The sky over Jupiter burned a slow, sullen red as twilight swallowed the palace towers. From the highest balcony, King Altherion stared out with a hollow gaze. The banners still whispered of triumph; the armies still marched in polished cadence; the coffers still overflowed. But a wanter something gnawed at him — not hunger of coin or conquest, but an absence that would not be soothed. He had no son.
Queen Scarlet moved at his shoulder like a shadow in silk. Thirty-five years she had been his companion — patient, dutiful — and the palace had learned to call her gentle. Her body, however, had betrayed the court's desire: it had given him nothing.
That night, torches gilding the halls and music spilling from the banquet, Altherion's smile was a mask that cracked at the edges. Laughter ricocheted empty. When the guests left and the chandeliers were guttered, he sat alone before a cradle that had gathered dust more years than any living memory. He looked at the wood and at the faces frozen in painted portraits and made a choice that would unmoor the kingdom.
---
Rumors travel fast in a court that lives by rumor. In the months that followed, maidens came to the king's chambers — some trembling with feigned eagerness, some dragged by royal command. From that hunger two children were born.
Penelope's child arrived first: a girl with hair like a night without stars and eyes that caught the moon and kept it. The king's expression folded to disappointment, so subtle it might have been a courtier's joke. He named her Selene — Moon — an emblem of what he had wanted but never held.
Then came Emilia's son. Emilia — quick, hungry, crowned in ambition — gave Altherion the thing he believed had been missing. When he held the infant high, the court forgot how to breathe. "Yoresh," the king proclaimed, "Successor." Love (or its imitation) settled like warmth around Emilia and the boy.
From that hour, the palace split like a rotten seam. Yoresh and Emilia drank the king's favor. Penelope and Selene were given corners and cold meals and the looks of people who believed themselves better. Selene learned the shape of that look before she learned the shape of a dog-eared prayer.
She was twelve when she first named the injustice.
"Mother," Selene whispered in their cramped room, the distant feasts' laughter a dull ache in her ribs, "why do they look at us as though we do not belong?"
Penelope's hands moved with the small, careful gestures of a woman who had stitched away scorn a thousand times. She drew her daughter close. "Because we remind them," she said, voice low, "of what they wish to forget. Remember who you are, moon. That will not change."
Selene's fists curled until her nails left half-moons on her palms. "I hate them."
"Do not—" Penelope began.
"I do." Tears came quick and furious. "For how they treat you. For how they treat me."
Penelope looked at the girl and saw both flame and shadow living in the same heart. Within the year they left — not by permission but by necessity. One night under the gray sweep of cloud, mother and daughter slipped into the outerlands and vanished from the palace's memory.
---
Years braided themselves thin. Yoresh wore the crown but not the strength. A slow illness hollowed him: pale hands, tremors, breaths that came like bargains. When Altherion died the kingdom bowed and made a show of grief; no one asked to see the true price of succession. Yoresh took the throne like a man wearing someone else's armor. He lasted a decade before the disease took him too. Queen Scarlet followed, a small grief folding into the larger unspoken failures of a dynasty.
When the court had no leader left and panic crept into council chambers, they began to remember the child they'd dismissed. It took months of searching before guards found Penelope and Selene living in a quiet village where the sea wind tasted of salt and forgetfulness.
They told Selene of Yoresh's death as one might read a dry ledger. She did not fall apart. She looked at Penelope, at the thin lines time had cut into her mother's face, and then at the soldiers with their bright epaulettes.
"So," she said, cool and even. "Now you remember me."
---
The throne room crackled on the day Selene returned. Torches made the marble glow blood-warm. Nobles and guards and whispering servants assembled like theater extras waiting for the main show. Selene moved into the hush in a black gown that dragged the light with it. Penelope walked beside her, smaller now but steady.
The elder councilor read the people's decree: the bloodline demanded a queen; Jupiter had none other to call. "Selene," he pronounced, "by right of lineage, you shall be crowned."
Silence stretched. Old stares loosened like ropes. Selene felt them — the same disdain that had carved their early years — and she let the silence hold, a thing heavy enough to break bones.
"At last," she said, voice clear as a winter bell, "the people decree it? The same people who left us to rot? Who feasted while we found bread in gutters?"
No one answered. Behind stony faces, fear rustled.
Selene stepped onto the dais. The torches leaned toward her as if to hear better. She raised her hands and the flames did not merely leap — they screamed higher, twisting as if threaded to her will. Gasps pricked the hall like sudden rain.
"From this day," she declared, each syllable a small drumbeat, "mercy dies on Jupiter. You will remember what you did to us. Every dawn you wake, every night you sleep — you will pay."
They placed the crown upon her brow and called it coronation. But the weight that settled on Selene's head was not blessing; it was verdict. In that instant, the forgotten daughter became something else. The Demon Queen was born not with a whisper but with a sentence.
---
Jupiter bled under her rule. Selene's power learned cruelty as an art: dissenters vanished in silence, rituals that had been whispered about in forbidden corners came to life under her palms, towns folded into ash and rumor. Her sorcery grew black and deliberate. The people tasted vengeance and learned to fear the flavor.
Still, when moonlight slid across her chamber and softened the angles of a face carved by rage, Penelope's gentle hand remained the only touch that did not scorch. The old woman's voice was a fragile compass.
"Daughter," she would say, "do not let hate drown the rest of you. There was light in you once."
"If I forget the fire," Selene replied, the tension in her jaw like a wire, "they will forget what they did to us."
Penelope smiled a small, sad thing and settled into silence.
On Selene's thirty-first birthday, the palace unfurled red banners and the city murmured the ritual phrases of celebration. But joy is a brittle thing in a house built on bone. Penelope lay still in her bed, breath gone as if night had reached in and folded her hands for her. Selene found her as one finds a closed book.
"No," Selene whispered first, then louder, then a sound that was not a word at all. She shook her mother until the frail body did not answer. "Wake. Wake."
No assassin had come. No spear had pierced the throat. The truth slid like ice: time and neglect had done what no traitor could. Selene felt the world contract to the size of a single, clean blade.
"They killed her," she told the quiet room though no hand had struck. "They let her die. For that — they will suffer."
That night she trafficked with shadows no court had named aloud. Blood, smoke, and old runes braided around her until flesh and spirit changed form. The ritual took everything and left a shape both woman and something monstrous, ageless and merciless. The ritual did not grant peace. It gave power — and the hunger that comes with it.
---
Her wrath did not trickle. It poured. Plague and famine she summoned as one might unleash trained hounds. Communities turned on one another, hunger teaching neighbors to forget kinship. Fields burned; riverbeds ran thick with iron-dark water. Jupiter learned the sound of its own fall.
But not all was ash. Here and there, survivors clasped to hope like driftwood. They whispered names in the dark and kept small lights hidden in cellars.
Selene sat upon a throne of bleached bone, her crown catching the sickly half-light. Even as she watched the realm crumble into a mosaic of grief, her appetite for revenge was a coal that brightened.
"Is this enough?" she asked the shadows that answered without bodies.
"No," they said as if she had asked something obvious.
Her gaze turned upward, past ruined towers and cindered plains, to a red globe shimmering sharp and distant.
Beyond Jupiter lay Mars — unbroken, scarlet and patient, guarded by something older than prophecy. Whispers in the black spoke of a beast bound and waiting, a ruin of claws and chains whose fury matched hers.
Selene's lips curved. Her silver eyes caught the star's light and kept it. "Let the stars bear witness," she said. "If Jupiter has tasted my fury, Mars will taste my conquest."
She rose, and the palace felt the motion like the shifting of a continent. Fire at her back, shadows at her heels, the Demon Queen set her sight upon the red world — not knowing, as any great conqueror pretends to not know, that what waited on Mars would not bow. It would resist.