Characters: Queen Isabella, Fallon, Lord Dartemus
The night crept by slowly, full of unspoken fear and undying suspicion. Siarra and her companions walked on, their heads cast down, with Joan’s group unknowingly trailing by only a few miles. In the northern end of the Enchanted Forest, in the house of the Elven cookie-makers, sleep refused to comfort the two lovers, Kim and Isaac, who stayed awake, staring at the other’s twisted and coiled figure in the darkness. Meanwhile, a single candle continued to flicker in the house in Haledon, its flame marking the only light before the dawn.
In Felwinter, Gena and Roxanne had settled into an inn for the night. For once, they were silent, at peace with themselves. In fact, in a night so dark and quiet, only a few even fought to stay awake. At the top of the castle, in one of its many spiny towers, a solitary face stared out over the town of the innocent. She watched from her balcony, her breaths hushed, her sweet whispers low, her eyes drawn to the blue shards of the moon, as if she feared to be overhead in dreams.
“Isabella?” came a voice from within.
The face turned around to see her courier, the red ribbon-haired Fallon, step through the curtains. “Good evening, Fallon.”
“M’lady, it’s almost morning. Have you slept yet?”
“And miss one moment of this intrinsic beauty?” Isabella laughed, almost mockingly. “Dear sweet Fallon, I would never trade the real world for all the land in my dreams.”
“Isabella…”
“You need to learn to live more.”
“But your mother—”
“Again with my mother!” Isabella threw up her arms and turned around. Then she lowered her hands, gently, and placed them on the balcony railing. “…I’m sick of my mother. Everything has to be about her.”
“She is the queen…”
“I want to be the queen.”
“You are, for as long as she’s gone.”
Isabella’s fingers tightened around the railing until the turned as white as Fallon’s dress. “…Then I wish she wouldn’t come back.”
“Isabella! Don’t talk like that.”
“Why the hell not!? This should be my kingdom! Mine, mine, mine!”
“It will be, Isabella… Someday, it will all be yours.”
“…You know what the first thing I’m going to do is?”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to send Lucilla and her army into Penee and eliminate the race of Men once and for all. I will see them die!”
Fallon gave a half-smile and went to stand next to Isabella. “I know that you hate Men, but we need them for diplomatic reasons. Your mother knows that, her mother knew that, and so did her mother, and so on. Without Men, we have no lower class; and without lower class, we have no society on which to rule over. You must understand, Isabella…”
“I’m sorry,” Isabella said after a moment of reflection. “For a moment, I thought you were running this kingdom. Are you the queen?”
“No, M’lady…”
“Will you ever be?”
“No, M’lady…”
“And who will be?”
“You, M’lady.”
“Mm… Say it again!”
“You, M’lady. You will be queen.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Isabella danced in a circle. Then she cupped her hands over her mouth and shouted out to the city below her. “You hear that, people!? I will be queen! You will all bow before me! Hahaha!” She laughed and fell backwards into the arms of a very concerned Fallon.
“Are you okay, Isabella?” she asked.
Isabella had her eyes closed in amusement, but she opened them now and grinned. “Men are so screwed.”
“Yes, I suppose they are…”
“You should be happy, Fallon! I won’t kill them all. I’m going to keep some of them alive to pleasure me. Oh! You can have some of them too.”
Fallon helped Isabella to her feet. “Really, that’s okay. I find them to be rather…vulgar creatures myself.”
“They’re considered to be delicacies in some places, you know.”
“I know, but so is caviar and you know how I feel about that…”
“Ugh! Again, Fallon, you need to live more. Go out on the limb for once.”
“Yes, M’lady.”
Isabella laughed. “Someday, Fallon. I swear, someday, I’m going to take you out for a night of stomping Men and you’ll have tons of fun.”
“That really should be a job for the Paladins… You shouldn’t leave the castle.”
“Oh, psh…”
“Yeah, listen to her, you stupid bitch!” thundered a male voice from inside Isabella’s bedroom. “You’re going to learn to fear the race of Men before this is over!”
Suddenly, the curtains were thrown open and Isabella stormed across the room, her eyes like two pistols pointed directly towards the birdcage with the man inside. “That’s it. You’re about to become a stain in history.” She grabbed a thick textbook from inside her nightstand and raised it over the cage.
“Isabella!” Fallon screamed, grabbing the queen’s pale wrists. “Isabella, you can’t kill Lord Dartemus. We need him.”
“And I need him squashed on the bottom of this book!”
“You can’t do this!” the man inside the cage yelled. “You know you can’t. You can’t even touch me."
Isabella glowered at him, then at Fallon, and hurled the book to the floor. The force was so strong that it knocked Lord Dartemus off his feet. Or maybe it was because Isabella picked up the cage and flung it across the room, where it rolled like a boulder out of control and smashed against the wall.
“I hope he’s not hurt!” Fallon gasped, running over to the bent cage.
“I hope he’s not breathing!” Isabella gasped, mockingly, and laughed as she plopped down on her cushiony bed. “But in either case, I don’t expect him to talk back to me again.”
Fallon picked up the cage and sighed with relief when Lord Dartemus staggered to his feet. He fell again, though, when she carried the cage back to the bedside table.
“…Isabella,” she said as she set down the cage. “You’re my best friend and the temporary queen and I respect you, but we can’t be throwing members of the royal court of Penee around your room.”
“I was aiming to throw him out the window.”
“We can’t do that either.”
“Then why are we even keeping him alive? He’s terribly ugly.”
“That’s because you haven’t let me shave in three months!” he bellowed.
“Shut up or I’ll shave you with my fingernail.”
Lord Dartemus began to bite his thumb at her, but he saw the fiery, playful look in Isabella’s eyes—the look of a pyro maniac—and stopped himself. “…Queen Isabella, I beseech you to let me and my people go. We have done no harm you can’t repair and there is no reason to keep us here.”
“Your people are dead,” Isabella said bluntly. “And those we haven’t killed will soon be. You should be lucky you’re up here with me and not working where they are.”
“You ravenous whore! You told me they wouldn’t be harmed!”
“And you trusted me? It’s stupid things like that that make Men so inferior. Isn’t that right, Fallon?”
Fallon said nothing for a moment and then turned to the man in the cage. “Lord Dartemus, I assure you, we don’t wish to kill more Men than we have to. Most of your people are working in the stables.”
“How many? How many are still alive?”
“At least sixty.”
“Which is how many it takes to lift one piece of horse crap,” Isabella laughed, falling back into her pillow in a fit of giggles. “I can’t wait until they drop a piece on themselves.”
Lord Dartemus seethed, his fists shaking the dented bars of the cage, but he knew there was nothing he could do for them now. He looked at Fallon, but her face was blank and staring off into nothingness. Eventually, Isabella’s laughter began to subside into snickering whimpers.
“There may come a time…” Dartemus started to say, but hearing his voice only made Isabella laugh harder. And just when he thought she had died down again, she turned her head to face him and it was the same thing all over, for the next five minutes—her laughing at him and him, trapped in the cage, powerless to do anything about it.
“Damn it, you!” he shouted through the bars of his prison. “There will come a time when you, the almighty girls of this kingdom, will come to Men for help!”
Isabella’s cheeks puffed and her green eyes watered. “Yeah… If we have an accident in the washroom!” And then she burst into laughter again.
Giantess World
