Chapter 8: The Necromancer Queen's Feast
The bone cracked between her teeth.
Leliana tore a strip of charred meat from the marrow and swallowed without tasting it. The flesh was stringy, greasy, cold—some part of a pig that had been roasting when the dead swept through the village three days ago. The fire had gone out since then. Everything had gone cold. The meat, the ash, the bodies stacked like cordwood at the edge of the square.
She didn't care. Food was fuel. Nothing more.
The throne beneath her shifted as she leaned back—wagon wheels lashed together with sinew, goblin skulls wedged into the gaps, the whole grotesque construction creaking with every movement. It wasn't comfortable. It wasn't meant to be. A throne should remind you of what it cost to sit in it.
Behind her, the army stood in perfect silence.
Two hundred corpses. Maybe more. She'd stopped counting after the third village. They didn't breathe. Didn't shift. Didn't moan like the shambling things in children's stories. They just stood there, rank after rank, their hollow eye sockets fixed on nothing, their rotting fingers curled around rusted weapons.
Waiting.
Leliana closed her eyes and reached for the Codex.
It was there, always there, a splinter lodged deep in the meat of her mind. She could feel its presence like a second heartbeat, cold and patient, pulsing with ancient hunger. She'd stopped fighting it weeks ago. Stopped pretending she was still the woman who'd worked the fields and hidden her blades and dreamed of a quiet life.
That woman was dead.
The Codex showed her things now. Not visions—nothing so gentle. Just... facts. The way a map showed you where you were, the Codex showed her where her enemies stood.
Fox was alive.
Arielle was alive.
And Everly—that smug, sharp-tongued bitch with her ice and her secrets—had slipped through her fingers again.
Leliana's jaw tightened. The bone in her hand snapped.
She opened her eyes.
The proxies on the island were gone. She'd felt them die, one by one, like candles snuffed by a cold wind. The archer's work, probably. Or the half-breed's poisons. Or the mage's elemental tricks. It didn't matter. What mattered was that her trap had failed.
The Codex whispered something wordless. A suggestion. A correction.
She ignored it.
"Bring me the map," she said.
No one moved.
She turned her head, slowly, and looked at the man standing at her shoulder.
Xander.
He was tall and lean, with the weathered face of a man who'd spent his life on the water. Salt-stained clothes. Calloused hands. Eyes the color of storm clouds.
He had gone through Hell with her in the battle against the Harpy. Xander had proved to be not only a great warrior but also a passionate lover.
When she'd shown him what the Codex could do, he didn’t flinch. She'd whispered the truth into his ear—that the sea had taken everything from him, that the gods had abandoned him, that the only power in this world was the power to take. To destroy. To remake.
He'd listened. But he already believed in her before the whispers. Xander had wanted her the moment he laid eyes on her.
Now he stood at her shoulder like he'd always been there. Like he belonged.
"The map," she repeated.
Xander shifted his weight. His hand twitched toward the battered leather satchel at his hip, but he didn't move to open it.
"Leliana," he said. His voice was low, rough, the voice of a man who'd spent too many years shouting over wind and waves. "The village. The one you're planning to hit at dawn."
"What about it?"
"It's a trading post. Maybe forty people. Families. Kids."
"I know."
"There's no strategic value. No soldiers. No weapons. Just..." He trailed off, jaw working. "Just people."
Leliana set down the bone.
She rose from her throne.
The motion was slow, deliberate. She was taller than him now. The power of codex had changed her body into something else. She used that height now, letting it remind him of the space between them. The power between them.
She stepped down from the dais. Her boots squelched in the mud, in the blood, in the offal that had soaked into the cobblestones. She didn't look away from his face.
"You doubt me," she said.
It wasn't a question.
Xander's expression didn't change. That was one of the things she liked about him. He didn't flinch. Didn't cower. He just stood there, solid and stubborn, like a rock in a riptide.
"I'm asking a question," he said. "That's not doubt."
"It's the same thing."
She reached up and took his face in her hands. Her palms were slick with grease and blood—pig fat, mostly, but some of it was older. Some of it was human.
He didn't pull away.
"Let me ease your mind," she whispered.
She pushed him to his knees.
He went without resistance. The mud sucked at his trousers, stained the fabric brown. He looked up at her, his storm-cloud eyes unreadable, and waited.
Leliana turned.
"Piet," she said.
The man who stepped forward was younger than Xander, broader in the shoulders, with the dull, obedient face of someone who'd been broken and rebuilt. He'd been a blacksmith once. Now he was just another piece of meat that moved when she told it to.
She grabbed him by the collar and dragged him forward. He stumbled, caught himself, and ended up on his knees beside Xander, close enough that their shoulders brushed.
Xander glared at Piet. The fisherman was unable to hide his jealousy of the young recruit.
"Both of you," she said. "Don't move."
She knelt between them.
The mud soaked through her trousers immediately. Cold. Wet. She ignored it. Her hands moved to Xander's belt, then Piet's, working the buckles with practiced efficiency. Leather creaked. Metal clinked.
She pulled them both free.
Xander was already half-hard—he always was, around her. The fear and the desire tangled together in his gut until he couldn't tell them apart. Piet was slower to respond, but his body knew what to do. It always did.
She took one in each hand.
The weight of them. The heat. She stroked slowly, deliberately, her thumbs sliding over the heads, smearing the pre-cum that beaded there. Xander hissed through his teeth. Piet made a sound like a wounded animal.
"Look at me," she commanded.
They looked.
"You think I'm a monster," she said. "You think I've lost myself.”
She tightened her grip. Both men groaned.
"I know exactly what I’m doing."
She leaned forward and took Xander into her mouth.
He was thick, salty, familiar. She'd had him before—more times than she could count. On the road. In the ruins of farmhouses. Against the trunk of a dead oak tree while the dead stood watch. His taste was a constant, something she could anchor herself to when the Codex whispered too loud.
She took him deep. Let him hit the back of her throat. Held there until her eyes watered, then pulled back with a wet gasp.
"Fuck," Xander breathed.
She didn't answer.
She turned to Piet.
He was bigger than Xander—thicker, longer, the kind of cock that made women nervous. Leliana wasn't nervous. She'd taken bigger. She'd taken worse. She opened her mouth and swallowed him whole.
Piet cried out. His hands flew to her hair, tangling in the red strands, not pushing, just holding on. She let him. She liked the weight of his hands on her head. Liked the way he shook beneath her.
She pulled off him, spit trailing from her lips to his shaft, and spat directly onto the head of his cock.
"Greedy," she said.
She took him again.
She worked them both like that—mouth on one, hand on the other, switching, alternating. Spit and pre-cum slicked her fingers. Slicked her chin. Dripped onto her breasts, her armor, the mud between her knees.
The dead watched.
Their hollow eyes, their rotting faces, their absolute silence. They didn't care. They couldn't care. But she could feel their attention anyway, a weight pressing against her skin, and she liked it. Liked knowing that even in this, even on her knees in the filth, she was in control.
She pulled off Piet with a wet pop.
"You will obey me," she said.
She took Xander back into her mouth. Deep. Sloppy. She could feel him getting close—the way his thighs tensed against her shoulders, the way his breath came in short, sharp gasps.
"Both of you."
She stroked Piet faster. His hips bucked into her fist, chasing release.
"You will kill for me."
She sucked Xander harder. Hollowed her cheeks. Ran her tongue along the vein on the underside of his cock.
"You will burn for me."
Piet came first.
Hot, thick ropes of it splashed across her tits and belly, painting her skin white. She didn't stop stroking him. Didn't slow down. She milked him through it, squeezing every last drop onto her chest until he was shuddering and gasping and begging her to stop.
She didn't.
She kept stroking him, soft and slow, while she turned her attention back to Xander.
"And you will come for me," she said.
She took him deep one more time. Let him feel the back of her throat. Let him feel her swallow around him.
He came with a roar.
She captured every drop. Swallowed it down—salty, bitter, alive. She kept her mouth on him until he was soft, until he was trembling, until he was pulling at her hair and gasping for mercy.
Then she let him fall from her lips.
She rose.
Her knees were muddy. Her face was a mess—spit and cum and God knew what else. She didn't wipe it off. She wanted them to see. Wanted them to remember.
She scooped the cum off her tits with two fingers and licked them clean.
"Now," she said. "The map."
Xander, still on his knees, still shaking, pulled the satchel from his hip. His hands fumbled with the clasp. He pulled out a rolled parchment, stained and torn, and held it up to her.
She took it.
The village was marked in red ink. A trading post on the river, twelve miles east. Forty souls, give or take. Farms on the outskirts. A mill. A chapel.
She traced her finger over the chapel. The church of the Hanged God—a minor deity, barely worth worshipping, but his followers had helped hide some of the survivors from her last raid. That was reason enough.
"Burn it," she said.
Xander looked up at her. His eyes were red-rimmed, his mouth still open, still gasping for air. He looked like a man who'd just been fucked senseless. He looked like a man who'd just watched his soul get torn out and handed back to him.
"All of it?"
"All of it." She rolled the parchment and tucked it into her belt. "Every man, woman, and child. Every building. Every animal. Leave nothing standing."
He didn't argue.
Piet was already on his feet, tucking himself back into his trousers, his face blank, his obedience absolute. He'd do what she said. He'd always do what she said.
Xander was slower to rise. But he rose.
He always did.
Leliana turned to face the army.
Two hundred corpses, maybe more, standing in perfect formation. Waiting for her command. Waiting for the only thing they understood anymore—direction. Purpose. The will of the one who'd raised them.
She raised her hand.
"Burn the village," she said.
The dead didn't cheer. Didn't shout. Didn't stamp their feet or clang their weapons.
They simply turned.
As one. Two hundred rotting faces, turning toward the east, toward the river, toward the village that would be ash by nightfall.
Leliana watched them go.
She felt nothing.
Not satisfaction. Not anticipation. Not even the cold, quiet joy she'd once taken in revenge.
Just... nothing.
The Codex pulsed in her mind. A reminder. A promise.
Fox was still out there. Arielle. Everly. And somewhere, in the ruins of a childhood she'd tried to bury, there was a farm girl who'd survived the same raid that had taken everything from Leliana—and somehow, impossibly, had kept her soul intact.
She'd find them.
She'd burn them.
She'd leave nothing standing.
But first, she needed to wash the taste of cum out of her mouth.
She turned and walked toward the ruined well at the center of the square, leaving Xander and Piet to follow in her wake. Behind her, the dead marched east, their hollow feet striking the cobblestones in perfect unison.
The sound was like a heartbeat.
The sound was like a drum.
The sound was like the end of the world, walking slowly toward a village that didn't know it was already dead.
And somewhere, far to the west, Fox woke from a dream of fire with a scream caught in his throat and Arielle's name on his lips.
But that was another story.
This one belonged to Leliana.
And it was just getting started.