Down Falls The Queen: A Splitting Worlds Novella (The Splitting Worlds Series)

by Katherine D. Graham

  I pause, trying to think of what Riara could even remotely lack. My gorgeous sister, with her cunning wit and charming smiles, has no shortage of suitors, bravado, or energy.

  And bless Riara with direction for her path in our world.

  I finish my prayer with a few more thoughts about strength for my warriors and for peace within the Human world when they awake to count the losses of another month’s Hunt. Clapping and bowing again, I leave the shrine with an empty stomach but a full heart.

  The gods hear me. They will guide me.

  I barely make it down the steps to the main road before Riara flings herself into my arms, her slightly smaller wings colliding with mine.

  “Rei! You’re home!” she quips, stepping back and presenting an open palm to me expectantly.

  I raise an eyebrow at her, trying for my most what do you think you’re doing expression. As always, she sees right through me, and just shakes her head with a smirk.

  “My blood, if you please,” she says, beckoning for the unseen vial she knows I have for her.

  Fishing the vial from my pocket, I barely have time to hand it to her before she whirls on her heel to leave.

  “You should pray over it before you drink it!” I call after her. “A Human died for it, you know. It could be tainted!”

  If she hears me, she ignores me. Shrugging, I clutch the other two vials in my pocket tightly in my fist. The young women who bled for them were not pure like the ones the oni are allowed to spirit away, but the maidens’ lives will find new purpose in sustaining the lives of my own parents.

  At least they get a second chance in death to contribute good to the world.

  The deep, rich, resounding chime of the main gate’s gong grips me.

  The guard gong?

  Running and leaping into the air, I let my wings glide through the air to the tall stone wall. My hands slip a thick, black, beak-like mask from my pocket and over my nose and mouth reflexively—my Tengu warrior mask—so it rests lightly against my face. I skim the open grassy plains beyond the wall, but, seeing nothing, I circle back to the gate.

  “Rei-hime!” Someone on the ground waves frantically up at me.

  Soldiers are scurrying in and out of different homes, some bearing torches and all armed. Civilians flood the streets, some in pajamas and many with feathers ruffled from the ungraceful awakening before dawn. Fear looms over them, interspersed with confusion at the unusual flurry of activity.

  Drawing my own blade, my feet barely tap the cobblestones before I’m surrounded by questioning civilians. I tune out their words, looking for the soldier who’d waved me down.

  “Rei-hime, the King!” Kazuho shouts. I hardly make him out from beyond the sea of torches flooding the street.

  Without hesitation, I take to the sky again. This time my wings carry me swiftly above the others’ heads toward the castle.

  Why aren’t they flying?!

  A poorly aimed arrow ruffles my feathers so close my heart skips a beat. A quick glance reveals the attacker, and I dive without taking the time to catch my breath. The would-be assassin scrambles away, leaving the longbow they must not be used to wielding behind as they try to disappear into the crowd. The assassin is wingless but fast, dressed in a scarlet so deep it almost looks black.

  An archer who can’t even aim cleared the entire sky of trained soldiers? My thoughts race at the illogical facts before me. But that assassin was wearing scarlet…

  My mind is spinning, trying to place a black rose emblem embroidered across the back of the assassin’s robes while also too focused on catching up with the assassin to think too much about the familiarity. A crowd of civilian servants scrambles to the sides of the road, screaming, as I plunge between them to land. A lightning flash of silver is all I see as my sword plunges down in my hands, just before my feet hit the ground. The assassin screams, a shrill, feminine scream, holding her now-armless shoulder as she topples to the ground.

  Mirada dashes past me, snatching up the assassin and whispering a spell to bind her as I run by on foot.

  Mirada must have been on my heels this whole time.

  I make a mental note to raise her rank as I run up the short stairs into the castle’s main keep. Oil lamps burn fully through the interior, preventing shadows that would conceal more assassins. My guards are scouring every hiding place, searching for trouble.

  A wave of dizziness hits me as a silver-white aura swirls down the stairs toward the doors I just entered. That aura stops me dead in my tracks.

  Only souls are that color…

  Somehow my body moves numbly on its own through the chaos to the stairs winding up higher and higher in the keep to my parents’ rooms on the top floor. Sounds around me are muted, and the silver aura thins the higher I climb until it’s barely a thread between the sliding doors to my parents’ bed chamber. The lack of servants and guards outside the doors, the unnerving silence within despite the obvious shadows of kneeling figures in the room, confirm my biggest fear.

  Willing my trembling hands to be steady, I slide open the delicate paper doors.

  Father’s head rests inches from where his body lies still in a deepening pool of blood on his futon bed. My vision blurs, my breaths growing slow and heavy in my chest.

  My father is dead.

  Chapter Three

  “Kazuho!” I shout without thinking, thankful my subconscious mind is processing what my stunned and grief-filled soul cannot.

  Riara and Mother, who have been huddling together in silent shock, both startle at my voice. Trembling, Riara promptly doubles over with a choked cry. Mother wraps her arms around my quivering older sister. The sobs and wails my mother and sister let out rend my heart, testing the limits of my reserve.

  No tears. Riara is older than me; she’s supposed to be emotion. She doesn’t have a throne to think about. No. I will not dishonor my father with tears while his killer still breathes. I coach myself, forcing myself to stand strong.

  “Rei-hime.” Kazuho bows by my side, not looking into my parents’ room.

  “Bring the assassin to the square.” The steadiness of my voice catches me off-guard, but the cold authority seems to set my now hushed family at ease.

  “Yes, hime-sama.”

  “Mother, see to the body,” I say with one final lingering glance at my father before turning to leave.

  His strong but gentle arms will never welcome me home with a hug, or spar with me in the field. His face is still peaceful, eyes closed as though sleeping.

  He never even knew his end was upon him. I choke back sobs at the thought.

  I pause a fraction of a second when my gaze passes over Mother and Riara. Mother’s face is tear-stained but set with the grim confidence befitting the Tengu Queen. Riara, though…

  Is that… a smile?

  I blink, but my double-take only shows Riara’s grief-stricken eyes staring back at me.

  Did I imagine it?

  Something unsettling nags at the corner of my mind, but there’s no time to dwell on it.

  Guards rush into the room to help Mother, and I leave them behind. Hopping off the top stair, I glide to the landing, then hop and glide again until I reach the main floor. The short walkway from the castle’s main doors to the main city square are packed on either side by a throng of Tengu men, women, and children. Civilians, servants, guards both off and on duty—everyone watches me with frantic eyes bordering on hysterics.

  My presence stills their movement, a hush falling over the crowd. Heaviness weighs down on me—the burden of an uncrowned heir in a world without a leader on the throne for the first time in our recorded history.

  War doesn’t come to Tengu lands. No one would dare slight the gods. But… why else would there be an assassin?

  The city square is empty save for the woman in scarlet. Her back is to me, the intricately embroidered rose standing out in full bloom across her back. A single eye rests in the center of it. The sight of it strikes terror into the core of my sou
l.

  My eyes fly to the bare, uninjured arm hanging where there should only be a stump at her shoulder. Kazuho guards her, but even his weather-beaten, typically stoic face is ashy and his jaw set tight. Silvery-white and violet auras twirl around the woman, who I see - now that I’ve come to stand before her, is sitting in perfect peace with her eyes closed. The auras snake through her auburn hair and cling momentarily to her neck and arms before resuming their hovering around her body. The silvery-white one touches the last remnants of a scar on the woman’s shoulder, and I stifle a gasp as the scar disappears as a result of its touch.

  The woman cocks her head, turning her face to me with eyes still closed. Her nearly perfect complexion shows only the slightest hint of wrinkles around her mouth.

  Say something. You’re Acting Ascended, now, I chide myself, but I don’t know what to say. What does one say to the gods’ Oracle after chopping her arm off for merely assuming she was an assassin? She could blot our names from history for even daring to question her actions…

  The living incarnation of the gods’ eyes fly open, and all around us fall still. Her eyes are solid white—not white as one blind, but white as though they never developed a cornea at all. My stomach knots within me.

  Good thing I was fasting, I think to myself as a wave of dizzying nausea wracks me at the thought of the judgement to come for my sins, otherwise I’d be adding puking on the Oracle to my damnable list of sins against her.

  The corners of the woman’s lips curl up in a smile, and not an unkind one. The amusement on her face takes me aback.

  “Don’t be acting so fearful, Tengu young’en.” The woman’s voice is light-hearted and kind, but her accent is unlike one I’ve ever heard before. “Dorathea here’s replaced this arm before. Good thing Dorathea has it under warranty, no?”

  “Warranty?” The strange word rolls off my tongue, and I immediately snap my mouth closed.

  Stupid! At least pretend you know what you’re doing.

  Dorathea laughs a tinkling laugh similar to a Fairy and says, “Give it a thousand years. You’ll be hearing more of that word than you’d ever wish then.”

  Shaking her head, Dorathea stands and scans the crowd with her disconcerting white gaze. When her gaze falls on me again, I feel as though she sees through me to my very soul. Trembling, I look away from her.

  I thought only Tengu Royals could read others’ minds, but of course the Oracle can. How else could she be an Oracle?

  The silvery-white aura hovers a moment beside Dorathea’s ear. She leans in as though listening to it, even though not the faintest whisper is audible to me. Standing up straight, she fixes her sights on me again.

  “Yer father says you owe him.” Dorathea’s words drive a dagger through my heart.

  My eyes dart to the hovering aura, my jaw hanging open in shock. I remember the aura coming down the stairs from Father’s room and shudder.

  Father?

  “His years as a spirit are lessened, fer he healed the wound which you wrought, thus mending your slight with the gods.”

  My face burns like fire as shame slices through me for the first time in at least a hundred years.

  “I—”

  “Danger comes for your throne, young’en,” Dorathea cuts me off before I can say more. The finality and grimness in her words sets my senses on high alert.

  “The assassin,” I whisper.

  Dorathea stands tall, her wavy hair billowing in the heavy morning breeze. The dawn sky above us is in its last traces of deep gray—the sky in the Between never turns blue as it does in the Human world—before the sunrise.

  “Do not be deceived,” Dorathea warns me. “Three come with the dawn. All will seek blood, both beyond and within. An innocent façade wields deadly betrayal. A raging flame tarnishes all it touches down to its soul, and the third…”

  Her voice trails off into nothingness as her face rises to take in the first rays of sunlight.

  “The third?” I ask, hoping she will answer me.

  Oracles have never come to our home in my lifetime, although their garb and insignia are well recorded in the Tengu history books Father forced me to study. Cryptic visions given directly from the gods to the Oracles were imperative to the survival of all the world’s inhabitants, but few have been able to decipher them.

  “Devotion to an idea surpasses devotion to blood,” Dorathea whispers, looking around, “and bearing that devotion, one hungers for your throne.”

  Horns sound in the distance, and I see a couple guardsmen fly atop the wall to take a look. Kazuho and Mirada shout orders for the civilians to return to their homes. Soldiers rush to herd the bystanders indoors. The streets come alive in the bustle of it all, leaving Dorathea behind. She turns as though to leave, but I rush after her, barely catching myself before touching her arm.

  Let’s not add to our transgressions by touching her, I scold myself a half second before disaster.

  The last person known to touch an Oracle, according to the history books, spontaneously combusted before a meteorite smote them where they stood.

  “Wait, please!” I plead with her instead.

  She pauses, turning patiently back to me as though the hustle and bustle mean nothing to her at all.

  “You shot at me when I was flying earlier,” I say, “and you were leaving the castle. Did you meet with my father yesterday? Did you have a message for him?”

  Smiling kindly at me again, Dorathea says, “The same message Dorathea bore to your father, Dorathea has now delivered to you. The gods have given no more clairvoyance than that. Although Dorathea suspects the timing was purposeful. Dorathea collects the souls of kings, after all.”

  I notice again the two souls flying around Dorathea’s head and shoulders. The silvery-white one is my father’s, but the purple one…

  A purple aura? What has purple auras? Demons?

  “As for the arrow”—Dorathea’s smile turns ever-so-slightly impish, and her voice drops to a whisper—“Dorathea has been around nine hundred years, young’en, and didn’t have to miss. But the skies were not emptied by Dorathea’s doing.”

  “Rei-hime! We need you at the gate!”

  Even from this distance away, I can feel the presence of an Angel and a Demon at the gate.

  Only the two of them, though?

  Just imagining dealing with the Demon-Angel feud right now is enough to poke at my nerves, especially when the first Oracle to appear on Tengu land has arrived after more than five hundred years. Dorathea nods over my shoulder to the gate.

  “Go now, young’en,” she says, her words ending the conversation before I can protest. “You seem like a hardy warrior. Dorathea hopes to see you again. Be wary, and avoid a fall.”

  In a poof of scarlet smoke, Dorathea vanishes before my eyes. Her disappearance and confusing warning leave me more troubled than I’ve ever been before. Despite my heart sinking into my empty and protesting stomach like a rock, I withdraw my emotions into myself. Replacing the building anger, grief, and fear threatening to break me with a resolute mask—my Hand of Justice mask—I make my way to greet the visitors at our gates.

  I stop just short of the wide wooden doors, my mask threatening to break at the shock. Two young men similar in appearance to me in age, stand alone beyond the gate—two young men I’ve known their whole lives. Vampire Twins Ayangelo and Natius stand waiting for me as they’ve done hundreds of times over the past two hundred years. I freeze in my tracks when my gaze meets theirs today, though. While being half-Demon and half-Angel, born of the Demon King Draco with the holy Angel mother Seracuse, they have only ever been Vampires.

  Today, however, I am not met by their identical maroon eyes or long dark-gray hair. Panic and confusion build within me. Ayangelo’s hair hangs in fine, sky-blue strands that match his now sky-blue eyes. Natius, on the other hand, has chopped his jet-black wavy hair short at his shoulders. Twin pools of blood-red flame—Demon flame—meet my own from beneath shaggy bangs.

 
A pair of white Angel wings I’ve never seen before on Ayangelo’s back takes my breath away—whether in awe of their beauty or shock at their presence, I am unsure. Natius’ flushed, red skin and protruding fangs, so much bigger and rougher than a Vampire’s, unsettles me.

  Unable to move, my mask crumbles enough for me to gawk at them both.

  They’re not Vampires anymore…

  Chapter Four

  “How?” I ask Ayangelo, having regained my composure and motioning for the brothers to follow me in through the gate.

  “How what?” Natius asks as though completely lost on the fact that they’re no longer Vampires.

  “How come you’re an ugly, sunburned Demon and I’m a winged white stallion,” Ayangelo gloats, strutting up to me and draping an arm casually around my shoulders.

  While my body tenses at the inappropriateness of physically touching someone outside my family, the corners of my lips turn up ever so slightly.

  “White stallion, Aya? Really?” I sputter, a chuckle threatening to bubble out.

  Father’s severed head flashes in my mind’s eye, grounding me instantly like a kick to the gut.

  Father’s body is barely cold, the entire Kingdom is mourning, and I’m laughing at Aya’s narcissism? Shame presses my lips back into a cold, tight line.

  I realize, looking around, that the villagers are watching in horror, and I shove Aya’s arm away. Immediately, I regret the loss of his natural warmth and physical presence—small comforts mean little to the Tengu, but the Angels are known for their affection. I sneak a glimpse at the grinning Angel Prince out of the corner of my eye. His glistening white smile is pure and innocently unaware of the trauma my people are going through. But his heart is open and gentle. His muscular, tan arms shine with the faintest hint of sweat in the sunlight. Seeing him so carefree, a strange longing worms into my heart.

  Is it Aya I wish I could be with, though? Or do I just envy his freedom?

  “Shall we discuss business, Aya?” Natius, ever the realist, is grimmer than is even normal for the stoic man.