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Synopsis
All Hail Chaos is Sarah Rees Brennan’s wicked, unmissable sequel to Long Live Evil ("delicious, subversive" –Leigh Bardugo), one of the New York Times "Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2024."
THE EMPEROR IS HERE. AND SHE MADE HIM WORSE.
Rae is a fantasy reader who’s been transported to her favorite fictional world of swords and sorcery, castles and monsters. Playing the villainess, she thought she could change the narrative, but this version of the plot is far much more deadly than the one she knew.
Her friends are on the run: the Cobra shelters in an eerie manor haunted by dark secrets, while Emer and Lia stoke a revolution in the gutters. Undead armies roam the kingdom, raiders camp at the city gates, and the irresistible emperor – Rae’s favorite character ever, now possibly the greatest monster in the land – wants her to be his evil queen.
Romantic in fiction, complicated in reality. What’s a villainess to do? Time for wicked bargains and fake engagements, in a fantasy where the most dangerous thing you can do is believe in someone.
Release date: September 16, 2025
Publisher: Orbit
Print pages: 432
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All Hail Chaos
Sarah Rees Brennan
Run to the abyss to watch my man rise, rise!
He can only get it if he’s got red eyes.
My pretty baby can be pretty odd.
Did you hear he’s the son of a god?
Hate to see his downfall,
Loved watching as he fell.
Someone that smoking
Must belong in hell.
There’s a curse upon him,
Wish I was on him too.
If he’d just glance my way
I’d die. And so will you.
Time of Lies, the brand-new sequel to hit musical Time of Iron
Enthroned in splendour, Rae Parilla contemplated her doom. Every pane of glass in the tall windows was stained crimson with the fires of war and the deeper, darker arterial red of unearthly flame from the abyss. Drenched in the light of another world, Rae sat on a throne of gilded bone side by side with her favourite character, the Once and Forever Emperor.
The story lay in ruins, because of all the shit Rae had pulled.
From the depths of her petty heart, Rae longed for someone else to blame, but this was on her. She’d taken the offer from a mysterious stranger and walked into a book. She’d used her sketchy knowledge of said book to act as if she were a true prophet. She’d plotted to steal the magical Flower of Life and Death, cure her cancer and escape back to her own world.
She hatched the brilliant idea to organize the minor villains of this world into an unstoppable team in order to achieve her wicked ends. She ignored all signs, and being repeatedly told outright, that the characters of the book were people as real as she was. Most fatal of all, she’d mistaken the king from book one for her beloved Emperor, on the basis of him being tall, dark, handsome and enthroned. Because of her arrogance and wilfulness, she’d got one of her vipers killed.
Now, the Emperor, formerly her guard Key, had crawled out from the dread ravine with a barely healed cut throat. The sky burned livid with enchantment. Flames from the dread ravine leaped so high that every facet in the green crystal-lined throne room gleamed crimson, and every shining passage in the palace echoed with the moans of the restless dead. Key should have lived for years longer, learning under the pure sweet heroine’s tutelage about pity, mercy, and grace.
Except Rae screwed up and got him killed. She couldn’t blame him for rising from fire and death as a monster.
She had enlisted Key, the fated hero, among the villains, and kissed his murderer as he died. She never meant for anything to happen to him, but what did that matter when he got his throat cut as a direct result of her schemes?
When Rae realized who walked across the golden floor towards her, leaving a path of blood in his wake, she expected to be slain with the imperial sword. She hadn’t anticipated a proposal of marriage.
Why was everything fun to read about terrifying to experience?
Here she was, on a throne, hand in hand with the most powerful and evil man in the world. An objectively cool and sexy scenario, and Rae couldn’t even enjoy it.
If she were reading this book, Rae would roll her eyes so hard at the loser whining that she must marry a gorgeous monster.
This world is as real as ours, but those who walk into the story have an advantage because we know the rules, the Golden Cobra told her once.
The rules said Rae was doomed.
An evil siren who betrayed the hero to his almost certain death? Readers would want the bitch hanged, drawn and quartered. Possibly eighthed.
The readers would get what they wanted. Rae always loved the Emperor’s epic revenge against his enemies. Later in the original series, scheming courtiers killed Lia, his queen. The Emperor lulled the conspirators’ suspicions, letting the noble maiden who betrayed Lia believe he would marry her. Until the Emperor manoeuvred the traitors exactly where he wanted them. At the grand feast when the duplicitous maiden believed he would proclaim their union, the Emperor exposed their lies and ripped their hearts out.
While reading, Rae cheered him on. People loved stories about revenge because nobody got justice in real life. Rae would never hear an apology from her father, or any of those who abandoned Rae for having a bad personality, which they coincidentally discovered after she got cancer. Let the Emperor wreak vengeance for them both. Traitors deserved punishment.
Rae deserved worse. The conspirators killed the heroine. Rae got him killed, and now he was back with eyes red as the wound on his throat. The story had gone wrong. So had he.
As a reader, it was extremely fun to root for bloody vengeance against those who betrayed the hero. As the wicked betrayer, Rae didn’t want to get butchered at the altar, blood drenching her wedding dress.
She needed to escape. Now.
The Emperor’s low voice, crackling like flame and deep as the abyss, broke her reverie.
“Scheming, my lady?”
Rae jerked, hand slipping from his claw. Swiftly, she pasted on a smile. “Picturing our wedding day.”
There was a pause, as though he was startled by her enthusiasm. Some level of surprise seemed reasonable. She had agreed to marry him at swordpoint.
Then the Emperor smiled back, as if at a nasty joke.
Lost in visions of disaster, Rae had failed to take in much else. Now she studied the man enthroned by her side. Behold: the bad bitch she’d bagged by being a worse bitch.
The dramatic planes and valleys of the Emperor’s face were even more dramatically outlined by eldritch light. Once, the Emperor’s great winged throne stood on its silver dais alone, but the ghouls had dragged a throne carved from bone for a dead queen to stand beside his. Now Rae and the Emperor had his-and-hers thrones, both winged. The wings of the Emperor’s throne spread vast and high behind his spiky black head. Jet and red gold, enamelled with human bone. Diamonds and rubies trailed after the wings, each jewel a spark in a cascade against a lapis-lazuli sky. The sparks fly upward, the people of Eyam said of the flames rising from the dread ravine that ran alongside the Palace on the Edge. Those who swallowed a single spark from the abyss were always angry, always restless, always burning.
The Emperor was born from the abyss. All its rage lived within him. The mask of kings lay beside his clawed gauntlet, his sword, Longing for Revenge, ran with fresh blood, and his eyes burned like the coals of hell. Little trace remained of Key, the laughing boy from the city slums she’d affectionately called her evil minion. The guard who’d knelt at her feet. This was the Once and Forever Emperor, the son of the gods, her favourite character of all time. Once, Rae would have given anything to see him in person.
Now, she missed her gutter guard.
Misery weighed like a cold anchor tied to her scarlet-dyed skirts, trying to drag her down. She needed to survive this. She couldn’t let the Emperor suspect her plans.
“Your proposal was extremely romantic,” Rae purred. “What could I answer but ‘Yes, handsome man with an undead army, I will be your dark bride.’”
When his red gaze swept her face, she felt the lick of flame over skin.
“Have I pleased you? You don’t mourn the death of your lover, the king?”
Right, her lover the king. King Octavian had been Lady Rahela’s lover, before Rae took over the body. Rae’s personal opinion was “screw that guy”. Or don’t: King Octavian had given the impression he would be selfish in bed.
Rae shook her head. “He wasn’t going to marry me.”
“You vowed you loved him.”
Rae shrugged. “I say a lot of things.”
“You lie so sweetly.” The words cut off any possibility of reply, cold as his blade to her throat. The Emperor’s smile widened like a wound. Almost his old smile, with an abyss behind it. “That was a compliment, my lady.”
It didn’t sound like a compliment. He sounded murderous and furious, and he had every right to his revenge. Her veins felt laced with cold poison, her skin sheened with frost, too scared even to shake. Rae wanted to live.
Don’t cry. Don’t panic. Be a villain and plot.
The moment the Emperor first sat on the throne was the end of the first book. They were now in the sequel. At the beginning of many sequels, unfinished business could be wrapped up as the characters moved on into the next story.
According to all rules of narrative, Rae would die soon. Probably at the Emperor’s hands. Unless she ran like a cowardly rat. Hence, running like a rat was Rae’s new scheme. She had already villainously acquired the Flower of Life and Death and opened the door to her own world. She was almost sure she had heard her sister.
Rae had been so close to fleeing through that door to Alice.
Except when Key died, Rae realized how terribly wrong she was to believe the people around her were fictional characters, essentially unreal, who couldn’t be wronged and wouldn’t suffer. When Rae walked into this world, she became Lady Rahela, the evil stepsister of the heroine. She couldn’t leave her new stepsister to face the Emperor’s fury. So Rae turned away from the open door, went to face the Emperor herself, and sent Lia away in the care of Rahela’s maid Emer.
Beforehand, she put the Flower of Life and Death in the hands of Lady Horatia Nemeth, telling Horatia she could give the Flower to her dying twin if Rae didn’t return before morning.
The sky hung in a black curtain behind the flames. The long dark night of the Emperor’s rise wasn’t over yet. All Rae needed to do was slip away as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
Her plan was simple. Get the Flower, flee to her own world. Never be seen again.
The Beauty Dipped In Blood gave her betrothed a false smile, rising from her gilded throne, smoothing skirts of ivory and scarlet.
“Enough death for tonight.”
She should have swept out. Instead, as villains will, she made a fatal error.
She sank upon the silver dais to look at her Emperor one last time. Rae had giggled and kicked her feet over every battle scene through which the Emperor prowled with his legendary sword. She wept over the page when he sat on the throne beside his dead bride, the loneliest creature under the broken moon.
As lonely as Rae.
The Emperor’s smile faded into the faintest sinister, contemplative curve. His lambent gaze fixed on Rae, smouldering scarlet. He was as deathly pale as a glimpse of white ash beneath gold, like a mask in a burning temple. The dark circles beneath his burning eyes looked inscribed by a skeletal finger dipped in charcoal. Rae was evil, not stupid. All characters with red eyes were bad news. This one was lethal. She should leave.
Before she betrayed him, before he died for her, he’d liked her a little bit. Kissed her back at the Night Market, gone along with every scheme, defended her against assassins and the king. The Emperor had liked her.
She used to reread all the Emperor’s scenes over and over, just to spend more time with him.
She had looked at the words that made him for so long. He was looking back at her now. A character to make a reader kick a hole through a library window, and steal the book with him in it away. Her Key.
Impulsively, Rae leaned up, and kissed him goodbye.
Hey. Restraint was for heroes. A villain couldn’t resist temptation.
Her kiss was as light as a cinder, falling and singeing whatever it touched. She was leaning back, lips parted, eyes dazzled, when the Emperor’s enchanted iron claw closed on her waist, his arm as hard as a cage bar. Key lifted her from her knees, pulling her in. Rae caught at the jewelled wings of the throne to stop herself from falling into his lap.
It would be the act of an evil vixen to pledge her troth, give him a night to bitterly remember, and slip off before dawn.
So actually, she could do it.
Or could she? Surely Key would expect vixen moves from Lady Rahela. Having spent the entirety of her adult life dying of cancer, Rae didn’t know any.
His mouth against hers was as cool as kissing someone surfacing from underwater, or coming in from a storm. He breathed in ragged rhythm with her, one gleaming gauntleted claw tangled in the dark of her hair. The slight curve of Key’s mouth grew more pronounced, though no less cruel. She knew the shape of that evil smile, pressed against hers. Rae’s lips curled in answer. For a moment she felt the way she used to, as though they were the only two people in this world who didn’t take everything so seriously. The only ones who realized they were playing a game.
Perhaps he was thinking of sweet revenge. Or perhaps he still liked her. Just a little. Maybe even enough to mean it when he asked her to marry him. There was a chance it wasn’t all for revenge, but Rae knew him well enough to see the bleak fury building behind his smile, enough rage to claw hearts from chests. Even if he meant it now, he wouldn’t mean it for long.
No slow burns for villains. An evil candle burned at both ends. She would not last the night. But while the night lasted, possibly she could improvise vixen moves.
For a moment, it didn’t matter that he’d come back wrong. Only that he’d come back.
The silvery steel of Rae’s gauntlets slid on the carved wings of the throne, jet and enamelled bone. She stood arched over the Emperor for a kiss, hanging onto the throne rather than tumbling into his lap as if it meant a tumble over the edge of a cliff. The Emperor smiled wickedly up at Rae. Her grip relaxed as the fall beckoned sweetly. The space between them filled with lightning, the edge of the light brilliant red. Lightning was another bloody sword the Emperor wielded at will.
If he pulled her in again, Rae would go to him. Even if it was like tumbling off the edge of a cliff.
Instead the Emperor murmured, almost tenderly, “Lie to me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
His voice was hoarse, not with emotion, but a cut throat. “Say you love me.”
Who says I don’t? Except every action Rae had taken since she entered the book said that.
Could you love a book character for real? Of course not. Rae felt her chest burn with guilt, as though wearing a coal of fire over her heart. She hadn’t even recognized her favourite character when she saw him. She’d deceived and betrayed him. How could that be love? A villainess always faked it. Key was real, but her love wasn’t for real.
“The thing is,” Rae prevaricated, “I just don’t think me professing my undying love would be very believable. Right now. What with you storming the castle with your army of ghouls, killing an astonishing amount of people, and holding your sword to my throat. It all happened very fast. Some might call this a whirlwind romance.”
The Emperor tilted his wild dark head, considering this point of view. “I can make you a whirlwind. If you find them romantic.”
“No thank you! Literal whirlwinds are not necessary.”
Rae had been reckless and careless, but starting from this moment she needed to be careful. She and the Emperor were playing a different game now.
Time to coax the powerful man into complying with her will, as vixens were wont to do.
Rae eased away, knelt again, and lied through her teeth. As requested. “When the time is right, the blood moon is high, the battlefield laid waste, and even gods fall to their knees, my Emperor, I’ll tell you. Then you will believe me.”
This time, Key was the one who reached for her. He traced the line of her jaw with a fingertip.
The gesture would have been sweet, had his fingertip not been encased in a razor-sharp iron claw. In the earth of Eyam, where divine blood once spilled, enchanted metal could be forged: orichal gold, silver, copper. Orichal iron, able to cut diamonds, gleaming red as blood. The orichal of the Emperor’s regalia was the most powerful in the world. The Emperor’s sword striking Rae’s had turned her sword to silver dust. She could be dust as well, just as easily. Rae did not even allow herself to breathe.
Key’s voice used to sing. The Emperor’s voice did as well, softer as well as hoarser, an eternal mourning song.
“My lady, I love you. But believe in you again? No. Between us, love is possible. Belief is not.”
The tip of an iron claw lingered in a sharp whisper of a moment, indenting the skin beneath Rae’s ear. A helpless shudder passed through her, the anticipation of pain, the memory of a razor that had shorn off all her hair when it started falling out in clumps. The iron sting lifted from her neck, only for the Emperor’s claws to sink hard into her hair. He held her, face uplifted to his.
“Tell me a story I want to believe. Even if I know better.”
She saw her death in his eyes. That was bearable. She’d pictured her death before. It was worse to see all his rage, and pain, and fear. She was the last person he’d trusted. She might be the last person he would ever trust.
I love you as a knife loves a throat. He said those words when he entered the throne room. How much could that be?
That was the point. He didn’t love her. Not really. There was nothing in Rae to inspire love.
Nobody could love someone who had hurt him that much. He must be plotting her death. Rae hoped so. It would be too awful if Key believed he loved her, because he had no one else.
Lady Rahela would disappear tonight, never to be seen in this world again. That would confirm the Emperor’s cynical views about humankind, and probably launch a reign of terror, but the reign of terror was coming anyway. There was nothing Rae could do about that. Reigns of terror needed to be dealt with by the good and true. Someone should call in Lord Marius.
One day, Key would truly love somebody and realize he never truly loved Rahela. For now, Rae was grieved to hurt him one last time.
Held captive in iron claws, Rae looked into his red eyes. “Believe this, if you can: I’m sorry to leave you.”
Abruptly, Key released her.
“Don’t be sorry. You won’t leave me. We’re going to have such fun together. I was thinking, in the abyss.”
The Emperor mentioned the abyss very casually. Would he kill her just as casually?
His face said he would. “I was thinking about all the lies you told. They never did add up to a sum that made sense. You informed me and Emer you forgot everything about your life. Then you spun me a tale about a grave childhood illness. You claimed to the court you could see the future, but I notice the future is not exactly as you described. I can’t help wondering, what’s the truth behind all this smoke?”
She owed him that, at least.
“The future I described did happen,” Rae told him. “In a book.”
“A book?” the Emperor repeated. “Is this a joke?”
He was raised in the gutter. Only the aristocrats of this world could read. Rae could see why this sounded like a very cruel joke.
“In another world. In another version of this world, but I made a huge mistake—”
The Emperor cut her off. “I didn’t ask for an explanation, my lady. I asked for sweet lies. Why would you tell me your secrets? You never did before.”
Why should the Emperor believe her, if she told him the truth? How could anyone believe her? Rae nodded.
The Emperor shook his head. “I intend to keep you with me always. I will hunt out all your secrets in time.”
Distant in her own ears, Rae’s voice whispered, “What will you do, when you learn all my secrets?”
The Emperor sounded as playful as an apex predator toying with its prey before it went in for the kill. “I never know what I might do next.”
Rae decided to combat all this sinister innuendo by getting extremely literal. “You can’t keep me with you always, darling. Sometimes I need to use the bathroom.”
“Well, you can’t leave now, darling.” Key’s voice rang with mockery as he echoed the endearment. “We simply must receive our guests.”
A question died on Rae’s lips, answered by a nearer thunder than that in the sky. The slaughter outside had ceased, the enemy army quelled or butchered.
In the quiet, footsteps rang. Headed towards the throne room.
Key crooked a claw. The doors swung open. The dead, lining the luminous green crystal walls, came to attention like rotten soldiers.
What remained of the court had scraped together enough courage to investigate. The surviving king’s ministers stood at the doors of the throne room, stately blue uniforms in stately blue tatters.
Prime Minister Pio stared. “Who are you?’
Key wiggled his iron-sheathed-and-clawed fingers in a little wave. “I am the Emperor. The son of the gods, risen from death to rule you. Remember, there was a prophecy?”
Thus it was that the aristocratic assembly, selected to govern the country of Eyam in wisdom and dignity, beheld for the first time their foretold leader.
The divine Emperor, risen from flame and commander of midnight, sat with a leg slung carelessly over the throne arm. He winked. It was clear none of the ministers had expected the wink.
Key raised an eyebrow. On another man, the eyebrow would look interrogative. On Key the gesture seemed a demand, possibly for money and lives. “You’re not happy the prophecy has miraculously come to pass?”
Someone hissed, “Is that a servant?”
The reply came, even lower, “It’s the servant who died.”
Rae only realized she’d begun to smile at Key’s antics when the mention of death fell like a blade to cut her smile away.
Elevating his voice over the whispers, Prime Minister Pio’s demand rang like an aristocratic bell calling an insolent servant to obey. “Where, may I ask, is the king?”
Thunder rolled into an expectant pause. Every soul in the throne room shuddered except Key.
“The king?” Key mused, tugging on a jauntily swinging garnet earring Rae had given him once, as if trying to recall an unmemorable name. “Oh, the king. Green eyes, brown hair, had me put to death? That king?”
Uncomfortable silence answered.
Already balanced on his throne like a leering devil on the edge of hell, Key tilted precariously sideways. He leaned over the elaborately carved arm of his bejewelled throne to grab something he’d dropped on the floor.
“You want the king?” asked Key.
Cautiously, the ministers nodded.
The Emperor grinned like a lightning flash. “Catch.”
With careless ease the Emperor tossed his trophy to the prime minister. Pio’s hands opened automatically to receive it.
As the red light of the ravine spread across the smooth golden floor, further staining the king’s throne room, Rae watched the prime minister realize what he held: King Octavian’s head. Blood drying his glossy hair into black straw, summer-green eyes lost beneath the grey cloud of death. All the ministers of the court saw, and believed.
This wasn’t the king’s throne room any more.
When the handsome new minstrel became the sensation of the court, a gathering of his eager admirers was held to discuss his songs and stories.
“In all these romantic tales,” the prime minister asked, “why are the king and his knights not giving any thought to the governance of the country?”
“That’s less a question, more a nasty statement about how you would prefer the story to go,” replied Merel the minstrel. “By all means, write your own.”
It was agreed by everyone that the prime minister had no appreciation for art.
Time of Lies, ANONYMOUS
A mask shone before the shadows on the throne, golden and grave, a dark jewel shining in the forehead where once a hollow was carved. This was the royal mask, worn in humility to show that the kings knew the Emperor was coming and the throne was not theirs to keep. The prime minister had seen the mask of the kings-in-waiting countless times, when the young king or his father before him held court.
Tonight, Pio watched the mask raised by a bloodstained claw, held in front of the Emperor’s face in a parody of the familiar regal manner. The young king’s head was still warm in Pio’s hands.
The golden visage lowered to reveal the dark countenance beneath, with its terrible smile.
“And the mask falls,” announced the beast slouched upon the throne.
He laid the mask carelessly aside.
“If you doubt my imperial claim,” continued the awful Emperor, “shall I further demonstrate my powers of command over the dead?”
Pio coughed. “That won’t be necessary, Your Imperial Highness.”
Being the power behind the throne was usually an ideal position. It meant you could hide behind the throne. When matters went awry, it was simple to brush off disappointed courtiers with “So sorry, ultimately His Majesty guides us all.”
This approach failed if the throne was usurped. The approach utterly collapsed if the usurper on the throne could puppet the undead to slaughter half the court.
The creature’s footsteps had painted a trail of fresh gore across the throne room. Memory offered visions of countless nobles cut down before Pio’s eyes, gentleborn ladies screaming as their flesh tore with their silk gowns, ministers whose speeches he had listened to for years gurgling on their own blood. Fear whispered Pio could be next. He didn’t know why he still lived.
Andras Pio, Prime Minister of Eyam, shut away emotion to concentrate on the matter at hand.
This was better than a rioting mob. This wasn’t an overthrow of the government, only a change in monarch. Monarchs changed all the time. The king is dead, long live the Emperor! The system endured. Order endured. Andras Pio believed in order.
Andras permitted himself a single dismayed sigh, and wondered what to do with his king’s head. He looked around for a servant. Naturally, the ministers had come to the throne room accompanied by every possible palace guard.
Andras himself had selected a guard based on youth and strength. Said strong-looking youth was backing away, hand flying to his mouth. Why was it impossible to find reliable help? Everybody was upset, this was an upsetting situation, but forsaking one’s duty would not aid matters.
Nobles and servants receded like the tide from the horror of the Emperor’s gaze, leaving Pio stranded. Save for the only one remaining by his side.
Commander General Nemeth was the sole person not to retreat. Through countless victories in war, he had never learned the habit. Pio’s old adversary, which in politics was as close as anyone ever got to a friend.
“Please hold this, Commander. Treat the royal remains with all due reverence.” Pio placed the head in Nemeth’s hands. To his credit, the grizzled veteran of many battlefields barely flinched.
Wiping congealed blood from his palms onto his favourite herigaut, which was fortunately – depending on how you looked at the matter – already covered in blood from the night’s excesses, Pio raised his voice.
“May I be the first to say: Long live the Emperor!”
“Thanks,” said their apparent Emperor in his lamentably ill-bred accent. “I think I’m immortal, as the son of the gods and ruler of the skies. Exciting for us to find out together.”
“You are undying,” declared the woman enthroned beside him. “You’re the Once and Forever Emperor.” Her dark eyes flashed over the ministers, and her voice echoed like a voice from the abyss. “Did I not say the Emperor’s time was nigh? It was so incredibly nigh. The king stood before me, but who walked through the golden doors with me, and stood at my side? Believe my prophecy. This is the young god you prayed for, the prince reborn, the Emperor foretold. Do not doubt, this is the hero of the story.”
A fitting end to a terrible night. If it wasn’t Lady Rahela Domitia.
The other ministers looked stricken by the dread tones of prophecy. Considering the currently indisputable fact that the Emperor prophesied for eight generations had finally come, Andras supposed he couldn’t dismiss the lady as a complete charlatan, but he felt the mouthpiece of the gods should be accurate. Think before you prophesy, woman!
He never expected the Emperor to come in his lifetime. Indeed, while it was only right for a minister to be suitably religious, Andras had often thought it would be pleasant if the dread ravine, the starveling ghouls and the enchanted objects surrounding them were some sort of natural phenomena that ultimately meant very little.
Seeing a man’s crowned shadow fill the sky, as the dead rose in droves and slaughtered his fellow nobles and the foreign invaders of their city alike, had put paid to any wistful atheist aspirations.
Andras Pio considered his mind a vast cabinet with many drawers. Some drawers contained intelligence he referred to frequently. Some drawers he kept locked, as the intelligence within could be of no possible use. This was a busy night for the second type of drawer. Andras put “divine prophecies” in another compartment he didn’t feel equipped to deal with at present.
Do not think about the scarlet skies, do not think about the ghouls, do not think about the head.
The realm. Think of the realm.
“Lady Rahela,” said Pio slowly. “What a surprise to see you here. Considering how last we met.”
Earlier he had attempted to send the young woman to her chambers. Shortly after that he tried to arrest her, and witnessed her committing regicide.
Rahela cackled. “How the turn tables, am I right?”
Prophets always were mad.
The Emperor, lounging insouciantly upon the throne in a manner the king never had, remarked: “Lady Rahela has done me the honour of accepting my hand in marriage.”
Truly it needed only this for the horrors to be complete. The last thing the present circumstances required was a mad queen.
“Ah.” Pio heard his own voice go hollow, like a sad little animal crying alone in a cave. “Congratulations.”
So the young man wa
He can only get it if he’s got red eyes.
My pretty baby can be pretty odd.
Did you hear he’s the son of a god?
Hate to see his downfall,
Loved watching as he fell.
Someone that smoking
Must belong in hell.
There’s a curse upon him,
Wish I was on him too.
If he’d just glance my way
I’d die. And so will you.
Time of Lies, the brand-new sequel to hit musical Time of Iron
Enthroned in splendour, Rae Parilla contemplated her doom. Every pane of glass in the tall windows was stained crimson with the fires of war and the deeper, darker arterial red of unearthly flame from the abyss. Drenched in the light of another world, Rae sat on a throne of gilded bone side by side with her favourite character, the Once and Forever Emperor.
The story lay in ruins, because of all the shit Rae had pulled.
From the depths of her petty heart, Rae longed for someone else to blame, but this was on her. She’d taken the offer from a mysterious stranger and walked into a book. She’d used her sketchy knowledge of said book to act as if she were a true prophet. She’d plotted to steal the magical Flower of Life and Death, cure her cancer and escape back to her own world.
She hatched the brilliant idea to organize the minor villains of this world into an unstoppable team in order to achieve her wicked ends. She ignored all signs, and being repeatedly told outright, that the characters of the book were people as real as she was. Most fatal of all, she’d mistaken the king from book one for her beloved Emperor, on the basis of him being tall, dark, handsome and enthroned. Because of her arrogance and wilfulness, she’d got one of her vipers killed.
Now, the Emperor, formerly her guard Key, had crawled out from the dread ravine with a barely healed cut throat. The sky burned livid with enchantment. Flames from the dread ravine leaped so high that every facet in the green crystal-lined throne room gleamed crimson, and every shining passage in the palace echoed with the moans of the restless dead. Key should have lived for years longer, learning under the pure sweet heroine’s tutelage about pity, mercy, and grace.
Except Rae screwed up and got him killed. She couldn’t blame him for rising from fire and death as a monster.
She had enlisted Key, the fated hero, among the villains, and kissed his murderer as he died. She never meant for anything to happen to him, but what did that matter when he got his throat cut as a direct result of her schemes?
When Rae realized who walked across the golden floor towards her, leaving a path of blood in his wake, she expected to be slain with the imperial sword. She hadn’t anticipated a proposal of marriage.
Why was everything fun to read about terrifying to experience?
Here she was, on a throne, hand in hand with the most powerful and evil man in the world. An objectively cool and sexy scenario, and Rae couldn’t even enjoy it.
If she were reading this book, Rae would roll her eyes so hard at the loser whining that she must marry a gorgeous monster.
This world is as real as ours, but those who walk into the story have an advantage because we know the rules, the Golden Cobra told her once.
The rules said Rae was doomed.
An evil siren who betrayed the hero to his almost certain death? Readers would want the bitch hanged, drawn and quartered. Possibly eighthed.
The readers would get what they wanted. Rae always loved the Emperor’s epic revenge against his enemies. Later in the original series, scheming courtiers killed Lia, his queen. The Emperor lulled the conspirators’ suspicions, letting the noble maiden who betrayed Lia believe he would marry her. Until the Emperor manoeuvred the traitors exactly where he wanted them. At the grand feast when the duplicitous maiden believed he would proclaim their union, the Emperor exposed their lies and ripped their hearts out.
While reading, Rae cheered him on. People loved stories about revenge because nobody got justice in real life. Rae would never hear an apology from her father, or any of those who abandoned Rae for having a bad personality, which they coincidentally discovered after she got cancer. Let the Emperor wreak vengeance for them both. Traitors deserved punishment.
Rae deserved worse. The conspirators killed the heroine. Rae got him killed, and now he was back with eyes red as the wound on his throat. The story had gone wrong. So had he.
As a reader, it was extremely fun to root for bloody vengeance against those who betrayed the hero. As the wicked betrayer, Rae didn’t want to get butchered at the altar, blood drenching her wedding dress.
She needed to escape. Now.
The Emperor’s low voice, crackling like flame and deep as the abyss, broke her reverie.
“Scheming, my lady?”
Rae jerked, hand slipping from his claw. Swiftly, she pasted on a smile. “Picturing our wedding day.”
There was a pause, as though he was startled by her enthusiasm. Some level of surprise seemed reasonable. She had agreed to marry him at swordpoint.
Then the Emperor smiled back, as if at a nasty joke.
Lost in visions of disaster, Rae had failed to take in much else. Now she studied the man enthroned by her side. Behold: the bad bitch she’d bagged by being a worse bitch.
The dramatic planes and valleys of the Emperor’s face were even more dramatically outlined by eldritch light. Once, the Emperor’s great winged throne stood on its silver dais alone, but the ghouls had dragged a throne carved from bone for a dead queen to stand beside his. Now Rae and the Emperor had his-and-hers thrones, both winged. The wings of the Emperor’s throne spread vast and high behind his spiky black head. Jet and red gold, enamelled with human bone. Diamonds and rubies trailed after the wings, each jewel a spark in a cascade against a lapis-lazuli sky. The sparks fly upward, the people of Eyam said of the flames rising from the dread ravine that ran alongside the Palace on the Edge. Those who swallowed a single spark from the abyss were always angry, always restless, always burning.
The Emperor was born from the abyss. All its rage lived within him. The mask of kings lay beside his clawed gauntlet, his sword, Longing for Revenge, ran with fresh blood, and his eyes burned like the coals of hell. Little trace remained of Key, the laughing boy from the city slums she’d affectionately called her evil minion. The guard who’d knelt at her feet. This was the Once and Forever Emperor, the son of the gods, her favourite character of all time. Once, Rae would have given anything to see him in person.
Now, she missed her gutter guard.
Misery weighed like a cold anchor tied to her scarlet-dyed skirts, trying to drag her down. She needed to survive this. She couldn’t let the Emperor suspect her plans.
“Your proposal was extremely romantic,” Rae purred. “What could I answer but ‘Yes, handsome man with an undead army, I will be your dark bride.’”
When his red gaze swept her face, she felt the lick of flame over skin.
“Have I pleased you? You don’t mourn the death of your lover, the king?”
Right, her lover the king. King Octavian had been Lady Rahela’s lover, before Rae took over the body. Rae’s personal opinion was “screw that guy”. Or don’t: King Octavian had given the impression he would be selfish in bed.
Rae shook her head. “He wasn’t going to marry me.”
“You vowed you loved him.”
Rae shrugged. “I say a lot of things.”
“You lie so sweetly.” The words cut off any possibility of reply, cold as his blade to her throat. The Emperor’s smile widened like a wound. Almost his old smile, with an abyss behind it. “That was a compliment, my lady.”
It didn’t sound like a compliment. He sounded murderous and furious, and he had every right to his revenge. Her veins felt laced with cold poison, her skin sheened with frost, too scared even to shake. Rae wanted to live.
Don’t cry. Don’t panic. Be a villain and plot.
The moment the Emperor first sat on the throne was the end of the first book. They were now in the sequel. At the beginning of many sequels, unfinished business could be wrapped up as the characters moved on into the next story.
According to all rules of narrative, Rae would die soon. Probably at the Emperor’s hands. Unless she ran like a cowardly rat. Hence, running like a rat was Rae’s new scheme. She had already villainously acquired the Flower of Life and Death and opened the door to her own world. She was almost sure she had heard her sister.
Rae had been so close to fleeing through that door to Alice.
Except when Key died, Rae realized how terribly wrong she was to believe the people around her were fictional characters, essentially unreal, who couldn’t be wronged and wouldn’t suffer. When Rae walked into this world, she became Lady Rahela, the evil stepsister of the heroine. She couldn’t leave her new stepsister to face the Emperor’s fury. So Rae turned away from the open door, went to face the Emperor herself, and sent Lia away in the care of Rahela’s maid Emer.
Beforehand, she put the Flower of Life and Death in the hands of Lady Horatia Nemeth, telling Horatia she could give the Flower to her dying twin if Rae didn’t return before morning.
The sky hung in a black curtain behind the flames. The long dark night of the Emperor’s rise wasn’t over yet. All Rae needed to do was slip away as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
Her plan was simple. Get the Flower, flee to her own world. Never be seen again.
The Beauty Dipped In Blood gave her betrothed a false smile, rising from her gilded throne, smoothing skirts of ivory and scarlet.
“Enough death for tonight.”
She should have swept out. Instead, as villains will, she made a fatal error.
She sank upon the silver dais to look at her Emperor one last time. Rae had giggled and kicked her feet over every battle scene through which the Emperor prowled with his legendary sword. She wept over the page when he sat on the throne beside his dead bride, the loneliest creature under the broken moon.
As lonely as Rae.
The Emperor’s smile faded into the faintest sinister, contemplative curve. His lambent gaze fixed on Rae, smouldering scarlet. He was as deathly pale as a glimpse of white ash beneath gold, like a mask in a burning temple. The dark circles beneath his burning eyes looked inscribed by a skeletal finger dipped in charcoal. Rae was evil, not stupid. All characters with red eyes were bad news. This one was lethal. She should leave.
Before she betrayed him, before he died for her, he’d liked her a little bit. Kissed her back at the Night Market, gone along with every scheme, defended her against assassins and the king. The Emperor had liked her.
She used to reread all the Emperor’s scenes over and over, just to spend more time with him.
She had looked at the words that made him for so long. He was looking back at her now. A character to make a reader kick a hole through a library window, and steal the book with him in it away. Her Key.
Impulsively, Rae leaned up, and kissed him goodbye.
Hey. Restraint was for heroes. A villain couldn’t resist temptation.
Her kiss was as light as a cinder, falling and singeing whatever it touched. She was leaning back, lips parted, eyes dazzled, when the Emperor’s enchanted iron claw closed on her waist, his arm as hard as a cage bar. Key lifted her from her knees, pulling her in. Rae caught at the jewelled wings of the throne to stop herself from falling into his lap.
It would be the act of an evil vixen to pledge her troth, give him a night to bitterly remember, and slip off before dawn.
So actually, she could do it.
Or could she? Surely Key would expect vixen moves from Lady Rahela. Having spent the entirety of her adult life dying of cancer, Rae didn’t know any.
His mouth against hers was as cool as kissing someone surfacing from underwater, or coming in from a storm. He breathed in ragged rhythm with her, one gleaming gauntleted claw tangled in the dark of her hair. The slight curve of Key’s mouth grew more pronounced, though no less cruel. She knew the shape of that evil smile, pressed against hers. Rae’s lips curled in answer. For a moment she felt the way she used to, as though they were the only two people in this world who didn’t take everything so seriously. The only ones who realized they were playing a game.
Perhaps he was thinking of sweet revenge. Or perhaps he still liked her. Just a little. Maybe even enough to mean it when he asked her to marry him. There was a chance it wasn’t all for revenge, but Rae knew him well enough to see the bleak fury building behind his smile, enough rage to claw hearts from chests. Even if he meant it now, he wouldn’t mean it for long.
No slow burns for villains. An evil candle burned at both ends. She would not last the night. But while the night lasted, possibly she could improvise vixen moves.
For a moment, it didn’t matter that he’d come back wrong. Only that he’d come back.
The silvery steel of Rae’s gauntlets slid on the carved wings of the throne, jet and enamelled bone. She stood arched over the Emperor for a kiss, hanging onto the throne rather than tumbling into his lap as if it meant a tumble over the edge of a cliff. The Emperor smiled wickedly up at Rae. Her grip relaxed as the fall beckoned sweetly. The space between them filled with lightning, the edge of the light brilliant red. Lightning was another bloody sword the Emperor wielded at will.
If he pulled her in again, Rae would go to him. Even if it was like tumbling off the edge of a cliff.
Instead the Emperor murmured, almost tenderly, “Lie to me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
His voice was hoarse, not with emotion, but a cut throat. “Say you love me.”
Who says I don’t? Except every action Rae had taken since she entered the book said that.
Could you love a book character for real? Of course not. Rae felt her chest burn with guilt, as though wearing a coal of fire over her heart. She hadn’t even recognized her favourite character when she saw him. She’d deceived and betrayed him. How could that be love? A villainess always faked it. Key was real, but her love wasn’t for real.
“The thing is,” Rae prevaricated, “I just don’t think me professing my undying love would be very believable. Right now. What with you storming the castle with your army of ghouls, killing an astonishing amount of people, and holding your sword to my throat. It all happened very fast. Some might call this a whirlwind romance.”
The Emperor tilted his wild dark head, considering this point of view. “I can make you a whirlwind. If you find them romantic.”
“No thank you! Literal whirlwinds are not necessary.”
Rae had been reckless and careless, but starting from this moment she needed to be careful. She and the Emperor were playing a different game now.
Time to coax the powerful man into complying with her will, as vixens were wont to do.
Rae eased away, knelt again, and lied through her teeth. As requested. “When the time is right, the blood moon is high, the battlefield laid waste, and even gods fall to their knees, my Emperor, I’ll tell you. Then you will believe me.”
This time, Key was the one who reached for her. He traced the line of her jaw with a fingertip.
The gesture would have been sweet, had his fingertip not been encased in a razor-sharp iron claw. In the earth of Eyam, where divine blood once spilled, enchanted metal could be forged: orichal gold, silver, copper. Orichal iron, able to cut diamonds, gleaming red as blood. The orichal of the Emperor’s regalia was the most powerful in the world. The Emperor’s sword striking Rae’s had turned her sword to silver dust. She could be dust as well, just as easily. Rae did not even allow herself to breathe.
Key’s voice used to sing. The Emperor’s voice did as well, softer as well as hoarser, an eternal mourning song.
“My lady, I love you. But believe in you again? No. Between us, love is possible. Belief is not.”
The tip of an iron claw lingered in a sharp whisper of a moment, indenting the skin beneath Rae’s ear. A helpless shudder passed through her, the anticipation of pain, the memory of a razor that had shorn off all her hair when it started falling out in clumps. The iron sting lifted from her neck, only for the Emperor’s claws to sink hard into her hair. He held her, face uplifted to his.
“Tell me a story I want to believe. Even if I know better.”
She saw her death in his eyes. That was bearable. She’d pictured her death before. It was worse to see all his rage, and pain, and fear. She was the last person he’d trusted. She might be the last person he would ever trust.
I love you as a knife loves a throat. He said those words when he entered the throne room. How much could that be?
That was the point. He didn’t love her. Not really. There was nothing in Rae to inspire love.
Nobody could love someone who had hurt him that much. He must be plotting her death. Rae hoped so. It would be too awful if Key believed he loved her, because he had no one else.
Lady Rahela would disappear tonight, never to be seen in this world again. That would confirm the Emperor’s cynical views about humankind, and probably launch a reign of terror, but the reign of terror was coming anyway. There was nothing Rae could do about that. Reigns of terror needed to be dealt with by the good and true. Someone should call in Lord Marius.
One day, Key would truly love somebody and realize he never truly loved Rahela. For now, Rae was grieved to hurt him one last time.
Held captive in iron claws, Rae looked into his red eyes. “Believe this, if you can: I’m sorry to leave you.”
Abruptly, Key released her.
“Don’t be sorry. You won’t leave me. We’re going to have such fun together. I was thinking, in the abyss.”
The Emperor mentioned the abyss very casually. Would he kill her just as casually?
His face said he would. “I was thinking about all the lies you told. They never did add up to a sum that made sense. You informed me and Emer you forgot everything about your life. Then you spun me a tale about a grave childhood illness. You claimed to the court you could see the future, but I notice the future is not exactly as you described. I can’t help wondering, what’s the truth behind all this smoke?”
She owed him that, at least.
“The future I described did happen,” Rae told him. “In a book.”
“A book?” the Emperor repeated. “Is this a joke?”
He was raised in the gutter. Only the aristocrats of this world could read. Rae could see why this sounded like a very cruel joke.
“In another world. In another version of this world, but I made a huge mistake—”
The Emperor cut her off. “I didn’t ask for an explanation, my lady. I asked for sweet lies. Why would you tell me your secrets? You never did before.”
Why should the Emperor believe her, if she told him the truth? How could anyone believe her? Rae nodded.
The Emperor shook his head. “I intend to keep you with me always. I will hunt out all your secrets in time.”
Distant in her own ears, Rae’s voice whispered, “What will you do, when you learn all my secrets?”
The Emperor sounded as playful as an apex predator toying with its prey before it went in for the kill. “I never know what I might do next.”
Rae decided to combat all this sinister innuendo by getting extremely literal. “You can’t keep me with you always, darling. Sometimes I need to use the bathroom.”
“Well, you can’t leave now, darling.” Key’s voice rang with mockery as he echoed the endearment. “We simply must receive our guests.”
A question died on Rae’s lips, answered by a nearer thunder than that in the sky. The slaughter outside had ceased, the enemy army quelled or butchered.
In the quiet, footsteps rang. Headed towards the throne room.
Key crooked a claw. The doors swung open. The dead, lining the luminous green crystal walls, came to attention like rotten soldiers.
What remained of the court had scraped together enough courage to investigate. The surviving king’s ministers stood at the doors of the throne room, stately blue uniforms in stately blue tatters.
Prime Minister Pio stared. “Who are you?’
Key wiggled his iron-sheathed-and-clawed fingers in a little wave. “I am the Emperor. The son of the gods, risen from death to rule you. Remember, there was a prophecy?”
Thus it was that the aristocratic assembly, selected to govern the country of Eyam in wisdom and dignity, beheld for the first time their foretold leader.
The divine Emperor, risen from flame and commander of midnight, sat with a leg slung carelessly over the throne arm. He winked. It was clear none of the ministers had expected the wink.
Key raised an eyebrow. On another man, the eyebrow would look interrogative. On Key the gesture seemed a demand, possibly for money and lives. “You’re not happy the prophecy has miraculously come to pass?”
Someone hissed, “Is that a servant?”
The reply came, even lower, “It’s the servant who died.”
Rae only realized she’d begun to smile at Key’s antics when the mention of death fell like a blade to cut her smile away.
Elevating his voice over the whispers, Prime Minister Pio’s demand rang like an aristocratic bell calling an insolent servant to obey. “Where, may I ask, is the king?”
Thunder rolled into an expectant pause. Every soul in the throne room shuddered except Key.
“The king?” Key mused, tugging on a jauntily swinging garnet earring Rae had given him once, as if trying to recall an unmemorable name. “Oh, the king. Green eyes, brown hair, had me put to death? That king?”
Uncomfortable silence answered.
Already balanced on his throne like a leering devil on the edge of hell, Key tilted precariously sideways. He leaned over the elaborately carved arm of his bejewelled throne to grab something he’d dropped on the floor.
“You want the king?” asked Key.
Cautiously, the ministers nodded.
The Emperor grinned like a lightning flash. “Catch.”
With careless ease the Emperor tossed his trophy to the prime minister. Pio’s hands opened automatically to receive it.
As the red light of the ravine spread across the smooth golden floor, further staining the king’s throne room, Rae watched the prime minister realize what he held: King Octavian’s head. Blood drying his glossy hair into black straw, summer-green eyes lost beneath the grey cloud of death. All the ministers of the court saw, and believed.
This wasn’t the king’s throne room any more.
When the handsome new minstrel became the sensation of the court, a gathering of his eager admirers was held to discuss his songs and stories.
“In all these romantic tales,” the prime minister asked, “why are the king and his knights not giving any thought to the governance of the country?”
“That’s less a question, more a nasty statement about how you would prefer the story to go,” replied Merel the minstrel. “By all means, write your own.”
It was agreed by everyone that the prime minister had no appreciation for art.
Time of Lies, ANONYMOUS
A mask shone before the shadows on the throne, golden and grave, a dark jewel shining in the forehead where once a hollow was carved. This was the royal mask, worn in humility to show that the kings knew the Emperor was coming and the throne was not theirs to keep. The prime minister had seen the mask of the kings-in-waiting countless times, when the young king or his father before him held court.
Tonight, Pio watched the mask raised by a bloodstained claw, held in front of the Emperor’s face in a parody of the familiar regal manner. The young king’s head was still warm in Pio’s hands.
The golden visage lowered to reveal the dark countenance beneath, with its terrible smile.
“And the mask falls,” announced the beast slouched upon the throne.
He laid the mask carelessly aside.
“If you doubt my imperial claim,” continued the awful Emperor, “shall I further demonstrate my powers of command over the dead?”
Pio coughed. “That won’t be necessary, Your Imperial Highness.”
Being the power behind the throne was usually an ideal position. It meant you could hide behind the throne. When matters went awry, it was simple to brush off disappointed courtiers with “So sorry, ultimately His Majesty guides us all.”
This approach failed if the throne was usurped. The approach utterly collapsed if the usurper on the throne could puppet the undead to slaughter half the court.
The creature’s footsteps had painted a trail of fresh gore across the throne room. Memory offered visions of countless nobles cut down before Pio’s eyes, gentleborn ladies screaming as their flesh tore with their silk gowns, ministers whose speeches he had listened to for years gurgling on their own blood. Fear whispered Pio could be next. He didn’t know why he still lived.
Andras Pio, Prime Minister of Eyam, shut away emotion to concentrate on the matter at hand.
This was better than a rioting mob. This wasn’t an overthrow of the government, only a change in monarch. Monarchs changed all the time. The king is dead, long live the Emperor! The system endured. Order endured. Andras Pio believed in order.
Andras permitted himself a single dismayed sigh, and wondered what to do with his king’s head. He looked around for a servant. Naturally, the ministers had come to the throne room accompanied by every possible palace guard.
Andras himself had selected a guard based on youth and strength. Said strong-looking youth was backing away, hand flying to his mouth. Why was it impossible to find reliable help? Everybody was upset, this was an upsetting situation, but forsaking one’s duty would not aid matters.
Nobles and servants receded like the tide from the horror of the Emperor’s gaze, leaving Pio stranded. Save for the only one remaining by his side.
Commander General Nemeth was the sole person not to retreat. Through countless victories in war, he had never learned the habit. Pio’s old adversary, which in politics was as close as anyone ever got to a friend.
“Please hold this, Commander. Treat the royal remains with all due reverence.” Pio placed the head in Nemeth’s hands. To his credit, the grizzled veteran of many battlefields barely flinched.
Wiping congealed blood from his palms onto his favourite herigaut, which was fortunately – depending on how you looked at the matter – already covered in blood from the night’s excesses, Pio raised his voice.
“May I be the first to say: Long live the Emperor!”
“Thanks,” said their apparent Emperor in his lamentably ill-bred accent. “I think I’m immortal, as the son of the gods and ruler of the skies. Exciting for us to find out together.”
“You are undying,” declared the woman enthroned beside him. “You’re the Once and Forever Emperor.” Her dark eyes flashed over the ministers, and her voice echoed like a voice from the abyss. “Did I not say the Emperor’s time was nigh? It was so incredibly nigh. The king stood before me, but who walked through the golden doors with me, and stood at my side? Believe my prophecy. This is the young god you prayed for, the prince reborn, the Emperor foretold. Do not doubt, this is the hero of the story.”
A fitting end to a terrible night. If it wasn’t Lady Rahela Domitia.
The other ministers looked stricken by the dread tones of prophecy. Considering the currently indisputable fact that the Emperor prophesied for eight generations had finally come, Andras supposed he couldn’t dismiss the lady as a complete charlatan, but he felt the mouthpiece of the gods should be accurate. Think before you prophesy, woman!
He never expected the Emperor to come in his lifetime. Indeed, while it was only right for a minister to be suitably religious, Andras had often thought it would be pleasant if the dread ravine, the starveling ghouls and the enchanted objects surrounding them were some sort of natural phenomena that ultimately meant very little.
Seeing a man’s crowned shadow fill the sky, as the dead rose in droves and slaughtered his fellow nobles and the foreign invaders of their city alike, had put paid to any wistful atheist aspirations.
Andras Pio considered his mind a vast cabinet with many drawers. Some drawers contained intelligence he referred to frequently. Some drawers he kept locked, as the intelligence within could be of no possible use. This was a busy night for the second type of drawer. Andras put “divine prophecies” in another compartment he didn’t feel equipped to deal with at present.
Do not think about the scarlet skies, do not think about the ghouls, do not think about the head.
The realm. Think of the realm.
“Lady Rahela,” said Pio slowly. “What a surprise to see you here. Considering how last we met.”
Earlier he had attempted to send the young woman to her chambers. Shortly after that he tried to arrest her, and witnessed her committing regicide.
Rahela cackled. “How the turn tables, am I right?”
Prophets always were mad.
The Emperor, lounging insouciantly upon the throne in a manner the king never had, remarked: “Lady Rahela has done me the honour of accepting my hand in marriage.”
Truly it needed only this for the horrors to be complete. The last thing the present circumstances required was a mad queen.
“Ah.” Pio heard his own voice go hollow, like a sad little animal crying alone in a cave. “Congratulations.”
So the young man wa
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All Hail Chaos
Sarah Rees Brennan
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