Canon Hub » War On All Fronts - Hub / From 120's Archives Hub » The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Queen Mab, hmm? Oh yes, I can tell you a spell about her. A secret, you want? That's easy. You probably think of her as a monster, and alone in the world as a result. It's the natural impulse, I feel.
Queen Mab, storm-crowned, came to the Pillars of Fomóire. Behind her stood an army millions strong, and behind them all lay the ruin that they had carved through the world. In front, nothing more than another civilization to make skeletons of, and monuments to turn to ashes. It would not be difficult for her.
From the highest of the Pillars, King Balor looked out at the invaders. Mab stood at the front of her armies, glowing in her radiance. Even from miles away, his front eye closed and his back eye wide open, he could see her light. The people of Fomóire were strong — one of the strongest that Mab had come across during her rampages — but even they were not strong enough to fight against her. It would be a bloody battle, and perhaps they could cut down a million or more of the army, but Mab would live, and the Pillars would be toppled all the same.
Still: Balor rose defiant over the land. An immediate death on his feet, as compared to the thousand-year delayed death on his knees. Not that he'd get either.
He screamed to his people, rallying them to the war that he would certainly lose, all for his own vanity.
It was his own general that did it, in the end, his trusted right hand. Her name was Nessilatha, a titanic Fomorian, the most powerful of those dark spirits of destruction and the sea. Her true form was that of a great kraken, five-armed and five-tentacled, one eye each for the past, present, future, fate, and fortune. She came up behind him on the tops of the Pillars and gave him a mighty push and—
Why did she do it? That is the best question, isn't it. Nobody can quite agree these days, if they ever could have in the past. It's not the kind of thing that we know for ourselves.
Some are of the mind that she did it to protect her people from the armies of Mab. The destruction that was awaiting Fomóire was absolute and — had it come to war — unavoidable. They simply had no chance, and Balor proved unwilling to relinquish his power.
There are others who say that it was merely a means for Nessilatha to cement and solidify her own power. Although true that it was her actions here that saved almost all of the Formori people from death, how are we to account for the fact she ascended to greater and more expansive power in those immediate days following than Balor ever had? She turned from the right hand of Balor to the right hand of Mab — a trade that anyone would take. Or perhaps it was a combination of both these factors: she was only taking an action that would keep herself alive, the consequences of that be damned.
I'd be remiss if I did not mention the final possibility. Only poets suggest this one, but who can put it aside and dismiss it as fancy? Some say that she committed her actions out of love. Not love for her people, but love for her enemy: Mab. That she had stood on that spire, staring at the Queen who had come to destroy her people, and her heart had exploded with love. Anything for the goddess.
I think this is the most idealistic of all possibilities; still, you can't deny that the two did fall in love in the decades to come.
The Pillars stood that day, as they have for a thousand millennia prior.
The city gates opened soon, and the armies entered. One by one they marched, an endless legion of creatures from every corner of the world, all united under the steel-spangled banner of the Eternal Empire. They had just one order: to bring her Balor, the king who refused to bend his knee before the conquest of the Queen at War.
In the end, Mab's armies didn't need to do anything. The traitor greeted her with open arms.
She was kneeling when they came, her head bowed before her betters. Atop her extended hands lay her gift to Mab, her final mark of surrender — the head of her late king, both of his eyes plucked out for her new Queen to see. She stood there, silently praying to the ancient powers that lurked buried beneath the sea that she had made the right choice. That the game she presented Mab with would be enough for her to forgive their opposition. For the first time in her life, Nessilatha was trembling.
She stopped the second Mab's hand touched her head.
The Queen's pale palm was colder than winter, her long nails sharper than steel. For a terrible second, when their bodies met and heartbeats aligned, Nessilatha was sure that she was about to meet her end — a cautionary tale for whoever Mab would appoint as the ruler of the new province.
Overtaken with fear Nessilatha closed her eyes, and felt Mab's finger gently pull her head upwards, towards Mab's very own. Nessilatha didn't want to meet her gaze, but she had no other choice.
When she opened her eyes again, she was looking at the Unseelie Queen standing before her. A single shiver went down her spine.
In Mab's eyes, she saw nothing but desire.
"Rise, Nessilatha," spoke a voice so cold and vast it couldn't have possibly belonged to a living creature. "Rise now and give me your people."
Whatever the case, it does not matter now. It did not change Nessilatha's fate, in the end.
Nessilatha swore fealty to Mab on the night when the Two Moons aligned and rose anew over the Silver Lake, right in the heart of Mab's Empire. The skies were silent then, covered by both the darkness and the towering palaces of Mab's court. The only Starlight which was allowed to be, on that day, was that of the Queen.
Nessilatha knelt before Mab and spoke the blasphemous words, swearing her past and future to her conqueror. She spoke and they all watched, all silently gathered around the shores of the lake, observing a humiliation they had all known too well. The Horned King and his Ambassador, their sneers quiet for the first time in years; the ever-handsome Hahn and his golden blade, both emissaries and wardens of the Steppes in the west; the giant Skrymir, the jarl of the northern jötnar, his stone posture almost as towering as that of the spires behind him; and the Twin Prodigies from the golden Lands Beyond, both remnants of an Order long-gone.
They are all dead now, of course, but in that moment, they felt more alive than they were allowed to most days. They rejoiced as they all stood silent and witnessed another fool join their ranks of submission, thinking the animal which rose to become one of them would be another piece of prey for their games.
Was she afraid, you want to know? Like the rest had been? No. Not Nessilatha. For her, this wasn't a death sentence, a chain. Unlike the rest of them, she was a warrior, not a ruler. She was a soldier.
No, I do not think that there was fear in her soul on that night. You see, she had always been a pragmatist. She knew that her servitude was to be the key to a greatness she had never imagined.
Greatness that would soon become storied, for us to carry unto eternity.
Nessilatha's first few centuries of servitude had been peaceful — as peaceful as the Court of the Unseelie Queen could get. They all feasted and whored and drank and fought, as was expected of those who had chosen to serve Mab, but all of those hundreds of years passed with little to no distractions. Some wars were fought, of course — such was tradition — but for the most part the Empire had settled in place; it was there to stay, and the whole world knew this.
But as is with all things, this did not last forever.
The Emerald Isles, they called them, a vast and fertile realm of the western seas. An enemy defeated and conquered once; even with the help of the arms of the allied Tuatha Dé Danann, they had been of little actual danger to Mab and her sworn swords. It was a natural instinct, then, that she and her generals thought the next rebellion would be just as easy to put down.
It was a humiliating defeat for the Empire, the first true blow against the Queen's conquest in many millennia. This could not stand. It wasn't just an insult to Mab — it was a sign that her Empire was not truly Eternal. That, if just given enough opposition, it could perhaps fall.
Mab called all of her generals that day, Nessilatha included. She needed to test her new commander's loyalty in times of crisis. She told them to gather all of their people and arm them: the Emerald Isles were going to be made an example, and Nessilatha would be the one to raze them to the ground.
The people of Fomóire did not like fighting a war that wasn't theirs, but they had little choice — and so they took up their swords and rallied behind Nessilatha, ready to slaughter in the name of their own questionable freedom. They were a natural pick for the invasion — the Isles were surrounded by sea, so those who rose from it were the first to breach their shores.
It is said that when Nessilatha came, the waters around the Isles ran red.
She was a terrible thing, a dread behemoth the likes of which the people of the Isles had never before seen. The children of the children of those who had survived have said, I have heard, that when she rose from the turbulent waves to dominate the battlefield, the sky broke beneath her might. That the clouds cried and thunder screamed as she marched ever forward, her people bringing nothing but death in the wake of their leader — a leader larger than the world, a leader mightier than the mountains, a leader more unbent and unshaken than the oceans under which she had been born.
…
No. I cannot imagine the terror. I wish I will never need to.
The insurgents were crushed beneath the ceaseless wave of Fomóire before Mab's remaining forces could even arrive.
When Nessilatha knelt again before Mab, it wasn't to yield — it was to be rewarded.
For her great victory, she was given what no other servant had received in millennia — a brilliant star, molded by the will of her new Goddess to the shape of a silver medal. A medal Mab's long nails had placed right upon her chest, Nessilatha's five hearts exploding with pride — and with something else too. When the general stood up, she didn't join the other members of the Unseelie Court. Dressed in pearls and seaweeds covering her muscled posture, she looked at them, and — for just a split second — smiled with a promise of what would happen to anyone else that would dare threaten the Empire she now chose to consider her own.
What I'm about to tell you has been no doubt tainted by many a tellings over the centuries, but there is truth to it, as there is to all love. There is a deep heartbeat echoing behind those words, and I think that is all that matters.
What I have heard from my own elders when is that during the feast that would later come, Nessilatha sat by the right side of Mab — an honor that was previously only reserved for the Queen's sister, the twin's servant-consort Hahn, and whatever body Mab had fancied that century. It was common practice among the Sisters to choose a consort from the opposing Court as a sign of courtesy and pretend-unity between Seelie and Unseelie. But the truce was broken ever since Mab had surrendered to her own vanity a few decades earlier, slaughtering the poor fool Oberon in his sleep.
And that could not be. For all their pettiness and arrogance, the sisters could never break the image of unity they were to present before their subjects. Such is the case with all power. They were to be as unbroken as their own Empire, a monolith larger than life for all to witness. It was expected that Mab would choose one of her Sister's vassals to call her own. That she would bring a proper lover into her court. It was more than just law — it was imperial tradition.
More than that, though, it was a personal indulgence for that monster — the worst kind of poison for the heart. For the soul. The likes of which our own Prophet would try to root out, in the era to come.
And yet, for all the politics of the court, on that moonlit evening she didn't elevate anyone of Seelie unto her side. She chose Nessilatha.
Mab had known little more than desire, most of her life. Desire no matter the cost; it was an instinct deep in her flesh that was greater than anything, a terrible hunger festering inside her guts. A terrible hunger no thing and no body could ever satisfy, in spite of all of her conquest and dominance.
But when they became one, her and Nessilatha, it was like a storm, like a hurricane. As she clutched her fingers, for the first time since she could remember her frozen heart beat with something almost akin to compassion, almost akin to pleasure, and—
The sky was bright, that night. She remembered that still, even years later. The moon above their bed, above Nessilatha and her weary breath, above all of her hopes and dreams, its light illuminating their sharp and strong and luscious features, body against body, soul against soul, a single—
Her lips tasted like seawater. She could feel the depth of the ocean in them when she bit and felt a tongue like seaweed, a vast darkness that almost matched that of her own, a great depth she never thought would feel so familiar in spite of its breadth—
When all was said and done, and they turned to face each other, exhausted, Mab brushed side the sweat and blood and just smiled. She took Nessilatha's dark, saltwater hair in-between her fingers. There was something inside Mab's eyes, something Nessilatha could not read — a brief spark of sympathy, perhaps, of understanding?
When Mab finally spoke, her voice was calm. Her breathing had slowed down. She was grinning. "We will win many victories together, Nessilatha."
In a sense she was right. You cannot take that away from her, no matter everything else.
You see, in the centuries that were to come the Empire knew little enemies. War was scarce, as was famine — a privilege they had not yet come to appreciate. With the help of the Twins in the East and support from the Splendour in the far south, food and riches flowed through the vast palaces of the Empire like they never had. For a few centuries, it seemed, the Empire had come into its own. It was the master of the whole world, then — and nobody could ever change that.
All those that tried had been crushed beneath the boot of the ceaseless legions of Unseelie — so what use could rebelling against this new order ever be?
Of course, that was just the calm before the storm. The first of the storms which were to come, and which our kind had endured.
Nobody can quite say why the war broke out, even all those years later. You'll find as many tellings as you'll find clans and peoples among our kin. Good chance all of them are false. Good chance all of them are true.
There is some overlap between them, though. The most frequent thing you'll hear about the war is that having conquered the planet, Mab reached for the only crown she still couldn't call her own — that of her sister. Others will tell you that the Seelie Queen had finally decided she could not tolerate Mab's excesses any longer, deciding to listen to her supposed gentle side. The minstrels that come each Moon into town of course have their own version, one which I don't doubt you've already heard and seen performed beneath the starry sky — one in which Mab had grown jealous of her sister's new consort, the blonde-haired Hahn. It was his death that broke the Empire into chaos, they'll tell you.
Well. Whatever the case, they are all good stories.
One thing is certain: with Hahn dead, the Steppes unguarded, and the sisters at war, the Empire erupted into discord it had never before known. Both Queens had called their courts to aid their effort — a conflict that could only end with one or the other dead.
The Emissary of the Serpent refused to partake in the war, as did the Ambassador of Alagadda; the former cited the strictly observational ways of its timeless master, and the latter was too busy Hanging his King with the crimson fool by his side. But most others heeded the call: the southern powers stood by the side of Seelie, and the north rallied up behind Mab without any hesitation.
Nessilatha was the one that led them; thus it should be of no surprise that it didn't take long for the storm to engulf the whole world.
In every city and on every front, the endless armies of what had once been the Empire clashed amongst a hurricane of steel and teeth. It was a bloody effort, one that soon burned half of the realm to the ground — one that for all of its violence had no clear victor. No clear leader to emerge from all of that fire which soon baptized Nessilatha unto a new depth of lust.
Yes, for all her vices no-one can deny that Nessilatha had cared for what little remained of Fomóire, in her own queer way. But one battle after another the love she bore for her people seemed to fade, replaced by a devotion to a cause far closer to her heart by the century: for war itself. For war and, of course, its restless apostate and master, Mab.
History tells us that love and hate are twins, born of the same mother. Nessilatha soon came to learn the same, it seemed. For amongst all of those flames, amongst all of that bloodshed and terror, her and Mab grew closer than ever before — in more sense than one.
It's a cruel fate, to see blood burn away the love from your heart in its own stead. Don't ever let it happen to you.
Well, no matter: for endless millenia the war waged on, and for endless millenia Mab and Nessilatha lay together in burning passion, now more often spending the night alongside each other than alone.
…
No. I know your mother wouldn't want me telling you this part, but you need to. It is crucial that you hear this, that you do not become what those two had. That you see what path intemperance leads to. What straying away from the Prophet's path leads to.
You see, both of them were always ravenous spirits, hungry for strength and recognition, but the spark of rebellion ignited inside them a fire far more primal and terrible than either had ever known. Before, they were just famished — now, though, they were starving. Starving for satisfaction only found under the sweated sheets and amongst the blood-stained grassfields.
Still: there was no love in it all, no tender devotion. No truth. It was but desire.
But for all their lust and might, Mab and Nessilatha could never reach victory on either front. On the battlefield the war continued, and in the bedroom, there was no heir conceived between them no matter the satisfaction, no great spirit to take their side and turn the tides of war to their advantage.
Mab had many bastards, of course, all fruits of her endless hunger born of and from fools all around the globe. But they were little more than curiosities, memories of nights long-forgotten. They were insults in the eyes of their mother, debris to be mowed down on the battlefield once they inevitably rebelled side by side with the rogue offspring of the other godlings. None of them were worthy of recognition, none worthy of ascendance to the side of their mother. Weakness ran through their veins, for Mab was only half of their origin. The other was, most times, only potent in the flesh.
But with Nessilatha, it was different. She was the first one whom Mab recognized as another candidate to greatness. Together, had they borne offspring, they could birth a dynasty that would last until the end of the cosmos and far beyond, a brilliant Star that would never go out. With Mab's magics and Nessilatha's strength, their children would be mightier than that of the very gods.
But they were never to be given that particular blessing, thank the stars. I cannot imagine what would become of us if they were to succeed.
Why was that, you want to know, when both could command their flesh to shift at will? Why couldn't they do it? Well.
The Fomori were a people of the sea, and they were born of the sea also. When they emerged, they emerged from under the oceans, in that vast terrible darkness beneath the tides and the world whole. Without the salt and sea, they were destined for loneliness, destined for doom. It was through the providence of great powers sleeping at the bottom of those dark depths that they were blessed to linger on. The same great powers that Nessilatha betrayed, when she bent her knee.
Without them, without that connection which she had severed when she surrendered herself to a different power entirely, her blood was doomed to die out. Soon enough this prophecy would come true; for now, however, Nessilatha remained. Remained loyal to her Starlight, on both the battlefield and in the long hours of the night.
She remained loyal up until the very end — an end that would come far sooner than she had hoped, and far later than we had dreamed.
It was a moonless night, the day that the Empire's last stand was to occur. They had all fought long and hard, but in the end the Queen at Peace had broken through their defenses. The Twin had little allies still left, little to no soldiers still standing amongst her legions, but she had to hope their power added to her own might would be enough to take the equally damaged capital — and, with it, her sister's life.
That night, Mab called for Nessilatha to meet her in her chambers for one last time. But it wasn't to surrender to passion, should push come to shove — it was to receive orders.
None were there that night to witness the words the Tyrant had given her General. Not me, not my fathers, and not the Blade, if it could even speak then. We will never know for sure what their goodbye was — and whether there were tears or kisses, as the rumors claim — but we know this: come sunrise, Nessilatha left the capital to meet the opposing forces in an open field. She wouldn't hide behind the walls of the Capital and wait to starve. If the Inventor wanted to face Mab, she would first have to go through her right hand.
Behind Nessilatha marched the last thousands that were still loyal to Mab, one last army made of the remnants of old glory; a desperate attempt at victory, one mostly consisting of Nessilatha's own Fomorian kin. But faith was not lost upon them; after all, the opposing forces were similarly scarce, and there were no great battlelords on the side of Mab's sister. The only ones of any significance still standing with the traitor were the re-emergent Tuatha Dé Danann, offspring of the offspring of the few who had survived the day that Nessilatha had come for the Isles.
She would make an example of them today once more — this time, however, it was going to be a permanent one.
And soon enough Nessilatha's forces arrived in the vale before the capital, surrounded by mountains from every side. Whatever would come, she told herself, she was ready to die for her Queen.
But when the time had come, when the two armies clashed and thousands fell, when she transformed into her great beast form, ready to take the life of the enemy, she didn't find the sister among the fighters. She didn't find the sister anywhere, for that matter, not even among what little remained of her Court. The only ones who had led this army were the thirteen great sorcerers that the Inventor had captured into her service, a forum of Tuatha Dé Danann lords of thaumic power only rivaled by that of the Queens.
The Traitor wasn't there.
Yes, you're a sharp one. Nessilatha had been deceived.
Panic quickly rose through her hearts, a dreadful realization that this was not the full might of the rebel forces; that, even if they were to win here, the war would be lost. They had been drawn out here as a distraction, a trick conjured up by the thirteen bastards under the Inventor's chain. It was all but a ploy to allow their foul master to make her way into Mab's unguarded palace and take the throne for herself.
Nessilatha could not allow this.
Within an instant she turned back, screaming with a voice louder than thunder for her forces to follow her. For her forces to abandon the battle and make one desperate run for the capital, before their Queen — her paramount paramour, her stitch for a starving heart — would fall.
The world could not allow this, however.
See, for all of her might and indomitable strength, Nessilatha wasn't immortal. I know that's what older brothers like to tell the younger, when the night is dark and the parents are away, but she wasn't unkillable.
No sword could pierce her skin and no magic could fall her spirit, yes, but she was no god. Just like all others, she could bleed. Not bleed fast enough to die — the only way to take care of her regeneration skills would be to obliterate so much of her in an instant she could not recover without draining her soul dry — but bleed enough to slow her body down. To make it fall in exhaustion under the volley of enemy spells.
The Prophet teaches us that the only arts that could truly put her to rest would be that of Mab herself, her beloved Queen, her Star; Nessilatha could not resist those. That is the truth he had learned from the stars during his long toil under Mab's reign. Similarly, had the oceans she had grown up in decided to turn on Nessilatha with their incomprehensible weight, only matched by the scale of the sky, she could also not win.
But centuries of victories had blinded her. She had thought nobody else knew of this. However somehow, perhaps through gossip, perhaps through soulgaze, the secret had gotten out. And the Tuatha knew of it.
Before she fell, blinded by the might of magic lended by the Inventor to her servants, she could still see it. See the moment that her people had turned against her.
It wasn't just the Tuatha forces that had raised steel against her in her moment of weakness; seeing the only chance they were ever going to get, the people of Fomóire made their decision. They had indeed already made it centuries prior, when their communion with the ocean fell silent and the ones beneath the sea told them what they had to do to restore their severed connection to the powers, to once again thrive.
They didn't hate Nessilatha. They knew that only because she had bent the knee and surrendered into submission did they survive, only because of that act were they allowed to carry on. But they had no other choice — if they wanted to once again become who they really were and not die out under the blades of the Inventor's inevitable victory, they had to do it. Had to give the sorcerers time enough to bind their monstrous leader.
Before she fell, before she was weighed down by the strength of their spells, it wasn't the Tuatha that Nessilatha would focus on, not them that she wanted to take out while she still had the chance. Turned blind, she focused her rage on the ones she had despised the most, in that moment: her very own kin.
We hear from poems of the other survivors that when the Tuatha sang their ancient song, when the hills erupted and the valley surrendered to the waters around it, falling down with the weight of the world, that there were no Fomorians left to witness it. No survivors to break their shackles and march on the capital with the remaining forces, and finish the war once and for all.
Well. It might be but poetry, but it is true — seldom has anyone seen one of Nessilatha's kin in the years since the Fall.
…
Yes, of course. It wasn't the Inventor who would win once all was said and done, when we came and strangled our oppressors with the chains they used to keep us down — but that is a story for another night. One with far more light.
Cold iron snapped around her many hands as chains fell down her tentacles and her head. She still writhed inside them, still with rage enough to take out most of the Tuatha army and their sorcerers, but not enough to break the spell. Not enough to break the rite and break free from her inevitable fate, before it was too late.
When they brought her to the ground, foaming in fury, she still had some slither of hope; but when the oceans came from beyond the hills, when the flood came and crushed all around her with its unstoppable force, she knew the instinct was foolish.
Amongst the crashing waves and screaming Tuatha, Nessilatha still crawled, still squirmed and wriggled and tossed and thrashed, even when the runes glowed and her fate was sealed.
And as the chains tightened for one last time, Nessilatha turned still.
Hmm? What's that?
No. She will never break out, of that I'm certain. The chains that hold her down will see a thousand generations come and go before they give up. You have to understand, they are more than mere metal — in a sense, they are a living testament to the strength of our people, a rune-ridden memory of those who had given their lives so that we may now sit here, atop their grave. The spells inscribed upon them will never fade for as long as we remember those who crafted them — and I do not see our people going anywhere any time soon. Nessilatha will sooner see the last stars fade out of existence than draw breath as a free woman. And with the ocean—
Right. But what would become of the world, should she somehow shrug her shackles off and once again roam free?
She'd always thought she'd die as she had lived — buried beneath a storm of swords, fighting one final war for the glory of her Queen, her Starlight. It would be an honor like no other; to be with her just in death as in life, a final record of who she was and whom she belonged to.
But fate was a cruel poet.
Now, she lay without steel and without strength, in terrible conscience of all they had done to her. Buried at the bottom of the world, she could feel the incomprehensible weight of the ocean pressing her shoulders against the rune-ridden ground. She could hear the whispers of the deep, the words of hatred from the mouths of the ocean itself — a terrible reminder of the treason she had committed against her own kin.
In those words she heard the truth: that she was no longer Grand General, no Blade of the Empire to reap her enemies like full-grown wheat; she was now Nessilatha the Buried, a relict of an age long gone, a reminder of what had happened to the gods the day the masses had come for them.
Her body and mind broken, she lay unmoving, unthinking, incapable of even drawing breath. She remained little more than a silent grave, buried beneath the earth and the sea, left to rot still without mercy. In some terrible irony, she endured just as timelessly as when she had stood as the sword of her mistress and Queen: destined to forever linger on, surrendered to insanity.
But although they have broken her body, broken her might and mind, they could never break her spirit. Never her soul. Even now, countless eons later and with a mind fully befogged by the insanity of rage, the fire deep inside her soul burnt strong, inextinguished by the chains and waters of her prison.
They had taken away everything from her, those filthy Tuatha rats, when they fell her to the ground with the weight of their tricks. They robbed her of her future, past, and present, reducing her to nothing but a mindless beast under the weight of suffering — but within her solitude, they had also unwittingly given her time. Time enough to endure pain beyond imagining, yes, but also time enough to witness the wheel of history moving again. To witness the world changing and ages shifting.
When the oceans inevitably run dry and her chains snap free, she was going to emerge victorious — and take everything away from them, in return.
Well. I do not think that any of us would survive for long enough to see for ourselves.