Golden guards gathered beyond the silver gates on both sides, cheering for the queen, calling her name. Aetha shouted over them, “Huntmaster Kan’al’oth! Announce me!”

The bearded man flapped his own red wings, hovering over the golden guards as they gathered by dozens. He glanced back at the rooftops of the marble towers, the palisades, the windows in the gold-lined crags around the roads, at all the hungry faces of the commoners who so rarely saw their queen. Eyes wide with awe, they stared. Kan smiled and lifted his voice, “Behold, subjects of Al’ain, people of the Golden Reef! A rare glimpse of she who is Prime Sanguinate, she who is Matron Al’ain, she who is the Undefeated Champion of the Feral Fields!”

The beastly woman turned a snarl at the crowd of guards and leapt at them. When she came close to the gate, however, she growled in pain and backed away, running her hands over her arms. The gate’s refined silver repelled her. Instead, she spun back toward Aetha.

Just as the huntmaster declared, “She who is Supreme Seraph of the First Sphere!” the queen flapped twice more to get altitude, and then tucked in her red wings and fell. Sunset flared behind her as her hair spread around her head, firelight bright like her eyes, like her lips, like the excitement that reddened her pale cheeks. She landed in a crouch, the sanguine sun shining on her golden pauldrons, her chains and pins, the yellow sashes that wrapped her bleached white uniform splattered with the day’s blood.

Grabbing her machete out of the air, the massive red woman growled, her muscles tense and twitching across shoulder and back, chest and core.

“There’s a beauty to you,” Aetha said, a gentle, almost musical quality in her voice as she stood and looked over her quarry. She ran gold-capped fingertips over her obsidian blade and magic sparked. “Vermillion. A favorite color of mine. Less like a flower, less like a sunset, less even like blood, but yours must have such a taste to it. Do you thirst likewise for mine, I wonder?”

Kan shouted, “She who is Master-at-Arms of the Order of the Peak, she the First Admiral of the Grand Fleet of Sof Sator, she the dire eradicator of all Ossea!”

The beastly woman lunged, machete swinging high in huge arms, then coming down with such speed and power that the sky screamed when she cut it. Aetha held her place, meeting the machete with her obsidian blade. Obsidian was a fragile stone, easily broken, but the blade was infused with such magic that it held like unbreakable iron when the machete crashed against it. Aetha maintained her position with similar magic, power flaring out of her golden adornments, from the very fabric of her uniform. With a huff, Aetha threw the beastly woman back.

The golden guards cheered. Kan announced, “Your Queen of the Golden Reef, Aetha’al’ain!” Applause echoed in the city. The commoners, weak with hunger and plague, clapped and cheered as loud as they could. Theirs was a pathetic sound.

The beastly woman was only thrown off for an instant. As she fell, she struck the ground with her one fist, the blow spinning her so she could get her feet under herself and charge again. She attacked with nuance and intellect this time, a sweep of her hooked blade which Aetha blocked and then a closed fist thrown at Aetha’s unprotected side. Aetha pivoted inside the punch, evading it, and for a moment their bodies were a breath away from one another, almost touching. Aetha swung her sword to knock the machete aside and pull its obsidian point across the red woman’s scaled chest, the hard red scales deflecting much of the blow. Dots of bright blood, so bright it almost glowed, appeared, grew, ran fast in rivulets down the woman’s mighty body.

Huge arms tried to close around Aetha. The queen’s ephemeral wings flashed brightly, lifted and fell, throwing her up and knocking the beastly woman away. Flapping back, Aetha called up a spell in her blade; blue light glowed both on the blade and on the wound it had left on the woman’s scaled chest. Crackling like electricity, magic poured from the wound and wrapped the beastly woman’s chest and arms like chains, pulling tight, binding. She huffed in surprise, straining against the bindings.

Aetha dropped to the ground again. “Two or three more of those and you’ll belong to me, I think. Don’t doubt I’ve got more magic than it’ll take to bind you.”

The woman exhaled a low, deep chuckle.

“Hm?” Aetha straightened in surprise at the sound, that this beast would have a voice, that she would have a laugh, that it would surface in this moment. The queen looked over the beastly woman, her defiant stance, studied her, slowly noticing the movement of her armored right hand. Fingers moving subtly, but precisely. A spell. At that, Aetha’s awareness sharpened, and she heard a humming to one side, saw the subtlest of shadowy movement.

Aetha managed to tear her sleeve off just before the curse the beast had left there activated, some hungry sigil that an instant later reduced the strip of fabric to nothing but ash. Even the enchantments sewn into cloth were gone.

She gawked at her sleeveless arm, the enchanted golden bands that had been concealed. “Bold of you to defile a queen’s adornments in front of her subjects. How impressive. How charming. How unacceptable.” The cheers of the golden guards hadn’t yet abated, and they piqued when Aetha flew at the beastly woman.

Now the two each understood their opponent, and they fought carefully. Their blades clashed, sparking magic on contact, enchantments screaming as they slid close. Aetha dodged and slashed, trying to cast more binding spells on the red beast. And the beast, in turn, tried to grab at the queen with her right gauntlet, dark magic shedding shadow that wrote cursed sigils in the air.

At one point, the beastly woman grabbed the blade of Aetha’s sword, bright blood bursting from her hand but leaving a curse on the blade. Aetha flapped her wings to retreat, banishing the protective wards on the sword and shattering the frail obsidian blade against the ground. Shouting, “Fine! We’ll end this quickly,” she picked up the largest of the blade’s shards and rushed back in, serrated obsidian in both hands. No longer able to deflect the swing of the large woman’s machete, Aetha charged heedlessly inside her reach, using the shards to cut any part of the scaled body she could reach. The woman responded by tearing a cursed slash down the back of Aetha’s uniform and knocking her away with the flat of the machete.

Tumbling briefly, flapping to take to the air, Aetha activated the binding spells she’d left in the many wounds she’d given her opponent. Crackling chains poured out of the cuts faster than blood ever would, wrapping arms and legs, head and body. The beastly woman strained against the bindings, faltered, and fell, but her fingers still moved and conjured to quicken the curse she’d left on Aetha. It was a huge sigil, shadow blooming horribly from behind Aetha and wrapping around her. The darkness groaned, and Aetha felt it begin to consume.

As Aetha’s ephemeral wings came apart like torn paper to blow away on the wind, as she fell, she shouted, “Huntmaster Kan! Take the bound beast! Its blood is for Eiri’el and no one else, you hear me? Every drop of its blood is for her lips alone!” The cheers of the golden guards finally ceased when Aetha hit the ground, too weak to do anything more than crash down. She felt the enchantments in her garments fading, felt her strength pouring out of her. She lifted her arm to watch the shadowy curse move over her, watched the golden bands she wore turn brittle and crumble to dust, watched her veins turn dark. She heard the grind of the silver gate opening. Then darkness fell.