The Inertial Queen

Payton stood, rooted to the spot, as hot tears burned into her cheeks. It felt as if they were searing her skin, etching external symbols of her internal failures. The pain was so intense that she couldn’t feel it. She couldn’t think. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even lift her head.

Slowly she became aware of a subtle shift in the air around her. It was becoming cooler. The close dank humidity was withdrawing in the face of a knife’s edge sharp chill. Payton’s breathing became less labored and she began to have thoughts about recovery.

“How do I deal with this horrid essence of fear incarnate?” she thought. “What weapons would best serve me?”

Payton decided that she felt recovered enough to risk another look at the horrid apparition and tentatively lifted just her eyes, too wary of the demon to chance facing it full on. What she saw immediately stole her breath away again.

The hulking form of the Fear Demon had withdrawn and been replaced by a smaller, yet no less remarkable figure. Where the Fear Demon had emitted a masculine aura, there was no mistaking that the regal figure now occupying center stage in Payton’s world was female. She too was tall, although this was not the first thing Payton noticed about her. What Payton noticed first were her eyes.

This statuesque figure had clear mesmerizing eyes that seemed to house the threshold to infinity. They were blue-violet ringed with green and specked with brown. They were round and lashless. Those eyes were unlike anything Payton had ever seen. They were, in a word, remarkable.

Payton took an involuntary step towards those eyes before she realized what she had done.

“Hang on.” she thought. “What the hell am I doing?” Summoning up rather more bravado into her voice than she felt, Payton looked defiantly at the haughty figure in front of her and demanded, “Who are you?!”

As she waited for an answer, Payton looked more carefully at the figure in front of her. She had blue-black hair, which hung in a straight, still sheet down to the back of her knees. A circlet of copper adorned her brow. Her dress seemed to be of liquid pewter cascading gracefully down over her form from the rather unusual amber pins clasped at the shoulders. The dress fascinated Payton. It was so liquid, so alive and at the same time flat and lifeless.

As Payton continued to study the dress, words crept into her head and gripped her mind with cold fingers, freezing her soul and capturing her body.

“Who am I, girl? I am the Queen you have coronated and placed on a pedestal to rule your life. Look into my eyes and be still. What do you see there?”

Payton stood transfixed and unmoving; unable to respond.

The chilling voice went on. I am decay, frost, and immobility. I am your impotence and inability to act. I am the chain that binds you to stagnation. I am inertial despair freezing your lifeblood. I hold your powerlessness out to you in a mirror. What you see in my eyes is not eternity, but a pool of all you have lost because you chose to make me your Queen.

Payton stood stunned, frozen in her tracks and sinking into a pool of desolation so deep that not even her tears could find her.