NEKROS: Husband To Ruin

The Woman in Blue

She stood in the corridor with her hands clasped in front of her, posture straight, expression professional. If you didn't know what she looked like under Imperial blue, if you hadn't seen her materialize on the bow of a river barge in the dark, you would walk right past her without a second thought.

"How long," I said. 

"Eight months," she said. "Since before you arrived in Vethara."

"You were in Varek's court while you were following me in Vethara."

"I was in both places, it isn't difficult when you know which doors to use."

I looked at her for a moment, "You're not Sarreth," I said.

Something shifted in her eyes. "I work for Sarreth," she said. "Among others."

"That's not the same thing."

"No," she agreed. "It isn't." She tilted her head slightly toward the corridor behind her. "Walk with me, we have things to discuss before Varek's people come to collect you for preparation and we lose the window."

I walked with her. She walked me through three corridors and a servants' stairwell before she spoke again. 

"My name is Elpida," she said.

"Is that your real name?"

"Real enough." She stopped at a narrow window that looked out over the palace's inner courtyard. Below, servants moved between buildings carrying supplies, linens, firewood. Ordinary and indifferent. "What do you know about Moira specifically not reputation, not legend. What do you actually know?"

"She has been a Calamity for approximately four hundred years," I said. "Before that she was human — a physician and botanist of considerable skill. The Pantheon's plague aspect, the god Phthoros, co-opted her expertise and transformed her against the terms of what she believed was a willing exchange. She has occupied the same tower domain in the northern Reach since her transformation. She has not left it voluntarily in over a century. Every suitor sent to her has died. The current count is thirty-one."

Elpida looked at me. "Thirty-seven," she said.

"The last six weren't documented in any text I could access."

"The last six were sent privately, by the Church, without official record. They wanted to confirm she was still manageable. She wasn't." Elpida turned back to the window. "What you don't know, because it hasn't been written down anywhere that still exists, is that Moira has been changing."

"Changing how?"

"The plague touch is becoming stronger, for the first two centuries after her transformation she was dangerous but contained — a man could survive proximity if he was careful, masked, kept his distance. Now?" She paused. "She breathes and things die. The land within a mile of her tower has been dead soil for forty years, nothing grows. Birds don't even fly over it."

"She's losing control."

"Or gaining it," Elpida said. "Depending on how you read it, the Pantheon created her as a weapon. Weapons don't stay calibrated forever." She looked at me directly. "This is why the Church wants her gone, not because she is a threat to mortals — she has never once attacked a civilian population. But because a Calamity whose power is growing beyond the parameters her creator set, is a Calamity the Pantheon can no longer claim to manage and a god who cannot manage his own creation is a god whose authority is questionable."

"And if I walk in there and survive her touch," I said slowly, "the Church's entire justification for the crusade falls apart, because a living husband means a completed marriage means a legal contract under Eidyn law that even the Pantheon cannot void without admitting the law itself is selective."

"Now you understand why they need you dead before the ceremony completes."

"What does Sarreth want from this?" I asked. "The real answer."

Elpida was quiet for a moment. "Sarreth has been preparing for the Pantheon's collapse for fifty years," she said finally. "Not causing it, preparing for it. When the gods fall — and they will fall, the signs have been accumulating for decades — the continent will fracture. Every kingdom, every empire, every city state will move to fill the vacuum. Sarreth wants to be positioned correctly when that happens."

"And they think I'm the one who will bring the Pantheon down."

"They think you're the mechanism," she said. "The prophecy is the force, you're just the only person in recorded history who has the right blood to carry it through."

I looked down at my hands, the right blood. Six years of exile, cold and hunger and being no one, all because of blood I hadn't chosen and a blessing I hadn't asked for, running through me like a current I'd spent my whole life pretending I didn't feel.

"And you?" I said. "Personally, what do you want from this?"

She didn't answer immediately. When she did, her voice was quieter.

"I want the Church to burn," she said. "Everything else is negotiable."

The three days of preparation Varek had promised were, in practice, a performance designed to look like generosity while achieving something else entirely.

They gave me new clothes. Court quality — heavy fabric, Kaleth colors. I accepted them and noted that every seam had been checked. Looking for what I might have hidden inside. 

They assigned me a handler — a young court official named Petros who was pleasant, efficient, and reported everything I did to someone above him within the hour. I knew this because I tested it twice, saying two different things in his presence that I knew would trigger different responses if passed up the chain. Both responses came back to me through indirect channels within ninety minutes.

I complimented Petros on his efficiency, he thanked me and didn't understand why.

On the second day they brought in a priest.

He was Ekklesia Apokryfa, not in the hidden order's robes — those only came out in private — but in standard Eidyn white, with the Ouroboros ring on his right hand that Axios had described in Vethara. He was introduced as a spiritual advisor, come to prepare me for the ceremony ahead.

We sat across from each other in the room they had given me and he folded his hands and smiled, like a man who believed he already knew everything about you.

"The ceremony will be brief," he said. "A formal exchange under Eidyn marriage law. The binding phrase, the witnessed contract, the touch of hands." He paused on that last part, letting it settle. "Are you prepared for what the touch will mean?"

"Tell me what you think it will mean," I said.

"The Plague Weaver's touch has ended thirty-seven lives," he said. "Each one within moments of contact. The body simply... ceases. It is, by all accounts painless, a mercy some might say."

"Some might say," I agreed. "And the Church's position on my death specifically?" 

"The Church mourns every soul lost in service of diplomatic necessity."

"That's very practiced," I said. "How many times have you said it?"

"I am here to offer comfort, not to be interrogated," he said.

"Then comfort me with this," I said leaning forward slightly. "If I survive, and I understand that you find the possibility unlikely, what does the Church's formal position become? On the marriage, the contract. On my standing under Eidyn law."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"That," he said carefully, "would be an unprecedented situation requiring significant theological review."

"Significant," I repeated. "Not impossible."

"Not…" He stopped.

"Thank you," I said. "That's all I needed."

He left shortly after, he was reporting upward within twenty minutes. I watched his robes disappear around the corridor corner from my window and I thought about what Elpida had said.

The Church needed me dead before the ceremony completed. Not after. 

Which meant the three days of preparation weren't preparation at all.

I found it on the third morning.

The new clothes they had given me — the ones I'd checked every seam and found nothing in, I had been looking in the wrong place. 

The dye, I had a reaction to it when I put on the formal coat for the departure ceremony. 

Faint, a numbness in my fingertips that traveled slowly up both arms. I stood very still in the center of the room and breathed carefully and ran through everything I had read in six years about contact poisons and slow-acting compounds and the particular methods favored by organizations that needed deaths to look natural.

The dye was laced, something slow — designed to accumulate over days of skin contact, reaching critical level approximately when? When I was standing in front of Moira. When I reached out to take her hand for the ceremony. When my body, already compromised, met her plague-touch.

When what should have been a test of my blessing became a certainty of my death.

I took the coat off and set it on the chair, washed my hands and arms thoroughly with the basin water and sat down. 

Then I put on my own coat, the one I had walked into Kalephis in.

Petros arrived twenty minutes later to escort me to the departure.

He looked at my coat, then at the formal clothes folded on the chair. 

"The Emperor provided…" he started.

"The Emperor's clothes didn't fit," I said. "I'll manage with my own."

Petros opened his mouth and closed it almost immediately running the calculations in his head. 

I followed him down through the palace corridors toward the departure courtyard, where a coach and escort waited to carry me north toward Moira's domain, the dead land where thirty-seven men had gone and not come back.

Toward the first of seven, and in the departure courtyard, standing near the coach with her hands clasped and her expression professionally blank, was Elpida.

She was coming with me, she caught my eye for exactly one second.

In that second she looked down, almost imperceptibly, at the collar of my old coat.

Where a small slip of paper had been tucked while I wasn't paying attention.

I didn't reach for it, with Petros two steps behind me and the courtyard full of Varek's eyes.

But as I climbed into the coach and the door closed and the wheels began to move, I understood something with complete clarity.

I wasn't going to Moira's tower as Varek's proxy, I wasn't going as Sarreth's mechanism.

I was going as myself. Kyros Nekros the last Valeborn, the Hollow Vessel. The man every faction on this continent had spent six years trying to use, poison, dismiss, or bury.

Whatever that slip of paper said, whatever Elpida had tucked into my collar without touching me, whatever waited in the dead land north of Kalephis.

None of them knew what I actually was, not yet.