The Villainess's Reputation [Kingdom Building]

340. Landon in Nicola Uprising

Inside a Carriage, Somewhere on the Road to Vassal States of Ancorna, Ancorna Empire“Why are you so determined to have a senate created to control the power of the Emperor of Ancorna, Father?” Benric asked. The carriage took a sharp jolt just as the question left his mouth, swaying them both on the plush velvet seats. He watched his father, Prince Landon, waiting intently for an answer.

Prince Landon only offered a small, hollow smile, a melancholy expression that didn't quite reach his eyes. “Oh… you don’t know that story?”

Gracie leaned forward, joining her brother with an eager, excited nod. “Of course we don’t! Why go so far as to start a rebellion? You even gave up your right of succession just to make deals with our aunts and uncle!”

Across from them, their mother, Maria, gently patted Gracie’s head to calm her enthusiasm. Her voice was quiet, steeped in an old, heavy weight. “It’s very important to us, sweethearts.”

Landon looked out the carriage window for a long moment, watching the landscape blur past in shades of green and grey. When he finally turned back, the warmth of a father had faded from his face, replaced by the grim shadow of a survivor.

“Well… if you two really want to know… I will tell you. It happened years ago, when I was only seventeen, visiting the vassal state of Foster Liam.”

“Do you remember reading about the Nicola Uprising?” Maria asked softly. “The one the history books claim was resolved peacefully in just one night?”

Both the young prince and princess nodded quickly, their eyes wide with anticipation.

“It wasn’t an uprising,” Landon said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly register that commanded absolute silence inside the carriage. “It was just a simple, peaceful protest. And that night…”

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The lantern light only cut three feet into the thick, choking fog of residual smoke, illuminating a single velvet shoe sticking out from beneath a pile of coarse, blood-soaked cloaks.

I reached down. My fingers were shaking too violently to flex properly, slipping twice against the slick leather of the shoe before I could get a secure grip. When I pulled, the weight didn’t budge. I had to brace my knees against the cobblestones, stones that smelled sickeningly sweet, like iron and scorched hair and heave until my shoulders popped. The wood of the handcart groaned as it took the body of an old man whose face had been entirely melted away by the Imperial mages' fire.

That was twenty-four. Or twenty-five.

The numbers had stopped making sense to me three hours ago, somewhere around the time my palms had been skinned raw against the rough wood of the cart handles. I wiped my hands on my trousers, terrified that the dark, wet stains on my linen were Maria’s, before turning my eyes back into the dark.

“Maria!” I called out. My voice didn't sound like a prince's anymore. It was a raspy, broken scrape, worn thin by the smoke of a dozen active fires and hours of screaming. “Maria!”

No one answered me. The only sounds in the central square of Foster Liam were the low, agonizing groans of the dying and the repetitive, heavy thud of volunteers lifting corpses into carts.

An hour before it all began, this square had been full of life. I had stood right there, holding Maria’s hand beneath the rough fabric of our commoners' cloaks. We had snuck out of the diplomatic estate just to see the protest. It was supposed to be peaceful. The people of the vassal state were only singing, holding up banners demanding a voice in the taxation, demanding direct legislation. I remember being fascinated by their passion. Maria had smiled at me, whispering in my ear about how brave they were.

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Then, the iron gates of the square had slammed shut.

Prince Landon closed his eyes, his fists tightening.

But even now, decades later, the flash-burn memory of it is seared into my eyelids. The sky hadn't fallen; my father's legions had simply broken the air apart. There had been no warning command, no order to disperse. Just the sudden, deafening crack of atmospheric mana compressing. The mages, stationed on the high walls encircling the square, rained down bursts of white lilies to make kinetic force.

It wasn't a battle. It was a slaughterhouse with stone walls. I was thrown into a fountain by the initial blast wave, the impact knocking the air clean from my lungs. When I surfaced, gasping, the crowd had turned into a frantic, crushing wall of flesh, fleeing from the walls only to be bottlenecked at the chained gates. I lost a toe in the stampede. I screamed her name until my throat bled as the very air turned to fire.

Now, the silence of the night was worse than the screaming.

I dragged the handcart forward. The wheel caught on a discarded protest banner, the fabric wrapping around the axle. I dropped to my knees, frantically tearing at the cloth. It was stained with our imperial crest, defaced with harsh charcoal lines by the protestors. , they had written across the silk.

Absolute power, I thought, my teeth grinding together until they clicked. This is what absolute power looks like. A butcher's yard.

I moved to the next pile of bodies near the eastern gate, where the crushing had been the worst. The Imperial mages had systematically targeted the exits, leaving the corpses piled three feet high. My boots squelched in the dark. Every step felt like lifting pure lead.

I knelt by a young woman lying face down in the mud, her hair tangled in glass shards from a shattered lantern. My heart leaped into my throat. “Maria?”

I rolled her over, my hands slick with her blood. The face that looked up at me was bloated, her eyes wide with the terror of suffocation, but it wasn't her. It was just another nameless girl from Foster Liam. Another subject of my father's empire.

I collapsed backward against the stone wall, my breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. I looked at my hands, the hands of the Prince of Ancorna. This blood was on my family's name. My father had ordered the legions to "stabilize" the vassal state. This was their stability. A silence bought with a thousand innocent lives.

If I survive this night, I thought, staring blankly into the suffocating dark, if I ever sit on that throne, I will tear it apart. I will build a senate. I will chain the crown. No single man should ever have the power to turn a city into a grave.

A soft, weak cough cut through the low murmurs of the square.

It came from beneath a collapsed wooden stall a few feet away. I scrambled forward on my hands and knees, ignoring the sharp stones cutting through my trousers. I threw aside a splintered beam, my fingers clawing through the debris until I saw a familiar green cloak, torn and covered in grey ash.

“Maria!”

I pulled the debris away, reaching down to lift her. Her face was pale, smeared with soot, and there was a deep bruise forming along her jaw where she had been thrown against the cobblestones, but her eyes fluttered open. She looked at me, her chest heaving as she drew in a painful, wheezing breath.

“Landon...” she whispered, her fingers weakly grasping at my sleeve. “The... the people... they didn't do anything wrong...”

I pulled her tightly against my chest, burying my face in her ash-scented hair, my tears finally breaking through the crust of dirt on my face. I held her as the first pale, gray light of dawn began to bleed through the smoke overhead, slowly revealing the true, unimaginable scale of the slaughter around us.

I looked over her shoulder at the field of the dead, and my heart hardened into something cold and permanent.

“I know,” I choked out, watching the sunlight catch on the thousands of bodies we hadn't reached yet. “I know. And I will never let them forget.”

Inside the carriage, the silence returned, heavy and absolute. Benric and Gracie sat frozen, the glamorous illusions of the empire completely shattered in their minds.

Landon reached across the seat, taking Maria's hand and squeezing it tightly, his resolve as unyielding today as it was on that blood-soaked night in Foster Liam.