(The Iron Queen) ~ The Count of Six Days

She had learned long ago that it took little in the way of real effort to win over the human male. With most in fact, all it took was a pretty face, a suggestive yet passing glance, and the briefest hints of a smile to win the day.

With the young Crown Prince of Za’had’da’Keafer it had not even taken that. The battle of wills between them having been lost in the moment that his young eyes beheld her features for the first time.

Eyes that even now hungered for her holding only a smoldering want and desire for her. Eyes that carefully followed her every movement and absorbed her every hinted expression.

...

It had been the count of six days since her armies had taken the city. Six days that the young Crown Prince had spent never far from her company as her most honored guest. His every whim indulged and every want attended with the utmost care.

The young Prince unmoved in his belief in the protections of his all-powerful god and the promise of his own divinity that there was little caution on his part. His every thought or idea given voice and no secret beyond her grasp for very long.

For her part she played upon his arrogance and ignorance letting him set the stage of their assumed romance from the first. Her assumed role quickly becoming that of the innocent virginal queen to his coy and cunning hero.

Those first few days filled with days of childish attachments and innuendo until with seeming reluctance on her part she secreted into his bedchamber on that third night submitting to him whispering the sweetest poison into his ears as he made love to her.

So blind to the very idea that he could be in any real danger it almost pained her to see him play the fool and yet this was the role that fate had given him. Thus he remained at her hand at all times bearing silent witness as one by one she ordered the execution of his stewards, priests, and noblemen born of his once proud and noble city.

…

For the vast majority of those who stood before her to face judgement death was a certainty. The word of law being absolute in that no enemy of the people man, woman, or child was to be spared. This was not to say however that some were not. It took only one voice to speak out on behalf of the condemned. One voice to tell the tale of some redeeming virtue or deed of worth that proved the condemned was elf-friend.

Even for those condemned however she was not without mercy. For the vast majority in fact death was both swift and sudden. A blade in the hand of her most skilled executioner’s oftentimes more than enough to insure that the condemned knew dead before they knew that the sentence had been carried out.

For others though, there could be no mercy. Their crimes against her people were so vile and horrendous that the punishments of olde were called upon. Curses so dark and that they could not be spoken of aloud. Spells so twisted and vile that to cast them would stain the kharma of the caster for all time.

She could not help but hear the iron crown as it sung its joy at the coming of the seventh day, for it knew already that among those that remained. There were those individuals whose names were a curse upon the lips of the Elves whose deeds merited the crown's special attention. The Iron crown that rested upon her brow whispering to her the tales of their vile deeds and the promise of the punishments that awaited them.

…