The sycophants spit their insults at me. 'Savage,' 'Wildman,' 'Barbarian.'
They are many and I am one, and shackled besides. Dragged along the seemingly endless gilt-purple carpet, down the seemingly endless hallway, there is no originality in these people. Of many races, of many worlds, but all are dressed according to a fashion, neat and noble of cloth yet not of disposition.
Her guards, by contrast to the colourful nobles, are obsidian-clad warriors who speak little and say all they need with silence. Their armour is almost total, hiding everything to the outside world. An enchantment, or several, weaves the apparent interior with darkness, though I have seen their blood and the faces beneath. As varied as the folk of the hall, though my current captors are uniform.
The crowd peters out thirty feet from the stairs leading to the throne dais, held back by three soldiers aside. Beneath my feet the carpet blossoms into a large circle adorned with intricate artwork of conquest, domination, death to her foes. A macabre testament to her eternal victoriousness.
My captors stop and push on my shoulders, forcing me to kneel at the base of the stairs. Above is the great throne hewn of ivory bones, cushioned with exotic fabrics, and atop it sits the Witch Queen herself.
The woman has no guards, for she does not need them. Her arrival on Earth proved as much when she stopped tank shells with her bare hands and pulled the Seeking Storm from out of the heavens. Empress of Eternity, Designer of Divinity, Maker of Marvels, Queen of Witches.
She eats grapes from a platinum bowl, fat juicy white ones, plucked with lovely black-nailed fingers from the stem. The Queen of Queens chews slowly, languorously, tasting every bite. When she swallows, she seeks not another.
'The murderer, yes?'
'Slayer of three guards, your majesty,' the soldier beside me says. 'What is your judgement?'
There is a pause. She taps her pointed chin, and draws a smile onto those divine lips. A prettier mouth is hard to imagine, nor a more beautiful woman. Her lacquered black mouth, in a face of pure ivory, with a lovely sharp nose and high cheekbones and two eyes like wells of violet souls. The Queen's crown is twisted and spiked, tangled with braids of her seemingly endless black hair. It forms horns, six per side and a jewelled crest at the front, around which weave her braids that end in platinum hoops.
'Look at me, boy.'
Resistance is futile.
I trace out her body, from the spiked black sabatons with skull kneecaps to her exposed milky thighs, to the dragon-skulled girdle that loops her hips and from which hangs a flowing purple sash, past her creamy belly with its slight matronly bulge to the plated brassiere encasing heavy breasts that does little to support their natural sag and makes no effort to squeeze together for the sake of illusions (though they nonetheless display an enticing amount of cleavage), up beyond her lovely clavicle and the choker with a soul-stone embedded in it, to at least reach her terrible beautiful face.
The Queen smiles darkly. 'I should thank you, honestly,' her voice is gravelly, sensual, matronly. 'Any sword of mine to be bested by a mere unaugmented human is not worth life.' She rises, and moves to the top of the stairs. 'Better yet, your company held a harem of fertile young women, to birth replacements.'
Her heeled boots clack as she steps, a heavy percussion that echoes throughout the room. 'What to do, what to do?' The Queen taps her pointed chin. 'I am, most unusually, at a loss.'
'Kill him,' the other guard says. 'Wretched beast is not--'
She waves her hand and the crowds, the soldiers, disappear. Not dead, yet dispersed, sent away. The Queen sighs, and descends from the last step onto the rounded tapestry-carpet. 'Dullards,' she says. 'No imagination, in the soldiery.'
The Witch Queen paces around me, her full thighs twitching with muscular contractions, her prominent rounded buttocks jiggling up and down in my periphery when the angle is just right. I shut my eyes but her stink, a divine arcane fragrance like ozone and smoke and the sweetest of fruits, is too hard to ignore.
'You can speak, yes? They didn't remove your tongue?'
'I can.'
She brushes past me, running a finger up a bicep and across the same shoulder. 'Why so brave, young man? Why fight, where others surrender?'