Daughter of Death -Epilogue (Patreon)

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EPILOGUE

In the years following, The Kingdom of Bayern waited patiently for another heir to its throne. But it never came. 

Many confirmed that The Queen and her King lay regularly together and in fact quite frequently. Some of her Royal Household reported multiple occasions in a single day whilst members of The King’s small set of attendants could only report the same. 

The Royal Council waited two months after Reina's coronation to send a doctor to confirm Her Majesty's condition but that doctor returned word that The Queen was not yet with child. Her own attendants were frequently consulted after that but none could ever confirm that anything was awry or had changed.

“It’s so dull,” Reina told Ferdinand as she rolled over in bed onto her stomach having been satisfied again in making love to her King. “All they secretly want is to secure an heir. They’ll never understand why they can’t have one and why even if I was capable that I never would give them one...”

“Don’t let it vex you my love,” Ferdinand told her.

“I shan’t. I will bewitch them to concern themselves with other matters.”

And so, she had to. Once The Council suspected Reina was barren like her mother had seemed to be, they began seeking out the ways that her parents had taken in order to try and conceive. They suggested trips to other lands, soothsayers and doctors to visit Bayern, a new diet for Reina to try... Reina went along with all of it if only to entertain herself and Ferdinand with experiencing travel (which she never had done) and to toy with the men (and occasionally women) that came to examine her.

But years passed and Reina did not become pregnant and slowly but surely The Council dropped the subject altogether and ‘happily’ let Reina and Ferdinand reign over the kingdom as they saw fit.

Minus one crude assassination attempt early in her reign by some pathetic yet familiar noble wielding a hunting knife that Reina promptly drank dry, she and her husband ruled freely and without opposition for many, many years.

After about twenty years on the throne, Reina and her love had to adopt methods by which to conceal themselves from suspicion and after thirty years had passed anyone who had ever beheld them saw nothing awry in their youthful appearances for the two had become very good at convincing others otherwise.

They also had amassed a large fortune for Bayern and their kingdom had not seen any need for diplomatic measures. The sovereigns of Bayern seemed to have a way of making any other kingdom see their side on any and every matter that ever came up.

The dwarves who had once cared for Reina were no longer cared for by her. Whilst some passed away sad still with memory of her, others were robbed of ever knowing they had once given hospitality to the now Queen of Bayern –and her husband too. The tales involving them and their involvement had spread too far out of Bayern to be forgotten but within a generation’s time, the once famed seven men were completely forgotten by the people of the kingdom that had given them much esteem for the ‘miracle’ of Reina’s return.

But their Queen was too selfish to feel anything other than they had in proper obligation and duty served their purpose and now she was free to be who she had always been born to be: Queen and sovereign over a vast land that answered only to her desires.

As Ferdinand had promised her once long ago, Reina had everything she could ever want.

But after a half a century of living in such a lifestyle, Reina began to crave something more. 

She stood in front of her mirror –her former stepmother’s and the only one she could see herself reflected in—and gazed at her perfectly formed youthful body. She had beautiful white skin, silky midnight hair down to her waist and perfectly formed hips and breasts that her husband doted upon daily. Reina could find no imperfection.

Where she had once called her stepmother vain and cruel, Reina had now become the embodiment of all the rumours spread about the late ‘Evil Queen’. It was, to her mind, tastily ironic.

Ferdinand came up behind her and pressed a kiss to her shoulder before spreading her legs a little and letting his hands wander.

Reina allowed it though her face bore no expression of pleasure or happiness. It was blank, even when her husband picked her up in his arms and brought her to their bed then quickly shed his clothes and began to ravish her once again.

“Oh my darling the way you made those men fight one another today was so arousing,” Ferdinand told her as he pressed careful kisses to her neck and shoulder and lay himself between her legs. “And then to see you overtop their bodies taking your spoils...” He let out a grunt of pleasure as he pictured it again and began moving his hips in quick rhythm completely turned on by his memories.

Reina did not reply as she pictured the way Ferdinand had then began letting his lips roam over hers earlier that day, licking the blood from her mouth and off of her bosom where much of it had spilt in her haste to consume her quarry. And now though her husband’s movements spoke to his arousal and the rhythm jostled her breasts she felt no pleasure in it as she once had.

In fact, it had been a long time since she had enjoyed this.

For so long the two had taken such pleasure in one another. But now Reina was bored with the lavish life they led together and she was no longer intoxicated by Ferdinand’s lust and constant worship of her and her deeds. He had lost his worth to her. Now he was merely a vessel for her to use when she desired pleasure –only she no longer found it in him. His devotion was too full of the same emotion that she realized she felt to be dull and detested now, his praise felt pointless to her ears and every time they made love she found it merely an act of repetition. She only let herself go over the edge when she felt she needed to let off a bit of sexual repression. Otherwise Ferdinand’s touch elicited nothing from her anymore. And the man was too intoxicated in his own feelings of love and sexual drive to see it.

Reina attempted to feel something as she rolled him over and tried getting off on him herself but it didn’t work. She reached down and pulled Ferdinand up into a sitting position where they kissed for a short while before she leaned back and pulled him on top of her and allowed him to take over again. He did so with pleasure and was pleased when Reina pulled him closer and sank her teeth into him.

Her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms around his shoulders as she drank from him and he let out a sound of contentment as a wave of gratification went through him pausing his pace.

Ferdinand did not realize his wife was not sharing in this satisfaction of their union until it was too late. The King struggled with Reina as her own father had done more than fifty years ago but the girl had taken much of his strength. Like King Arnaud, King Ferdinand never got the gratification of knowing why she was taking his life. And like the late King before him, Ferdinand’s death would be mourned as a tragedy based entirely on lies of what had actually befallen him that night.

Queen Reina spent very little time after that in ruling her kingdom. Bayern eventually moved into a short period of political turmoil after their Queen went off to travel and did not ever return. Some said she had passed away peacefully in her castle only two short years after her beloved husband, others were told she hadn’t an heir and thus had passed on her kingdom through signing it over by rites of an Order of Succession. All that was known for sure was that Bayern’s next sovereign only came to the throne after a long and arduous time of uncertainty for The Crown –by which time its former Queen was living happily as she pleased traveling from kingdom to kingdom.

Reina did as she pleased for the rest of her existence. A Countess in Hungary in the late 1500s called Erzsébet Báthory began murdering people to bathe in their blood under the guise that it kept her young and beautiful. This rumor was spread of course because the vampir who performed the atrocities had not aged in decades and had become too lazy to cover up her inexplicable youth.

An English poet and actor wrote very sexual sonnets about a mysterious ‘Dark Lady’ in the early 1600s never revealing her identity to the world especially because he changed his muse’s snow-white skin to ‘dun’ in his descriptions of her. Reina felt pleased with that, especially because she destroyed the marriage of a poor Italian man in the process having murdered his wife and posed as her for a time using her powers of persuasion to avoid detection –all the while toying with the English dramatist until she eventually murdered him at his West Midland home in April of 1616.

Though the nicknamed ‘Daughter of Death’ took on many names and many roles, she perhaps has always been best remembered by the nickname given to her by two German brothers who collected fairy stories and added one rumoured telling of her tale to their book where they called her Snow White.

But Reina’s story never was a fairytale.