A knock came again to Aurelia’s chamber door.

  If she were being honest with herself, she was grateful that Roskvir and her ladies-in-waiting had come early that day. She might’ve still hated him, as she hated everyone aboard that ship. But she could at least pretend that he was nice, when he was pretending to be. She could play games with him, to entertain herself, and forget where she was for a while.

  But he bore a worried expression, at the threshold. Not like usual, when he came to play.

  “The shogun… wants to speak with you.”

  She crawled to her feet.

  “Is he angry?” she asked.

  “…I don’t know.”

  They traversed the ship’s corridors without speaking. As usual, Aurelia’s legs ached by the time they reached the shogun’s special room, with the big window above the bridge.

  He led her inside, and the ladies-in-waiting shuffled in after with heads bowed. The shogun was looking out through the window, at something far below which Aurelia could not see.

  The great robed man peeled away to look back after a long moment. He smiled at her in a way that would’ve seemed like real friendliness, if she didn’t know better.

  “Ah… princess. How are you? Has our friend mister Englihavt treated you well?” said the shogun, in the language of her people.

  As usual, she didn’t answer, only trying to seem cold.

  “Ah. Hmm.”

  The shogun raised an eyebrow at Roskvir, who replied with a shrug. Roskvir still seemed worried, but then also sad, for some reason.

  “Well, I suspected as much,” he said. “Come, bring her up here.”

  Holding her hand, Roskvir urged her onward.

  She stopped before the great window, beside him. Through it, she could see only the uniform gray soup of burgeoning clouds, as the warship coasted through them.

  “I have something for you,” said the shogun.

  He held out a wreath of braided leaves. A perfect recreation of those worn by her and her siblings back home.

  “I assume your last one has dried out by now. And it wouldn’t do for you to lack the proper uniform of your office.”

  She stared at the wreath, then at the shogun, making no move to accept it from him.

  His smile faded.

  “You can take it for her, for now,” he said to Roskvir. “There you go.”

  The shogun turned back to the window, and sighed. He did nothing but watch the flow of silvery mist for some time. As they cut through those clouds, the gray grew darker by the barest slow degree, ever more laden with moisture.

  “You’re a smart girl… you know we’ve been doing this the easy way, so far.” He tsk-tsked softly. “You witnessed yourself how it went in Hilomnos… I don’t think it should be hard for to believe me when I say that things are going much the same way on every other front, down there. What little resistance we do encounter is massacred. People are dying, your highness. Your people, and sometimes some of mine, as well.”

  She knew what he was going to say next, and she hated what she knew it would be.

  Maybe because it was a little bit true.

  “We can stop it, together, Aurelia. You can stop it, if you help me. Don’t you understand our situation? You’ve seen this warship. My armies haven’t even needed to bring it into battle yet. And we have many like it. Your subjects, your loyal subjects, are going to suffer and perish. And for what?”

  She stared at Roskvir’s boots.

  After seeing her still refuse to respond, the shogun sighed once more. He shook his head, as if chastising his own faint reflection in the glass.

  “You remember well the city your people call ‘Atum-Ra’? A great city, I’m told. A city of a million. Even the greatest cities where I am from do not have as many as a million citizens.”

  Thinning wisps swirled past the window’s glass. The muted light of the sun was emerging from behind the gray.

  “You have good memories of the city. Isn’t that right, Princess Aurelia? You lived in Atum-Ra for much of your life. And your mother and grandfather, too, hmm?”

  She couldn’t help but look up at him at that, though she regretted it the instant she did.

  “Ah. I thought so. That’s what I heard anyways, from my spies. I have many of them, you know, in your lands.”

  The clouds had almost passed, leaving the landscape below almost visible.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “Tell me, princess,“ he said, his words twisting cruel and cold. “How many of the imperial family lived with you, in Atum-Ra? …I believe — they all did, didn’t they?”

  He waved a hand, and at once the outside world appeared to rush toward them through the glass. Unseen lenses shifted, magnifying the view many times over.

  Surprised and disoriented, Aurelia almost lost her balance, and for a moment holding Roskvir’s hand was all that kept her upright. But the shogun then clenched his fist, and the lenses stilled, stabilized, and cleared.

  The view enlarged through the great window must’ve been hundreds of miles away. Truly everything was rendered in greater detail: even nigh-imperceptible bouts of brief turbulence still wrung the magnified image with violent tremors, even as the vessel felt so still beneath her feet.

  But when they were between pockets of rough air, the tremors stilled, and Aurelia could see what the lens had brought into focus.

  A landscape of ruination, spread up to the horizon, and beyond.

  “Do you understand, now… Empress Aurelia?”

  * * *

  Roskvir had lived in M?erplat his whole life before he’d enlisted. It was a vast city. He’d once heard it was the home of two hundred thousand souls.

  A squad was five. A platoon, forty. A company, five platoons. A battalion, five companies — but already, by then, he could no longer truly grasp the vast quantities therein, except by comparison to other abstractions. Let alone something like M?erplat, a field army’s worth, two hundred thousand.

  Just that, he couldn’t imagine.

  The shogun had said a million.

  The number echoed for me.

  It didn’t look as though only a fire had raged throughout the distant landscape beyond the window, or as if only batteries upon batteries of artillery had shelled it to pieces. Or as if only an earthquake had ravaged the expanse, even a terrible one.

  Maybe all three at once, every day for a year.

  Thousands of structures had been shattered into fine rubble, and then that rubble char-blackened. It was as complete a devastation as Roskvir had ever seen.

  A million people.

  And her family. Probably everyone she ever knew.

  Even as the lenses brought the landscape closer, the whole world to him was distant, and far away. His whole body numb, as if not his own.

  Everything, numb. Except, he realized, a slight pinching, at his right.

  Through his daze, he managed to recognize that something was squeezing together his ring and pinky finger.

  He looked down.

  The girl’s hand was wrapped tight around those two fingers of his, as she continued to stare out through the window.

  At first he thought she was trying to hurt him, angry as she so often seemed to be.

  But no.

  Tears streamed down her face, and it was contorted in some terrible emotion, and he was sure she was angry.

  But not at him, not at that moment.

  She was afraid. And even then, fighting for strength.

  It was the first he’d seen her cry, he realized. Despite all she’d been through, those past days. And if there ever was a time…

  But she stood only silent, there by his side, and did not sob, or wail. Only staring, through the window-lens.

  Unwavering.

  Before he knew what he was doing, he took her small hand into his in full, and gave it a gentle squeeze.

  She squeezed back.

  But as the shogun again demanded if she understood his meaning, Roskvir could but watch, in awe, as again she refused to even acknowledge the question. Her gaze never diverted from the landscape below. And still she did not sob, or break down, or waver in any way where she stood. Shifting just once, to dry her face with her sleeve, in vain.

  But only in silence, her tears fell, when again they did.

  As they three stood before the window. Five, with the ladies-in-waiting by the door. On a vessel crewed by thousands. And yet, utterly alone, Roskvir knew she was, then.

  The shogun asked her one final time, his voice a dangerous quiet.

  And once final time, she simply stood silent. Fragile, afraid, and so unimposing.

  As the shogun’s gambit came down, and fell, and crashed upon her resolve, breaking there like waves on rocks of the shore.

  Roskvir felt her presence, as if a sjael, though she wore no crown. He felt the fact of her being like an electric current coursing through her hand and into his, and in that moment he hated the shogun with an ardent burning passion, perhaps almost as much as she did.

  He looked down at her again.

  She was confronting the sight of it. Absorbing it. Forcing herself to do so, no matter how painful it was.

  After all was said and done, she would have no choice but to agree to the shogun’s terms. In the face of such destruction, there could be no question. In strategic terms, there was nothing to be gained by her resistance.

  But she stood against the shogun, then, nevertheless. Despite great fear, as he once more felt the rapid beat of her heart in her wrist.

  She would have time later to acquiesce to the shogun’s demands, he realized. Perhaps even indirectly, through himself as an intermediary. But under no circumstances would she ever give the man her surrender. Not in that chamber, because she’d been scared straight by some psychological ploy.

  He wondered if the shogun had yet realized the magnitude of his miscalculation.

  And Roskvir, who’d felt he might be sick — a million dead souls, each one to some degree on his conscience — found strength, then, in her strength, and found it within to compose himself for the shogun.

  A million, he thought.

  Her whole family, and then a million more.

  “This is what’s at stake, your highness,” the shogun said at last. His voice remained cold, but its edge had blunted. “Think on it.”

  Roskvir wasted no time pivoting back to lead the princess back out of the chamber.

  Halfway to the door, the shogun cleared his throat.

  “Your people down there, Aurelia… you know… they’re just going to surrender, anyways. I assume you understand that. They think you’re dead. Whoever’s making decisions down there… there’s no chance they won’t surrender sometime in the coming months, or weeks, in the face of our successes. What I’m offering you now — this is the chance to do things on your own terms. To have a say in what happens next.”

  She stared back at the shogun for a long moment. Then closed her eyes.

  When they opened again, tears there welled no longer.