuary.
"Tell me something," Isana said slowly, ignoring the threat to her life as though it were an idle inconvenience. "Have you ever seen it yourself? This... scepter you’re so desperate to retrieve?"
The assassin hesitated—not visibly, but Isana caught it. A pause too measured. This one hadn’t seen the relic firsthand. Useful knowledge.
"I don’t need to see it," the woman said finally. "I know it glows like the heart of a star when the unworthy touch it, and it scorches those with impure intentions. Perhaps it’ll burn even you, Princess Regent."
Ah, there it was. That subtle staccato in her voice when saying "Princess Regent." Someone loyal to the purists, no doubt—those who believed Isana had coronated herself not because she was the rightful heir but because she could. They would never accept an unmarried woman wearing the crown of Ondriyath, let alone ruling it.
Isana certainly looked the part of the rogue queen. Her tailored crimson velvet coat hugged close to her form, thigh-high boots encasing her long legs. When the light caught the gold trim of her cuffs, it reflected regal opulence, but her attire was purely tactical—a soldier-queen’s garb. One who knew her battlefields.
"You could just check my hands," Isana said lightly, raising one gloved finger. "I assure you, they’re quite uncharred."
An almost imperceptible flicker crossed her attacker’s eyes—confusion, disdain, or perhaps both. The kind of split-second crack one could exploit.
She moved.
Twisting on her toes, Isana ducked beneath the blade in a swan-like whirl, her elbow striking out toward her opponent’s ribs. The assassin grunted but stepped deftly back, spinning to evade Isana’s follow-up strike. A dance began between them, each movement precise and deadly, the clash of steel like whispers in the still corridor.
The assassin dropped low, shapes shifting in fluid whispers—too fast, too skilled. For a fleeting moment, Isana was certain she’d been bested. Her opponent showed too much discipline to be a mere freelancer. But just as the thought began to cement itself, the unexpected happened.
There was a ripple—a static hum in the air that crackled against their skin. Both women froze mid-motion as though the atmosphere had taken a shallow, electric gasp.
At the far end of the hallway, a figure emerged. Quiet, ethereal, and impossibly ancient.
It was not human.
The being’s form resembled living stained glass—fragments of blues, silvers, and greens shimmering like auroras bound in physical shape. It hovered slightly above the tiled floors, the faint glow of its body illuminating whorls of carved constellations that no one had laid eyes upon for centuries. And in its hands—if they could be called hands at all—it clutched the Sapphire Scepter.
Neither woman moved. The assassin dropped her weapon to her side, her mouth hanging slightly open in awe. Isana felt her pulse thunder in her ears.
"You quarrel," it said, speaking in a voice resonant and layered, like a hundred tones braided into one. "For something you do not understand."
The scepter pulsed gently, emitting an eerie, sapphire-blue glow that flickered like a heartbeat. Isana couldn’t speak. She couldn’t breathe. She felt her own reflection looking back at her within the gem—a mirror to the very core of her fears and ambitions. It was too much.
Two whispers entwined cruelly in her mind: Prove yourself productive... or relinquish the crown.
The assassin staggered, gripping the edge of the corridor as though steadying her balance. She too had received her judgment. A single phrase rang out eerily in unison between them: "One shall rise. The other shall fall."
The glowing being swept past Isana and her attacker, its presence dissolving everything confident, everything composed. The scepter’s light wove forward until its vessel disappeared down a narrow corridor, fusing into memory.
For what felt like forever, silence lingered.
The assassin began to laugh, ragged and breathless. A sharp contrast to the weight of divine judgment still lingering in the corridor.
"What now—Princess?" she rasped. Her eyes gleamed.
Isana straightened her back. Though her face betrayed nothing, inwardly, she too wrestled with nothing short of existential collapse.
"I suggest," the queen said in a tone both commanding and world-weary, "we figure out together whether either of us is worthy enough to touch that artifact... before it decides to destroy everything we’ve ever known."
Genre: Epic Fantasy/Psychological Drama
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: The Missing Van Gogh Mystery
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