Execution

“No one who witnesses the falling of the sky makes peace with the sea.”

That was how her father’s saying went, not that Gossamé had ever understood what it meant. Why she found herself remembering it now, standing on pearlescent white sand at the very edge of the world, she couldn’t say.

Here, she was very far from both the sea and the sky.

She wondered, feeling the sharp point of the executioner’s carbon-alloy spear at the small of her back, how the azure waters that ended in an abrupt line a mere one hundred yards from her position appeared so still even though they were in actuality pouring over the edge into the black void of the Nothingness-beyond-the-World. Perhaps one instructor or another, in some long-ago lesson, had told her the seemingly bottomless pool was fed by an underground source so gentle that it only barely overflowed the glittering green stone barrier between it and the world’s end. If so, she didn’t recall.

Although she had plenty of other things to be concerned about at the moment, Gossamé found the silence of greatest interest. What she did know about the water was that once it ran over the edge, it fell in an unending waterfall. Every other waterfall she’d ever been near had been noisy to the point of irritation, but this falling water had nothing to land on—or, if it did, that landing was so far distant that the sound never returned to the range of human hearing.

She sighed, pursing her lips, feeling acutely put out by the entire ordeal. Soon, the spear would be thrust, with great swiftness and decorum, through her heart. And then, with what she suspected would be far less gravity, her lifeless body would be pushed off it into the pool where dozens of her ancestors had also been left to…

To what? It had been several years since a member of the royal family had been disposed of, so Gossamé supposed it was no surprise that she observed no floating corpse. Perhaps the last had simply decomposed and the bones sunk to the depths and these were exactly the sorts of ideas which, when uttered, had given those who disapproved of her an excuse to petition the king to send her to her doom.

Of course, she had no intention of dying so conveniently.

Not when they foolishly hadn’t taken her rings.

Ba-bink!

The chime of her handcuffs being deactivated resounded over the silent water, and Gossamé half-thought she even saw a tiny ripple pass over the reflection of the pale yellow sun hanging in the ever-starlit teal sky.

“The time arrives, princesscia,” intoned the grave, low voice of the executioner. “When the solar body centers itself above the water, we send you ahead to prepare the sunlit road for our people in the world that is to follow.”

Gossamé couldn’t help but be impressed how he handled the lockchip that had freed her hands and spoke such serious words without the spearhead moving even a little against her back. That wouldn’t save him, but she took pride in being a person who recognized the good qualities of others—even if they belonged to the unfortunate soul who had been sent to escort a poor, disarmed princess to her watery tomb. He was just following orders, but that was no excuse. She had learned that lesson long ago.

Less than a minute remained before the weak sun’s movement would take it to the dead center of the pool, but Gossamé allowed herself a moment to rub her wrists. After all, she was about to do something that had never been done before: return from the dead. Surely she should do so in comfort.

At least that’s what her more flippant side said. The practical, ruthless Gossamé valued the motion for the way it hid her hands from the executioner so he wouldn’t have even a hint of warning of what was coming next. No point in giving things away and getting stabbed right before she made her escape.

Seconds left. With an inhalation Gossamé knew the executioner would mistake as preparing herself for death, she lifted her hand to her lips—and snapped her fingers into the taut, splayed, fan-like arc of an abbreviated Sync Rite.

“Apolonique!”

A four-pointed star of light burst into existence over the pool, and Gossamé hurled herself to the ground to dodge the thrust she knew would come. The spear’s point sliced through the skin at the top of her left shoulder, but that was all the purchase it found. A good effort, really, given how surprised the executioner must have been by her sudden cry.

But not good enough, and he would get no second chance to complete his task.

Apolonique’s gold-edged silver armor reflected kaleidoscopic the colors of Ruler’s Departure as it blurred into a killing stance in the air above and behind the executioner, radiant blue light from its boosters streaking across the scene. The man’s gray robes flared around him as he spun to try to track the motion of Gossamé’s partner and most treasured secret. Although she didn’t rejoice in the loss of life, Gossamé couldn’t help, in the forever-instant of stillness that always seemed to happen at the precipice of death, admire the finesse of Apolonique’s fighting. By its positioning, it had forced the executioner to turn away from her, toward his unexpected assailant, preventing any last, desperate attempt to end her life before the inevitable finale of his own.

And so she smiled as she saw the energy scythe ignite into pink deadliness along Apolonique’s drawn-back arm.

Then the still moment ended, the strike came before the executioner even realized that his survival instincts had taken control of his body in defiance of his duty, before he could even twitch the spear in his hands, and the two halves of the man’s body evaporated from unbearable force drawn from a plane beyond the existence of humankind.

Gossamé got to her feet, brushing the sand off her skirt. Apolonique’s energy scythe dissolved into nothing, and it floated over to greet her. The humanoid mech hovered just above the ground, the gentle propulsion from its foot jets creating small divots in the sand beneath it. It bowed deeply, one chrome-and-gold arm across its torso, the other extended, palm up, to Gossamé.

“Still you insist on formalities, my friend,” she said, placing her right hand over the armored fingers before her. “I told you I have no use for such things.”

The sync screens embedded into each of the five rings that banded her own fingers brightened in response, and Gossamé laughed. When they dulled again, all that remained were arrays of glinting sparkles in a blackness that, when Apolonique was not manifest in the human plane, too many—including the executioner and the soldiers who had turned her over to him—assumed were mere onyx inserts.

In their defense, no one knew the twenty-fourth princess of the kingdom could sync with a Magisterial. If they did, they would not have been able to arrange for her now failed execution.

“This may be the last time you address me as a princess, true,” Gossamé said. “But whether the next time is as monarch or a nationless outcast… well, we’ll see.”

That was indeed the crux of the entire situation, the same one she had been avoiding for years now. She was still the same troublesome, ambivalent princess she had been before being sentenced to death. She still concealed the Magisterial that gave her a right to lay at least partial claim to her father’s crown when it one day became masterless. She still sought an answer to the question in her soul, the one she could no longer leave without solution.

Even at spearpoint, she had not found it.

Apolonique straightened, returning to its full nine-foot height so that Gossamé had to crane her neck to meet the gleaming green eyes looking down from between the geometric plates of its face. Her rings shone again.

“Yes, we came in a ground jet. I suppose we should take it back, even if I wouldn’t mind you carrying me. It is a royal asset, after all. As long as we can find…”

She cast her gaze around white sand, then bent to pick up the thumbnail-sized lockchip from where it lay. The executioner must have still had it in his hand when Apolonique manifested and dropped it before he died, preventing it from being vaporized along with him. She left the handcuffs there, but then changed her mind and went back for them.

Maybe it would make for a better entrance if she returned with the same shackles she’d been led away in.