Off With Her Head

The Hollow Mountains purged all of its bodily substances, its fluids, its insides. It began with a trickle of underwocks, drizzling out from the crevices and caves with the subtleness of a nosebleed. They flowed out from the white rock in stark and silent sanguinity, circling over the climbing forces of the White Order. Then a trickle became a steady stream, then an ever-increasing flood, swelling and swelling until a torrent of blood red feathers and beaks and talons was pouring out from every marble orifice, coalescing in a levitating spiral that obscured all the grey-black sky as far as any soldier climbing the cliffs could see. Everything within the slopes under their feet had been expelled, the pale and stone-cold body bursting utterly and finally in a deluge of crimson and terror—of monstrous war, swooping down in screams that sang death throughout all of Underland. 

The whole world of the dead echoed with the sound, cries ringing through its vastness—hollow as the mountains had truly become, voided of their psychopomp innards. No longer did the caverns within them squirm with clinging underwocks; no longer were the channels veins and arteries filled with the living and horrible and necessary reapers, the only true source of oblivion in this land of unlife. All that populated them now were echoed screams, the armoured and armed and panting Alisabeth, and, standing still and giant and crowned before her, the dread Queen of Underwocky.

Alice had charged in. He had been ready, to fight or to scream or to do whatever terrifying thing he was apparently destined to do. The bonny boy in blue and white had come to slay the Queen—and yet, she just stood there, gazing down at him. The living face he could glimpse just beneath the razor edge of the metal bill was drawn—tired. The nose inhaled, and the mouth sighed the breath out—the passage of real breath, not stolen or mimicked, but simply alive. With a depthless voice, shimmering rays of light through dark water, the Underwocky Queen spoke: “At last,” she hummed. Just two words: at last.

Alisabeth’s chest heaved against and fell away from the breastplate around it. He swallowed the profusion of spit in his mouth, gathered by the rapidity of his own breath: the life which he and the prophesied anathema and all the underwocks she ruled possessed alone in this land. “You won’t fight.” It was a statement, exhaled shakingly, at first. Then it was a question: “You won’t fight me?”

The Queen’s long bill swayed, tipping down towards her. “I know why you are here,” she said. “But my time was always going to end at your blade. All things must die, even here in our Underland: Underlanders must die to underwocks to be kept from their decaying madness, and underwocks are killed by the Underlanders in turn, and the Queen comes to kill the Queen, is killed by the coming Queen, is killed by the coming Queen, and on, and on, and on.”  Her long fingers, clawed with red metal and beautifully lethal, flitted through the air as she spoke, but they fell softly as down—harmless—to her sides then. “That is the prophecy. That is death, as everything must face. I will not run from it.”

Alisabeth stared. Her heart pounded despite the fact she stood as still as the Queen herself had been. Her grip felt weak around the hilt of her shovel; she didn’t quite realize her fingers were shaking, didn’t realize how much even the subconscious that was her body was overcome with dread at the words—the truth—that the Underwocky Queen spoke. She stood there and shook as the Queen extended a clawed hand out to her, upturned her palm, beckoning. “Come. Do not be afraid; it’s alright.”

Alice inhaled, exhaled; inhaled, exhaled. She felt like she was falling—perhaps she had been falling all along. But now she saw the ground. Now she saw the end, the real nothingness to come. “I don’t even know why I’m here,” she breathed. “I’m no one. I have no one. I’ve just been put in places and told what I am and what to do all my life, and I don’t want to be queen of anywhere or to kill anyone. I just—I just want to go home and bury my father. My life is nothing much, but it’s not nothing; I just…”

Once more, the Queen’s great metal beak tilted, though angled in a new way. It rose, the dark and coiled face beneath exposed, the fragment of its visible countenance softened ever so slightly. Then she moved; she took a step, then another, closer and closer through the cavern until she was there upon Alice. She did not loom, but she did not stoop. She simply reached out towards her, metalled hands finding her own gloved ones, one on the grip and one at her side. “You were never going to leave this place. Nothing can escape here, no matter their conviction or madness, no matter how much they kill or consume or bleed. My blood becomes underwocky: my blood becomes death. Yours will too.” Her hands, beneath the claws, held hers tenderly. Gently, she lifted Alice’s limp palm up to her own cheek beneath the bill, positioned it grasping into the mane of crimson feathers. She sighed, and the breath lingered between the two of them. “I’m sorry, my boy.”

Alisabeth didn’t know it happened until it was done. Her gripping hand was pulled, the shovel with it. Metal caught on metal, ringing as the bill fell away at last, revealing the face in full for only a second. The blade sheared, through and followed by red, gushing into the air, into fluttering feathers. The head was in her positioned hand, blood and blood and blood all over her arm and chest and face. Alice, along with the giant beheaded body and towards the cold marble floor, fell. She hit the bloodied, lifeless ground. It was over.