The royal galley, the Spear of Aziza, cut through the deep, sapphire waters of the Western Ocean, racing the wind toward the ailing King Oba. A sense of cautious optimism pervaded the ship.
Princess Adanna, no longer haunted, worked tirelessly, preparing ancient poultices and chanting soft, healing songs over the herbs. Her presence alone seemed to calm the sea. She spent her days with Nnamdi, the poet-king who had won her freedom, learning the histories of Aziza.
Prince Odion, however, remained vigilant. His gaze was fixed, not on the waves, but on the horizon behind them. He sat in the stern with his most trusted captain, discussing military strategy.
"The old king of Oloran is dead," the Captain reported, his voice low. "The message reached the Isle of Ota yesterday, right after we departed. They say the heir, Oran, took the throne immediately."
Odion clenched his jaw. Oloran was the greatest rival to Aziza, and the stability of the Western Realms had depended on King Akor.
"An ancient king's death is a small thing," Odion said. "But the swiftness of the succession and the death of his queen alongside him? That is not tradition. That is expediency. It smells of a witch's impatience."
He looked at Nnamdi and Adanna, laughing softly near the prow. "We must pray Adanna's gift is fast. If Oloran senses weakness in our succession, they will strike. We need King Oba strong, or we need a new King on the throne—and that King is not yet prepared for the burden."
Meanwhile, back in the Stone Court of Oloran, the funeral pyre still smoked, filling the air with the scent of sacrifice. King Oran sat upon the lion-throne, the weight of his crown heavy and strange. Beside him sat Nkemesit, his Queen, a quiet pillar of grace that the court desperately clung to.
But the true centre of the palace's dark energy was the new Queen-Consort, Nkema. She stalked the halls, her beauty now edged with poison, targeting King Oran with a dangerous, raw desire. She made every seductive move to engage him sexually, but King Oran, bound by his strange new love for Nkemesit, coldly refused her every advance.
Nkema's fury festered. She declared bitter enmity with her sister and became radicalized by her own denied destiny. She even refused the conjugal bed of her husband, Prince Kelan, telling him flatly that he would receive nothing of her until he took the throne from his brother.
Kelan, soft-spoken and gentle, begged her to cease. He argued that King Oran was the finest warrior in the known human inhabitant and that to challenge him was suicide. But Nkema kept pressing him, driving him to the edge of distraction.
When she finally realized that Prince Kelan would never go against his brother, she abruptly stopped her campaign. She became suddenly soft and deferential, a calculated manoeuvre to conceal her true plan. A prince from a far-off kingdom was coming to pay homage to King Oran. Nkema used a subtle spell to draw the visiting Prince's eyes and attention, then publicly framed him, accusing him of attempting to rape her. She used her dark charisma to sway the court to demand the Prince's immediate execution, an act of sacrilege that ignited a devastating war with the Prince's powerful homeland.
The war came swiftly. As King Oran led his great army to the front, the air in the Stone Court thickened with dread. Nkema moved in the deepest shadows of the palace, her presence a cold weight. She found the chamber where Nkemesit kept the preparations for the Battle-shadow rites—the sacred magic that allowed a queen's spirit to protect her husband in battle. She removed the binding spell Nkemesit was supposed to use, not just breaking it, but inverting the runes so the magic would consume itself, ensuring her sister's power would fail.
King Oran fought with legendary ferocity in the blinding sun, hoping his Queen would soon appear in spirit to support him. But like a sudden, scorching squall rising from bone-dry earth, Nkema appeared on the field. She was not a spirit, but a whirlwind of dust and grit, smelling of ash and cold iron, covering King Oran's eyes. The King, furious and momentarily blinded, swung wildly at the cloud, knowing the witch who was responsible for the chaos.
The enemy seized the advantage of his confusion and struck. King Oran fell, mortally wounded, the bronze of his armor ringing against the packed soil, but his veteran soldiers, fueled by the motto "No Retreat," fought on, surrounding his body.
Meanwhile, Queen Nkemesit tried desperately to project her spirit to the battlefield, but the spell failed instantly—a searing pain ripped through her connection, her sister's counter-magic had pinned her in the palace.
The Commander of the army, witnessing their King fall, sent an urgent, final message to the council: Crown Prince Kelan immediately to take command and rally the troops.
Hurriedly, the chiefs summoned Prince Kelan to the throne room, where the Crown of Oloran rested on a velvet cushion. The room was heavy with the silence of crisis. Nkemesit rushed in, tears already streaking the sacred ochre on her face, knowing her sister had done something terrible, but she was too late to intervene.
As the crown was placed upon Prince Kelan's head, the very stone of the palace shrieked. A massive, blue-white bolt of thunder struck him dead instantly, ripping through the ceiling and filling the room with the acrid scent of ozone and burnt flesh. The crown, consecrated for the true heir of Akor, had judged Kelan an imposter and a weak vessel.
In that instant, Nkema rushed to the adjacent room where King Oran's body had just been laid out for the funerary rites. The air around the body was still warm. She plunged her hand into his chest, the metal of his armor yielding like wet cloth under her rage. She opened his body with savage speed and ate the heart, hot and slick with royal blood.
A shockwave of cold power hit her, so intense her vision grayed, but she did not notice the initial surge. Driven by fear of failure and purpose, she rushed back to the throne room. The Council and the Chief Priest were paralyzed, staring at Kelan's smoking corpse. They already knew the terrifying truth: there was a true heir in the womb of Queen Nkemesit.
Nkema grabbed the smoking Crown from Kelan's lifeless head and placed it on her own. The sky outside darkened instantly. Thunder crashed, a hurricane-force storm raged, and day became dark for a few frantic seconds, as if the sun had been extinguished by the ritual.
Then, the storm vanished. Silence returned. Nkema's entire countenance had changed. Her human fear was replaced by cold, magnificent indifference. Her eyes glowed with an ancient, terrifying power that seemed to pull the light from the air.
The Chief Priest, seizing the paralyzed Nkemesit, shouted: "A sacrilege has occurred! Nkema has eaten the heart of a king! She is immortal! We are now doomed!"
Chief Priest screamed the final, ancient chant while a small knot of the King's loyal Palace Guard—who knew the secrets of the true bloodline—acted. They shoved Nkemesit through the hole in the ceiling, covering her with their shields. The Chief Priest then projected a temporary, intensely bright shielding power—a dome of shimmering, yellow light—around them both before casting the final transportation spell.
Nkema, feeling the immense, ageless power flood her soul—a power that tasted of iron and endless time—turned toward where Nkemesit stood, her lips curved into a slow, satisfied smile. But the Queen was gone, spirited away through the smoking hole in the roof by the Chief Priest's last protective spell.
Nkema laughed, a sound that cracked the very stone walls of the throne room. Her terrifying, magnified face, now immense and ethereal, appeared in the sky above the battlefield. She raised one glowing hand, and in a twinkle of an eye, she erased half of the opposing army—their bodies vaporizing into black dust. The remaining soldiers, witnessing the horrific power of the ageless Queen, dropped their weapons and bowed immediately to the sky.
The Queen of Kings had arrived.
immediately. Nkema did not waste time with ceremonies. She sent messages demanding fealty, not just from Oloran's vassal states, but from independent kingdoms bordering the Stone Court—territories that had previously refused allegiance to King Akor.
The first five kings who received the summons—and sent back diplomatic refusals, citing Nkema's illegitimate ascent and the unnatural storm—were made an example of.
On the third day of her reign, Nkema materialized directly into the throne room of the nearest defiant king, King Boru. She appeared not as an apparition, but as a solid, crowned figure, radiating a cold so intense the guards' teeth chattered.
She did not draw a blade. She simply pointed. King Boru and his entire royal family, sitting stiffly on their dais, instantly calcified. They became statues of white, brittle chalk, still wearing expressions of stiff defiance. Nkema shattered them with a gesture, leaving only white dust.
She performed this execution on four other kings in four other courts over the span of a single night. She moved through space and time with a terrible efficiency, a phantom of consequence. The message was absolute: Fealty, or obliteration. The terror was not just in the death, but in the speed and impossible nature of her arrival and departure. The remaining monarchs bowed in abject terror, knowing that no fortress, no distance, and no spell could protect them.