Queens & Liars-Sequel to Three Broken Kingdoms (Completed)

Chapter One: The Goddess' Blade

In the silence, in the darkness, Myra Isidore knew one thing and one thing alone:

She was a blade, destined to be wielded by the three goddesses.

She was a blade, forged in the flames that had burned her kingdom.

She was a blade, with a hilt engraved with the names of those she loved and lost.

She was a blade, and she would shed Crimson blood before she met her end.

Five years. It had been five years since everything was stolen from her.

Ruby. Viktoria. Vera. Kestra. The names were a chant in her head. Her beloved.

Stolen from her.

Friend. Soul-bonded. Mentor. Daughter.

Myra silently screamed that word, howling it with all the rage in her heart, with all the pain and the despair that burned in her.

Her daughter had been stolen. Her friends had been slaughtered. Her people had been enslaved.

And she would kill them all.

When the time came, Myra would emerge from this haunted place and she would slaughter every human on the earth. She would free the valkyries.

She would dig graves for her beloved, and then she would throw herself into the sea and join them.

Jasper. She'd take her sweet time ending him.

Jasper, who had lied to her, and betrayed her. Jasper, who had made her fall in love with him. Made a fool of her.

Diaz had been right. Humanity were lying, murdering filth, and she would wipe them from the planet.

Diaz. Perhaps still out there, somewhere. Myra would find her and apologise for everything she had done. How wrong she had been.

And Nala Merson...Nala, who had abandoned the valkyries and left them to die...she would join her nephew in a grave.

Those were her tasks. They were the reasons she didn't find a way to end her miserable existence. She still owed the world those tasks.

So, Myra waited in the silence, in the darkness. Sometimes as a human, sometimes, when it got too cold-for Dorgon was so deep underground that it got cold-as a snow leopard, curled up on the dungeon floor.

A little tap filled the air, and she turned.

Layla Charlize Swallow, Layla Elenith, the Elfin Queen, sat in the cell next to hers and tapped the bars.

The Queen was chained in irons to stifle her magic. When she had first come, her waist-length moon-white hair had shone in the ageless dark. Now it was shorn to her chin, grey and matted.

Her eyes were broken and lifeless, haunted. Her skin was pale as death.

There was nothing of a Queen in the eighteen-year-old girl.

Myra tapped the bars, an echo of Layla's taps.

"Shadow queen, red throne. Bloody hands. Broken crowns." The Elfin Queen croaked, hoarse. Layla Swallow, great hope of Veron and Celeste, had long since gone mad.

Myra decided to indulge her.

"Burning cities, bloody streets. Throne of skulls, crown of blood."

"Stolen lives. Shattered dreams. Tears of blood." Layla continued, in a sing-song voice. "They took everything."

"They will pay," Myra whispered to Layla, to the darkness, to herself, to her dead. Layla turned away, eyes drifting. The broken queen was too hopeless for the revenge that burned and screamed and howled within Myra.

"Flame," Layla whispered, a few minutes later. "Ice." Myra didn't turn around, but she knew there would be tears running down the queen's cheeks.

The few moments of clarity like these were always painful for Layla. They brought back the memories of her mother and father. It was the reason-Myra thought-that Layla hid behind the madness.

"Lightning," she whispered. That, Myra knew, referred to her twin sister. She wasn't sure what had happened to Maia, apart from whispers from the guards that mentioned of the Lady's 'resistance' in the North.

"Mind," she croaked out, and the general reflected on the queen's other loss: her 'aunt'. Her aunt, who had stabbed her in the back.

Like Jasper did to her.

Myra was half-surprised to find her hand slipping through the bars between the queen and the general and clasping Layla's hand.

"In the skies far above,

They watch down on the ones they love,"

Myra sang to the Singer, her voice harsh and broken by five years deep in Dorgon. It was a valkyrie lullaby, but Layla was long past caring.

"One day we will join them,

High above with the fallen," Myra continued, and Layla let out a muffled sob.

The Elfin Queen had already tried to kill herself-twice. The guards had stopped her by luck the first time, and since then, she hadn't been let out of their sight.

"I want to go," Layla whispered to Myra, to the silence, to the world above where they were waiting. "I want to go and see them again."

But with her near-eternal lifespan closely watched and protected, Layla might remain trapped in the world of the living forever. That was the reason Medea had put them here, after all. To block them from their beloved, from their last escape of this cursed world.

To keep Myra from the sea.

Sometimes, when she could almost hear Viktoria and Vera and Kestra calling to her, when she could almost taste the salt of the sea and almost see the crashing waves...sometimes, when her grief and despair drowned out her fury, she would feel tempted to try to find that sweet escape of death.

But Myra reminded herself, over and over and over, that she was not done with this world.

There were people to be punished, and people to save. Once those tasks were completed, then and only then would she meet the bittersweet embrace of the sea.

See her friends and daughter again. Her mother too.

It had been an age since she had thought of her mother. Not murdered by the mortal Empress, but slowly butchered by an elfin sorcerer and MindWeaver.

After that, she'd taken her time ending him.

Layla shook her hand gently.

"Keep singing," she entreated, looking at Myra with a fervent desperation in her purple eyes.

So, Myra sang to Layla, to the darkness, to herself, to her beloved dead. And as she sang to the lost queen, she pictured Kestra, a lost queen herself, and she sang for her. In the five years since Myra had been in the darkness of Dorgon, sometimes she pictured Layla not as herself but as the daughter stolen from her. She turned Layla's purple eyes into Kestra's wide blue ones, pictured her once-moon-white hair as Kestra's dark curls. Sometimes even imagined a silvery-gray fox darting through the cells.

Myra smiled slightly as Layla began to sing back to her and she closed her eyes to block out the endless night.