Young Writers Society

The queen mulled the offer over.

No matter how hard she thought on it, she was unable to come up with what question he would ask. But that was alright. She didn't really care about the question itself; she was just itching for a fight. That was why she had been so happy to take to become the queen - she was ready for whatever conflict would lay ahead of her.

Her smile grew ever so slightly.

Tiberius would be the perfect warm-up.

"I accept your challenge," she said. She thought for a moment. She did need information on the intruders. And while the queen was perfectly capable of getting that information herself, someone like Tiberius could give her a good chunk of it.

Because even though a fight would be fun, she did have a job she needed to do.

"On one condition," she said, drawing out her sword. "If I win, you do the same for me. I could order you to do, since I am your queen, but I think this would be a little more fun than that. Don't you?"

"Should we stop her?" one of the guards whispered in the background.

Another one shook his head. "We don't get paid enough for that."

The queen, hearing their comments, glanced back. Both quickly fell quiet.

James smiled warmly when his challenge was received well. The queen seemed eager to fight, which meant he’d have to shake off the dust really quickly to keep up. He took a graceful step, sliding back as he drew his sword.

It’s weight felt... right. Familiar. Almost unsettlingly so.

“I wholeheartedly agree, your highness,” he said, beaming. The smile was of course, completely fabricated, but it came easily, appearing genuine as his eyes crinkled up with it.

“I agree to the terms. Are you ready, then?”

"Of course," she said. She eyed him and his sword. She could make the first move. She always did. But if her uncle was here, he'd tell her to wait. He would tell her that Tiberius was an enemy she had never seen before, and that she needed to study him before she made any offensive attacks.

She could fight on her own, of course. She had been able to for a long time. But his voice was always the voice that guided her when she was in any kind of battle; his hands had been the one to guide her sword when he first taught her to fight long ago.

So she held her sword out, waiting for Tiberius to make the first move.

Ah. She was leaving it to him to initiate the swordplay. He supposed that was expected. Anyone with experience in battle was told to wait until the fight came to you, but anyone with training also knew someone had to start. In the context of duels and competitive fights, there always had to be someone who would forfeit the advantage of having the first observation for having the first blow.

That would be him, if he had any of hope of getting to ask the question he wanted, but he had a gut feeling he was already far outmatched in skill. If he was in a forest, he might have the upper-hand. But this... he was long out of practice. If he succeeded at all, it would be pure luck.

He advanced, testing her balance as he brought his sword to hers with a quick jab.

The order of things, horrible though it was, was quite simple. Adrid was a soldier, with no-one to order her, and her usual autonomous routines rendered useless in this foreign context. Here, was only a concerned woman with a spear.

Adrid would die before she endangered that child, and she would die before she resorted to any other bestial measures.

So the woman with the spear opted to provide reconnaissance.

"I will provide reconnaissance." she said. In seconds, she was already around the corner.

___

Siren wanted to meet the queen. Siren had never met a queen. And this queen was very important to what they were doing. But James was doing so well on his own, and it would be very rude to interrupt. Even if the interruption ended up being in James' advantage, and not the queen's, it would be especially rude to treat him like he needed such an advantage. Unless he asked her for help, of course.

So Siren waited, like a good friend should, and kept company with the gaurds. "I'm with him," she said. "I'm with Tyeber-yeese."

She hadn't the slightest why he used these funny names. Maybe it was just the way he fought.

By the Ocean, he fought.

She knew he was trying to test her balance. She did the same thing with her uncle all the time, too, when he was too stubborn to make the first move. He could stand for what felt like an eternity - and was actually only a few minutes - but she couldn't. She always had to be doing something in a fight.

Her balance didn't falter.

So Tiberius had some skills with his sword, then. This really would be the perfect warm-up.

"I see you're used to wielding a sword," she commented.

How far could she push this conversation? Was it bad that she wanted to see it? She knew she would win the fight - only her uncle could beat her. Tiberius was a baby compared to her; she had more years on him that he could possibly imagine. So what was the harm in some friendly banter to test the limits?

"Where did you learn to use it?" she asked, going in for a strike of her own.

James let out a little laugh. It felt weird, fake-laughing again. Thankfully though, it was a well-exercised muscle. He was pretty sure the time he spent pretending to be "Liam" had given him more than enough practice pretending to be amused when he was not. Not that he was really proud of that.

"I thought we were saving the questions for the end," he said in a teasing tone, dodging a swipe of her blade and blocking.

The way she was moving, it didn't look like she was even trying. He didn't know if he should be worried or glad. He parried again, moving a little to the side.

"And I'm not a complete dunce. I wouldn't fight you with a sword if I didn't know how to use it."

So that was the route, then.

"That's very true," she agreed, grinning a downright smug grin. "But it's hard to tell when someone suddenly challenges you to a duel - the challenger is either very skilled or very cocky."

Tiberius wasn't the type to talk when fighting. He also seemed to deflect both her attacks and her words, so asking more questions seemed like it wasn't going to get her anywhere.

She frowned and dodged another one of his strikes. She needed the information he had. Or, at least, she was too lazy to go and get it herself. That would take time she really didn't have. Though it pained her to think it, she couldn't risk going too far with the banter.

She'd have to have a rematch with him later.

...Wait.

She studied him and his blade for a moment. What kind of question could he possibly want to ask her? Why had he shown up out of nowhere, and why was he so down for fighting? Something was off here, but she couldn't figure out what.

An idea suddenly came to her. It was a stupid idea, and one that might not have the payoff she wanted. But if she was on the right track, then the smartest thing to do would be...

Oh, gods above. If her uncle heard about what she was about to do, she'd never live it down.

She grinned again, raised her sword, and waited for his next attack.

James only sent the queen a mischievous grin, waggling his eyebrows up and down at her comment.

He didn't like sword fighting anymore, but it was coming back to him like a familiar routine. Granted, he could tell that he didn't have even half the experience the queen did. She was being quick and minimal in her movement and he was matching her energy, but he could tell she was holding back. That sense only intensified as the swordplay continued between the two of them with the guards looking on and Siren watching from the sidelines.

He was glad Siren was there. If he was being honest, Siren was one of the few reasons he was really trying at the moment. He wasn't going to overthink it.

And then, the queen left herself open. James would've been stupid not to take advantage of it - and he did - but the whole time his mind was screaming at him: she's letting you win. If this were to the death, you wouldn't have made it longer than a few seconds.

His sword caught on hers and he pushed and twirled his blade. As he surged forward her sword flung from her hand. He kept advancing, and she fell backward to the ground.

He stood over her, sword pointed down at her.

He forced a smile, but this wasn't a victory.

He sheathed his sword and offered a hand to help her up.

She took the offered hand.

"It looks like you won," she said, giving the gentle but powerful kind of a smile a queen was supposed to give to her subjects. "And, since you're the winner, it looks like you'll be asking the questions now - what did you want to know?"

James took a small step back and took in a deep breath, standing up straight. He flipped a small strand of hair over his shoulder.

"I want to know exactly how the barrier around this place works," he said, flashing a smile.

She stared at him.

"How...How did you-" She reached a hand up and pinched her arm, trying to make sure that she wasn't dreaming or hallucinating. She didn't have any reason to, but that question made her seriously doubt she was as lucid as she thought she was.

"How did did you know about the barrier?" she asked. "No one here is supposed to have even noticed it. So how did you-"

It was at that moment that she heard people coming.

She fell silent.

The air smelled off. It wasn't until a massive group of vampires turned the corner that she realized why.

"We finally found you-" the apparent leader of the group said. From the way he suddenly cut off, it looked like he hadn't noticed her until now. There wasn't any recognition on his face or in his golden eyes. Which was strange, since he was supposed to be one of hers.

She kept looking for recognition in the faces of the others in the group, but none of them seemed to know who she was.

She glanced back at Tiberius.

Had he even recognized her, or had he just guessed because she was leaving the throne room?

She sniffed the air.

The strange smell still lingered. There was a human somewhere in the group. She recognized that smell. But there was something, too - something she couldn't quite put her finger on.

Her gaze landed on the little girl clinging to the side of a boy with white hair.

The girl peeked at her from behind his leg.

Tiberius and the barrier were immediately forgotten.

"Found you," she said.

She quickly moved down the hallway, bridging the distance between her and the girl in a matter of seconds. She didn't even have trouble getting through the group. They didn't let her through, necessarily, but it was easy to slip past them.

What happened next happened so quickly that normal people wouldn't have been able to pick up on it. In a single, swift motion, her sword was removed from her sheath and thrust right into the girl's chest.

"You can't trick me," she said, pulling the sword out.

The girl fell, her chest still and stained with blood, to the ground.

James was gallant, and dashing, and all of the things Siren didn't know the words for. She trusted with all her heart that he could win, and he had, and he had, and she would tell him so, and he would smile.

Siren cheered for James and his victory, throwing a friendly arm around a confused gaurd's armour-y shoulders.

"That's Teeberis!" she cried, "That's my-"

The sequence of events thereafter soon muddied and blurred together in Siren's memory, but somewhere in the middle a helpless little body fell bloody on the stone floor, and a throttled squeak erupted from the windpipe in her clammy hand.

James had done his part with grace and honour. Now Siren would do her part, her way.

If one were to take the fluid spring of the frog, and the ruthless efficiency of the shark, and set it on the queen from behind at eleven miles per hour the picture would be about right. In two leaps a mouthful of shark teeth were poised to take a mighty chunk from her royal ankle.

At the same time, the dark-skinned spearwoman thrust her long cross spear.

In microseconds the queen would take that spear straight through the heart, or her foot would dangle from mangled threads.The soldier came from the front, the beast, from the back.

There would be no avoiding both of them.

Walking down the halls Paige had grabbed a single-edged blade off the walls, tossing it in her hands a couple of times to get the weight. Then she'd slipped it in her dresses belt, adjusting it so it would seem as though it was meant to be there. As long as no one looked too closely.

They entered the room, and quicker then she could think, the precious child fell. The moment the sword left her body she picked it up, stumbling backward out of the doors, holding the precious body to her chest. Two guards attempted to stop her as she left the room but that didn't matter. She gently laid Estelle down.

She turned around with a sweet smile to face one of the guards, then grabbed his arm, using her other hand to unsheath her sword. She tugged him towards her, flipped him around and held her blade to his neck, she pulled, placing her hand on the unsharpened edge, and sliced through half of his neck, leaving it hanging by a thread.

The severed nerves caused him to fall, the lungs couldn't process air, and he suffocated. She shoved the other guy against a wall and pressed her sword to his throat, this time pushing, with the same effect occurring.

She picked up Estelle's body again. and pulled from the group, standing a few feet away, guarding the motionless form with her life. Her parents deserved to have something to bury.

James watched when, all at once, the queen plunged her sword through Estelle's heart, and the girl fell dead to the ground.

At that moment, it was like James wasn't even there anymore. He was watching the events in another world, in another time, in another universe from a third-person perspective.

This probably would've happened whether they'd all been brought here or not.

Sure, Telos (or whoever had named themselves the "leader" for the time being) was to blame for leading the whole group and the human right to the queen. They knew the queen was a vampire, and powerful, and dangerous. It was their fault for thinking they could just march in without something happening beyond their control.

But all of those thoughts played in the background of James's mind as he watched Siren run toward the queen. One by one, several of the group began to converge on her, weapons drawn and teeth bared.

The queen had brought it on herself. Yes.

But the queen knew about the barrier. The queen was useful, and could be the key to them getting back home.

He ran ahead - too slow to block the first blows - but with the intent of throwing himself into the line of attack between the queen and the others.