My days are spent in the confines of her palace, away from prying eyes.
The living chambers are off-limits in the day, where the servants feed and clothe her, a state of affairs that the Queen tells me is more for her people's sake than hers. I can't exactly disagree, given how readily her audience hall fills each and every day.
Sometimes I watch from a high window, appearing on the audience side to be a thing of beautiful stained glass, a depiction of the Empress of Eternity with hands outstretched and palms upturned to the bowing and kneeling masses of a trillion timelines, the Mother of Mothers, the Queen of Queens, She Who Saves.
I am so full of doubt and conflict to watch her, to listen in.
To see this woman who acts so regal and queenly, there eating one sweet snack or another, upon a throne of black metal adorned in a risqué yet intimidating garb befitting a Witch Queen. To watch her decide the fates of people she has never known, complete strangers, so few like myself and yet so many not all so different, despite their varied species and shapes and qualities.
Murderers, the crowd will cry. Saviours, the crowd will cheer. All dependent on so little. All dependent on these people who -- quite bloody rightly -- trembled in the wake of this being that reforms spacetime in her wake, this perpetuator of the greatest of spells, a woman who became the closest thing to God.
And some she dissolves. And some she absolves. And some she enslaves. Punishments and privileges, dished out with a casual wave of a black-taloned hand.
If I trust her, it's all just a show. Just like Derrick, the deaths are a farce. It's not impossible to imagine that this being, this being of sublime power, could play with lives like that. Could kill and undo, could remake from nothing.
When she arrived on Earth, the skies split. The planets aligned. Our greatest weapons, wielded for the first time in unity, were nothing. ICBMs exploded upon her shape and she turned the radiant heat and force into works of crystalline beauty. Vehicles were aged a million years in a heartbeat, becoming so rusted and forlorn that they collapsed harmlessly on their occupants -- the metal was simply left simply so thin.
She doesn't use armies. She doesn't bother. Her soldiers, her guards, her warriors in finest black, are caretakers of cities, guardians of the peace. A "peace" I loathed. A peace that felt oppressive, these soldiers in all black plate barking orders and organising us. Not raping and slaving and beating and hurting, but I did -- as did so many others -- what seemed rational.
When an external force begins organising your entire species, gives you designations and numbers, begins categorising you by traits and qualities...and when in the history of your own species, similar things have been done by your kind upon itself, with genocidal results...
I did what seemed right. Derrick did what seemed right.
And now, below me, the Queen dishes out similar fates to others who, surely, thought they were doing what was right. And she, if I am to believe her, understands this and ensures that one way or another, all things turn out okay.
I am very much aware that I have a bias forming.
Naked or dressed up in her queenly garb, I am drawn to stare at her. This woman who I already found so attractive -- any fancier of the female form, and perhaps some who are not so inclined, would be mad to deny her sheer appeal -- grows more and more desirable by the day. A day being, in this weird strange mess of chronological progress, that period between waking and falling asleep at the side of the Witch Queen herself.
It can only have been a week, two at most, since I arrived in her care, but that rebel anger has only embers of its past furore remaining. In my worst moments, in the dark of night when all is silent, or during my long walks through the endless realms of her manse outside of its living quarters, I am forced to confront the worrying possibility that I am a traitor.
I do not feel it when my lips are at her breast, her gentle motherly hand on my head, stroking me as she feeds me the sweetest and creamiest of substances from those perfect mature womanly bosoms.
I do not feel when she bathes me, when she walks with me, when I am falling asleep beside her to the sonorous lullabies she speaks in a million different tongues. In the Queen's presence, all is well. When I can call her Mother and she can hold me, all is well.
But alone, I have my doubts.
*
When the day's duties are done, and her servants have taken leave of the palace, I waste no time in cutting to the quick of things.
'I want to see my friends,' I say, as she's drying me off post-bathing. 'I want proof of their continued happiness.'
The Witch Queen, stinking divinely of magic and feminine fruitiness, runs long lovely fingers through my wet hair. 'Is there any point, sweetheart?'
'Why do you say that?'
She wraps her arms around my shoulders from behind, chin resting atop my head, those amazing matronly breasts heavy and warm against my bare flesh. 'You're not stupid, Daniel. You know what I can do. Knowing this, how could you ever trust anything I do, to this end? We both know that if I were to convince you that I am precisely what I say, you would lose all doubts.
'You could, if you wanted, give yourself wholly over to me,' the Witch Queen says. Her voice, perfect as always, nonetheless has a forlorn quality to it. 'You could worship me, truly and fully, in a way that I would only accept or desire from you, who came from a place of loathing. But it's that very detail that means that you will never, not truly, be able to trust in me.'
Despite what she said, my memory was left untouched on the first night I fed of her.
This woman is lonely. It's easy to accept that, even if she is not as benevolent as she presents herself to be. How could anyone not be lonely, at the very peak of peaks, the highest of highs, given the degree of separation from one's peers that comes with being the mightiest and most supreme entity in all of everything?
And that loneliness is easy to pick out sometimes in her otherwise marvellous voice. Just like it's easy to pick out now, as she speaks something I struggle to dispute. I reach up with a hand and place it upon hers where they rest atop one another, and the Queen promptly shrouds mine between hers.
'You're right,' I say. 'I couldn't guarantee that it's not an illusion, given how much you'd benefit from convincing me.' To say such a thing provokes me to wince. 'The doubt is awful, Mother.'
'You call me that more and more, sweetheart.' She makes a warm noise, a humanised purr, against my head. The Witch Queen kisses my hair, sniffs and smells me. 'But yes, I have no way to cure it. You would have to make a leap of faith.'
'But only for my sake,' I say. 'For my own pleasure.'
She nods. 'Yes.'
