Ahem. On with the fic.]

So, there she was, no kidding, an Unseiligh royal lady charged with --

Am I getting ahead of myself again? Sorry. I'll start over.

All right.

Very well, then, we'll start where we should've: with Lotor's throne. Take notes on this part if you want to. It's gonna be important later.

The high throne of His Majesty Lotor Kessanarit ev'Zarkon was made of frozen light and resembled nothing so much as a chair-shaped slice of polychromatic heaven.

It had taken five sorceresses working for almost three solid years to create it; then the process had taken fifteen more years while another horde of witches slaved away to stabilize it. When I said it was made of frozen light, what I had meant was that it was literally a slice of Heaven. The sorceresses had used their combined might to reach into the higher planes and rip away some of the celestial glory that surrounds the dwelling place of the kamis and the gods and the Endless Perfection that is the Eternal.

Kinda shows what sort of ego we're dealing with, here.

Regardless, no matter how lovely it was, the sorceresses who had created it swore up and down that it had been far lovelier when it had been in their workshop. This was true. Heaven does not like to be forced, and when bits of it fall away from the glory of Eternity, it glimmers and shines and oh-so-gradually fades away from its original pristine perfection.

That's the important bit, although there's another important bit coming up in a minute. To recap: King Lotor had desired a throne made of Heaven itself, touched by divinity and sung over by angels.

He got it.

But when he did, as soon as he touched it and it felt the sluggish touch of Unseiligh blood, the throne immediately dimmed and lost an infinitesimal glint of its celestial glory.

Not that Lotor cared. He had a throne made of Heaven, and that was really all that mattered.

It was psi-conducive, reflecting the emotions of the man who sat in it -- flaring blue for anger, red for pleasure, white for laughter, warm gold for love or affection. Delicate flutes and sweeping whorls of scrimwork covered it, and when the King sat on it he looked as though he were enthroned in the midst of a symphony of rainbows.

But it was dead, and it was all the time becoming more and more attuned to the blood of Unseiligh, the blood of the Dark Elves.

That's the important bit. Remember it, if you would be so kind, because later on this throne is going to play a whopping big part in the history of the worlds.

And now we have the description down, so may I return to what I was saying beforehand? Thank you.

An Unseiligh royal lady had been charged with murder for no good reason.

That is to say, she had been charged for perfectly good reason: the young man was indisputably dead, and she freely admitted having assisted him off this mortal coil (of course even the Sidhe of Lower Faerie can die, although their souls must wander longer than ours do before reaching Heaven).

That wasn't the problem. It rarely was. Unseiligh as a general rule don't lie about such paltry things as killing. They hold that it's like dying: any fool can do either, and why bother falsifying such a thing?

Completely unlike our own culture, I must say. That's why they get to live closer to Heaven than we do.

No, the problem, to the Unseiligh court, was that she hadn't had what the court considered to be a good reason to gut the poor boy.

She did, of course; to her it was a perfectly valid reason, and honestly have you ever seen a murderer who hasn't had what seemed to him to be an impeccable reason why such-and-such should die? Neither have I.

"Your Wisdom," said the lady proudly, "he touched me without my permission."

The adjudicating prince raised one snowy white eyebrow. "Really."

She sensed that she wasn't making the proper impression; hastily she elaborated, "I am the daughter of Iranis, the daughter of Jroined, of the blood of the First Ones of the Unseiligh. Under our law, no one not of sufficiently royal blood can touch me without my explicit permission to do so. He did not have royal blood. He did not have my permission even to look at me. Nevertheless, he did both." She glowered, golden eyes outraged. "With... salacious intent."

"I don't suppose that it makes any difference that he was trying to alert you to the fact that your cup had been poisoned?" the prince murmured diffidently.

She looked impatient. "Why should that make any difference? I knew it was poisoned, anyway; and besides, I did kill the man, and I have made my defense. I don't see what's so hard about this, Wisdom; it's not as if he was anyone important."

The prince sighed. Unseiligh generally killed each other at the drop of a hat, but there were rules surrounding murder, rules that had to be followed to the letter on pain of pain and dishonor. This was a good thing; had there not been hard and fast rules about when and how the Unseiligh might legally and honorably kill their fellow Sidhe, the Unseiligh race would've probably died out within their first thousand years.

"Derayad, daughter of Iranis, daughter of Jroined," said the prince (his name, should you care to know it -- don't see why you would, but there are odd people over the Universe - was Chalora), "you've inconvenienced me. You have bored me. You have killed one of your mother's servingmen. And it's because he touched you? Well. young lady, I think that your problem is, quite honestly, sheer boredom."

The young Unseiligh lady sniffed. She managed to make it, as she made all of her motions, exquisitely graceful.

"You're guilty of murder for no good reason," said Chalora with a deep, annoyed sigh. "Your sentence is..." And here he paused.

The Unseiligh queens are neither elected nor born to their thrones; the queen rules for life --

And her successor is the one who has ended the previous queen's life. As the blood of the old queen dries on the new queen's sword, the scepter is passed and the throne will belong to a new Lady of the Dark Elves.

Therefore, Derayad's status as the daughter of the current queen ought not to have any bearing on Chalora's judgment. Technically, Derayad was only an Unseiligh lady, if an extremely hot-tempered and rather arrogant one.

The problem was, it just didn't work that way. Derayad was a magician and a swordswoman, a witch and a warrior. Her fencing was uncanny; her spells were unstoppable. And even at the practically infantile age of two hundred, she projected an air of majesty and power that spoke well for her chances of eventually pulling down the queen and becoming the Lady of the Dark Elves in Iranis' stead.

No matter what your culture is, it's generally not good form to be punishing your future queen, especially when you know that she's a vindictive little viper with a memory miles long and a sense of injury even longer.

Chalora paused again, and said, "Derayad ni Iranis, your sentence is ten years under a mortal seeming in the mortal realm."

The young lady's golden eyes grew wider and wider; the snickers and hoots of laughter all around the Court grew exceedingly mocking and extremely, audibly derisive.

Derayad, it was generally felt, was finally getting just what she had been begging for for simply years.

"And I will choose the venue," added Chalora, studiously ignoring the giggles and glancing at a starchart that had appeared before him. "When we of Lower Faerie appear in the mortal plane, we choose places of lawlessness, of terror, of fear; we are the Unseiligh, the Dark Elves, and we do not conform to mortal law or custom. I think it best that you arrive in the mortal plane in a place where the only law is strength; where the dark sorcery of the Unseiligh would be welcome, and where your appearance would not prejudice the mortals against you."

Derayad's eyes bulged. Rather an unattractive thing to be doing at that point, I can't help thinking, but the really annoying part is that she was still radiantly lovely when she did it.

"You are not sending me to my half-brother!" she screamed. "NO!"

Chalora smiled paternally, which ought not to have been surprising because he was her father. "Yes. They call the place Doom, I think. I should imagine you'll fit right in, Derayad. Her Dark Majesty the Queen has said that when she lived there, it was dark and terrible and fearsome. Dark sorcery never fazed anyone. Those lucky enough to possess blue skins were among the elite. You will enjoy it, Derayad, my dear, and you will get over this tiresome, inconveniently enraged boredom."

"That was forty years ago, when Her Dark Majesty visited the mortal plane, Your Wisdom," Derayad ground out. Her tone on that last word made it abundantly plain that she felt the honorific to be highly unwarranted.

"What thing of importance changes in a mere forty years, even in the mortal plane?" Chalora said indifferently. His golden eyes glinted at her. I'm afraid that Unseiligh families aren't quite as gung-ho on familial love as most mortal families are, and consequently Chalora and his daughter were free to detest each other as much as they liked without fear of opprobrium from their peers.

I'm sure that that's why most Unseiligh are so unpleasant: poor domestic lives. They say it can scar a child for life, that kind of atmosphere, and they should know.

The hilt of Chalora's greatsword came down on the arm of his throne. BANG. "That is your sentence. It will be carried out immediately. Don't come back to us in less than ten years, that is unless you would like to be faced with the queen's wrath for circumventing the justice of Her Dark Majesty's consort."

A swirling vortex, formed of something gorgeously insubstantial and as shimmery fine as Derayad's silvery hair, opened up under Derayad's lovely feet. "I don't want to go to the mortal plane!" she cried bitterly, sinking bit by bit through Chalora's Gate. "I'll remember this, Daddy. I'll remember every single instant of it when I pay the bloodprice and take the Throne of Darkness!"

Chalora and the Unseiligh Court, seemingly unimpressed by the young Sidhe's anger, watched the banished princess vanish.

Chalora stood up, gave the Dark Elf warriors a salute, and led the resounding cheer of relief himself.

"Thank all powers of darkness, she's finally gone!"

It was a dark and stormy night. But then, it was Dartarus. Nights are always dark and stormy on Dartarus. They're noted chiefly for never being otherwise.

The lightning flashed actinic blue over the twisted remnants of Haggar's tower; momentarily lit up the deserted and blasted remains of Castle Doom.

Not a mortal being on the whole bloody entire planet, and a good thing too.

The solitary not-quite-mortal being felt very much as if she would like to stamp her dainty foot in pure frustration.

"This was where my mother spent ten years?!"

No matter how you dressed it up in diplomatic language, King Lotor was a dictator, a monarch of an absoluteness as to make Louis Quatorze bat an eyelash in sheer envy.

Oh, granted, no one in the fiefs of Ursan owned slaves. Piracy was strictly forbidden among the Ursani Navy. If Lotor heard mere whispers of his soldiers terrorizing civilians, there were floggings and decimations.

But his word was law on Ursan and her daughter worlds; and if he blinked in your direction you threw yourself to the ground and prayed to whichever god you favored (or whichever god favored you -- it all depends on how devout you are) that he wasn't ticked off at you.

So when His Majesty stormed into the security division of Castle Ursan and demanded to see whomever he'd put in charge of watching over abandoned Dartarus, every single man and woman in the room began to sweat.

"Well?" Lotor roared. "Who is it?"

At last a young captain, looking almost fatally embarrassed, marched up and saluted so crisply that you could've sliced carbon with it. "I am in command of the Dartarus detail, Sire," he said heroically. He didn't dare close his eyes in preparation for the deathblow, although he very much would have liked to do so.

Much to his surprise -- and apparently to that of the rest of the force -- he stayed alive during the next sentence. "Sire, there -- um -- seems to be an alarm of some sort going off. There's a disturbance on Dartarus."

"I know that," Lotor snapped, golden eyes glowing. "What I want to know is: a) who is it? b) why didn't I hear about it from you instead of from some sorceress who leaves a Sending spell in the middle of my bedroom, and c) what do you intend to do about it?"

The captain did not squeak. He did not squeak. He just made a very small, very startled yip of surprise.

All right, he squeaked.

"Sire, we don't know who it is," he said rapidly, facing straight ahead, "we only just found out about it fifteen minutes ago and were waiting to confirm it before we bothered Your Majesty, and I planned to send an expeditionary force after it. Sire."

Lotor forced himself to calm down. He'd gotten very good at it in the arguments he'd had with his wife -- and between you and me, that's the only reason a man will ever control his temper, to annoy his wife or his sweetheart. Never fails -- you want a man to lose his temper? That's the time when he buckles under, smiles sweetly, and says, "You're right." There's nothing so aggravating as having a really choice argument nipped in the bud, and men do it on purpose because they're one and all born weasels.

Well, anyway, Lotor bottled up his temper, and you can just bet that all of his men were heaving great sighs of relief, too. Lotor losing his temper was a sight to see -- very often, it was the last sight someone would see.

"That's very good," he said rigidly. "You may carry on, Captain, and incidentally when you come back you are to report to me first thing."

"Yes, Sire!" The captain looked about to faint, his scarlet-red eyes nearly showing the whites around the edges. There is nothing quite as pathetic-looking as a Drule who's about to faint from sheer terror.

Lotor about-faced, his temper blazing so white-hot that it was almost tangible.

Into the Hall of the Presence, up onto the throne-dais, setting just so on the seat of that gorgeously blue throne. Lotor sat and allowed his temper to radiate outwards, to simply pulsate from him in an emanation of darkness.

Ever seen a blacksmith at his work? There's a process called venting. The smith will take the white-hot piece of metal out of the furnace, allow it to cool just enough so that it will be safe to hit without shattering, but not enough so that it will lose its malleability.

This is what Lotor habitually did with his temper these days.

He vented, allowing himself to lose just enough of his rage so that he wouldn't lose control utterly, but not enough so that he could let go of his anger completely.

Before his exile, Lotor had always let his temper and his rages flare, burst out into terrifying violence and acts of the most disgusting brutality. There'd been a reason they had called him the Scourge of Hell, and it wasn't because he delivered fruitcakes to people he didn't like.

Since his exile, since he had wed the placid, enigmatic Ysandra, he had learned to vent, to stoke his rages carefully, to preserve his temper so that he might not have cause to be exiled again.

That's what he did on this occasion, mm-hmm, and he sat there on his throne of azurean glory, enthroned in a mass of sapphire rage. The celestial throne flared so brilliantly, furiously blue that it was nearly impossible to look at it directly.

It was absorbing an Unseiligh's anger.

Nothing of celestial origin can long contain fury of the sort absolutely unholy -- but being of celestial origin, it does not let it go again, not where it might do harm.

No, the throne stored the anger until it could find a safe place to put it.

A safe place.... Is there a safe place to put the dark, molten rage of a Dark Elf, of someone who has the sorcerous blood of Sidhe in his veins?

Probably not, but another possession celestial in origin is hope.

The captain's name was Orren. That's not really strictly important, not from a historical point of view, but it most certainly is from a narrative point of view, leastways as it gives me a label for him so I won't have to keep assaultin'' your ear with "the captain this" and "the captain that."

So this Captain Orren, right, he took his crew and he took a spaceship to Dartarus.

Direct flight from Ursan to Dartarus is roughly twelve days, that is if you're traveling by the accepted warp routes or even through the perilously dangerous realspace.

Not if you're going through Fold-Space.

The Fold-Spaces were discovered, of course, by the Sidhe -- whether Dark Elf or Light Elf is unrecorded. This unnamed Sidhe one day decided, for some strange reason of her own, to see what would happen if she pushed a tachyon directly into the path of a lightning bolt.

That sucker hit deep space so fast the watching Elf couldn't see it even through spellcraft. For all intents and purposes, it had disappeared.

So, fine, OK, it disappeared. But where did it go?

This Elf did some experimentation.

Finally, she concluded that tachyons, being pretty speedy particles in and of themselves, got even faster when crossed with sorcerously-charged bits of light.

In fact, these tachyons got so fast they became instantaneous.

The Sidhe, of course, knew a good thing when they saw it. They picked up where the single Elf had left off, and did some more experimentation, this time to see what was practical with this stuff. It turns out -- can you believe it? -- that an entire slipstream of them, way far out into space, charged with a sorcerous lightstorm, could provide a workable platform for interstellar travel.

Know why?

The tachyons, by the time the magical light hits 'em, are so darn impatient to get where they want to be that they don't go through normal space. They punch a hole through reality and are there instantly.

The Sidhe had, in fact, discovered another form of teleportation, only since this form includes sciencey things like tachyons and slipstreams, they got to drag it down into the mortal plane and call it "Fold-Space." The people who wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot pole had it been labeled as "sorcerous teleportation" fell all over themselves to buy Fold-Space drives for their navies.

The middlemen who had been approached by the Unseiligh mages got fabulously rich; the Unseiligh lords who had sold the Fold-Space concept to those middlemen smiled to themselves and watched luxuriously as various fools and morons got themselves forever lost in Fold-Space because only the best of the best (and the wealthiest of them, can't forget the power of money, natch) could manage to preserve minds focused enough to bully the tachyons into going where the captain wanted them to go instead of willy-nilly into Tachyon Paradise.

A few ships in the Ursani Navy possessed Fold-Space capability. Orren's mind was focused not so much on Dartarus as on how angry King Lotor would be if he didn't do his duty immejitly.

Quick, snap your fingers; that's how long it took Captain Orren and his crew to get to Dartarus' orbit through the mysteries of Fold-Space.

Of course, when they'd gotten down on the planet and had zeroed in on the disturbance, Orren wished he hadn't been quite so quick to answer the call.

On the planet Arus -- a mere hop, skip, and a jump away from Dartarus -- the queen Allura Jalian of the Royal Arusian House Iridian, the Angel of Arus, the Rose of the Sun, the Lady of the World of the Dawn, plus a whole slew of other equally pretentious and cloying titles, was frowning and creasing her dainty brow in thought.

She was still exquisitely beautiful, was the queen; her figure had not spread nor had her eyes lost their celestial calmness. Her hair still glimmered as fine and as honey-colored as sunlight; her skin was still the color and texture of a mass of thick cream with a dash of apricots added to it.

Allura had, thankfully, been broken of her predilection for frothily pink confections dress-wise; and her fondness for mice was being worked on.

She was a most satisfactory queen; under her firm, benevolent hand, Arus had prospered exponentially. It had surpassed its pre-Doom glory, and all throughout the Denubian Galaxy the name of Arus was spoken in tones as reverent as those used to refer to Romae Nova or to Academe.

There was only one flaw to her rule, so far as Arus at large could see.

At the age of thirty-eight, she was unmarried and heirless. No argument, no matter how gross or how subtle, could sway her: she would remain husbandless until she found the love of her life. Allura always said so with a sweet smile on her face and a calm, tranquil look in her eyes -- but heaven help the counselor, suitor, or ambassador who tried to press his suit beyond that point.

"Radria," she said, still frowning as she toyed with her scrambled eggs, "tell me again why I should bother with this news."

Her aide didn't even roll her eyes; Radria was used to seemingly-naive questions from the queen.

"Because, Majesty, Doom may be as uninhabited as the reports claim, but there is unquestionably something there; the Alliance scanners went crazy fifteen hours ago, and no one can tell why." Radria paused, said calmly, "One of the robeasts might have survived intact. A few droids might have revived and assembled into a corps. Anything might have happened, Majesty -- it's best to take precautions. Better safe than sorry, you know."

The queen's air of serenity didn't change. "Really... Very well. Go away, please, Radria; I can't eat with you hovering over me like this. And... if you would be so kind... please inform Lord Marshal Kaylor and Commander Hideki that they would like a word with me, please."

Radria's expression changed ever so slightly. If it means anything to you, feel free to note that the look on her round face resembled that of Curly when Moe's fingers have yet again found a resting place in his eyes.

"Certainly, my queen," the aide said, bowing her way out of the royal breakfast room. Before the door closed behind her, her sprinting form could be made out in a beeline towards the chambers of the Arusian High Command.

Allura, for her part, calmly ate her eggs, choked down her oatmeal because she still remembered that Nanny had said it was good for her complexion, and stared thoughtfully out of the window.

Lotor's planet was stirring up again.... She glanced at the reports lying by her glass of stimtea. She still thought of the dark prince occasionally, but only with faint pity. She did not hate him anymore -- it wasn't in Allura's nature to hold grudges passionately; it was not, in fact, in her to hate people for longer than five minutes -- but that unbreakable bond between them had taken the form, on her part, of something resembling what Eva Braun must have felt for Hitler: pity and compassion, mixed with a certain fascination and revulsion both.

No, it wasn't the mere fact that Doom was, still and always, Lotor's planet that primarily attracted her attention.

It was the phrase, lightly underlined: "Suspected sorcerous in nature."

Sorcerous in nature.

And she had had the dream again last night, too...

Allura Jalian, daughter many times descended of the Seiligh queen Jalian the Golden, stared out the window at restored Arus, glanced over the Black Lion where it sat atop its Gate, centered at last in the heavenly blue, peaceful sky of Arus.

Her eyes settled at last on the golden disc of the sun. She stared into the sun without blinking, without hurt, for many minutes as she thought about the dream and what it portended.

Captain Orren checked his data, and a good thing, too.

To his way of thinking, objects with the sorcerous aura being picked up by his scanners quite simply ought not to exist. It was pretty much impossible for anything to surpass the aura of the king's daughter Raven, nor the dark miasma that still lingered over the ruins of Haggar's laboratory -- but this aura, centered in the circle of his men, was phenomenal.

In laymen's terms, we'll say that it was roughly like the sun descending to earth and just sitting there.

It was, to tell the truth, worrying Captain Orren just the smallest wee bit, most especially because he had only one sorcerer of any merit whatsoever on his team, and she was a junior-grade witch at best.

Yessirree bob, he was a mite skeered o' thet there thing, and he was considering the ways in which he might return to Ursan with his team and his hide and his soul intact.

Unfortunately, all of these rather brilliant plans fell down at the end, because when he returned to Ursan empty-handed without any concrete information, the king would deprive him of his team, his hide, his soul, and probably his head, too, which would admittedly look lovely stuck on a pike, but still it's not the sort of thing you just want to give up without a fight. Heads are a vital part of life these days.

So Orren heaved a deep sigh, glanced down at the maelstrom of color and light on the desolate plain before the ruins of Castle Doom, and gave the order to close in on it. "Blasters at the ready, and for God's sake, Birjun, keep a close eye on that spell-grenade of yours," he breathed into his comm.

He paused before he crept forward himself; was it his imagination, or was there the sound of someone sobbing?

As it turned out, it wasn't his imagination.

Derayad was bored, out of sorts, hungry, lost, annoyed, and extremely frustrated. She had looked around carefully to make sure that no one was near, and had promptly burst into tears.

No Dark Elf likes to be surprised while indulging in a good cry.

I'm surprised you're even shocked that when she discovered thirty men gathered around her and watching her weep, she immediately gathered her aura and incinerated almost the entire lot of them.

She dashed away her tears with one hand, and strode up to the survivor, eyes gleaming as coldly as will a cat's when he has finally cornered his mouse.

Continue...