080: The Queen's Knight

[Athony]

The universe can be cruel. Sometimes the mate she chooses for you is a dream. Sometimes she is your nightmare. Often she is both.

Eleanora keeps me around because I am useful. She is very stubborn with a willpower of steel--excellent qualities in a queen, but terrible ones in a mate.

But she is loyal to those she finds useful.

Why else would she still keep Segundus' corpse rotting in a vat of amber fluid?

We thought it had been lost to the fire, but the universe isn't just cruel but capricious. She saw fit in her infinite wisdom to hide his corpse below several layers of earth, down a long lost tunnel leading to tracks that go to the sea. We found it a moon cycle earlier, and the joy in Eleanora's eyes was only overshadowed by her smile of victory.

"We must have the Technician," she insists. "When that beast is in our grasp, we will win this battle and reclaim our rightful places."

"You deserve to be Queen of us all," I bowed before her. As she touched my shoulder to r