The Fury 1

They were gone. Stolen from me like shadows slipping through a keyhole at midnight, leaving only the cold residue of grief and despair. My children… my daughters, taken, vanished, and there was nothing I could do. Not for all my wealth, all my titles, all the lands of the Kingdom of Spain entrusted to me. Not even my influence or whispered power in court could claw them back from whatever hands had seized them.

I knew, in the quietest recesses of my heart, that they were alive. I clung to that flicker of hope as fiercely as I clung to the remnants of my composure. But even hope was a cruel companion, for I also knew that I might never see them again. My mind spun with endless “what-ifs,” each one more horrifying than the last. The impossibility of action weighed on me like the stone floors of the palace themselves pressing down.

I was bound for the court, waiting for an audience with His Most Catholic Majesty, Charles. Waiting to kneel and plead, to bend every ounce of my dignity into supplication. To beg a king for mercy, for justice, for the impossible. After all, a Countess’ word ought to carry weight. Must carry weight especially when her daughters were stolen in the dead of night by the very man who should have loved them, their father.

How could any sane person believe a tragedy of this magnitude could be overlooked? How could anyone fail to recognize the theft of children as a crime both against God and man? My daughters’ cries might as well echo unheard in the halls of heaven. And yet, I would face men whose attentions were purchased, whose eyes were blind to injustice, and act the part of the composed, noble woman, because to do otherwise would serve only my despair.

And then there was the minister. Old, wizened, disinterested, a man who treated every petition as a line on a checklist he would rather not mark, and a junior despite his age and experience, a man who had lost favor and simply did his job because he knew nothing else. His eyes, sunken and tired, flicked over me with mechanical indifference. I did not flinch. I did not rush. I allowed him to see me as I wished to be seen: resplendent, controlled, and unbroken.

My dress, a deep crimson of silk, clung to my form with quiet defiance. The blood-red was the color of fury, of life and loss intertwined. It was the finest silk appropriate for a woman of my station, the sort that whispered power and grief in equal measure. I would not crumble. I would not plead like a beggar. I would stand, and I would be seen.

Even if my daughters were gone.

“Countess Elena,” he began quietly, his voice measured, eyes flicking to the parchment in front of him. “It is… admirable that you bring such urgency to this matter. Though, I must caution, His Majesty is presently indisposed by other issues that demand his attention.”

“Of course,” I replied, curtsying with precision, each movement practiced and exact. My heels clicked across the polished floor as I stepped into his office. The door slammed behind me with a finality that felt almost deliberate, as if I had been imprisoned, not by iron chains, but by the invisible bonds of velvet power and gilded bureaucracy.

He seated himself behind the heavy desk, the papers of my plea laid before him. He read in silence, mumbling words to himself, his lips barely moving as if the letter’s sorrowful cries were too potent for sound. Every word seemed to weigh on him, yet I could sense a flicker of disbelief hidden behind his stoic mask.

Finally, his eyes lifted from the parchment to mine, scanning me like a scholar evaluating the authenticity of a relic. “You state here,” he began slowly, “that your eldest daughter—”

“Luisa,” I interjected sharply. She was my little girl. My voice carried the fierce protection of a mother whose blood had been spilt in anticipation of loss. No one, not even a minister, would dare reduce her to anything less than her name, her soul, her being.

He paused, blinking at me, then continued with a touch of skepticism. “Luisa… had marks upon her skin? Marks that appeared suddenly… as if carved into her flesh? Glowing green, exhaling black smoke?”

“Yes,” I said, holding his gaze with steady defiance. “She was ill beforehand, but nothing that could explain it. We sought the guidance of the priest—”

“Priests cannot fathom this,” he interrupted, voice dropping to a hushed gravity. His eyes narrowed as he leaned forward, hands pressed to the desk. “Countess, your daughter has been marked… by the heathen magic of the Americas.”

The words fell like a blade. My heart stilled for a heartbeat, then began to beat anew with a mixture of fury and despair. The room seemed to shrink around me; the velvet walls pressed close, and the polished floors gleamed like mirrors reflecting my helpless rage.

“Heathen magic?” I whispered, disbelief and fear clawing at my throat, each word catching like a shard of ice. “How… how could such a thing—?”

He raised a hand, slow, deliberate, the weight of authority pressing down like a physical force. “It is not something His Majesty can ignore,” he said, his voice low, measured, “yet it is a matter steeped in forces beyond any but one man. The current Viceroy of Mexico… the Hero, the conqueror of New Spain… Hernán Cortés—the man who by the grace of god should be buried, kept breathing by the smoked mirrors of Tezcatlipoca and the blood of a thousand altar stones. The man Spain calls Viceroy, and the Indies call Death.”

The name struck me like a thunderclap. My blood froze, as though the chill of the New World itself had seeped into my veins. Cortés, the man who had blundered his way into the Aztec empire, burned cities, slaughtered priests, and yet emerged victorious. The man who, against all natural law, had been gifted with the very magic that was supposed to burn him at the stake. And instead of punishment, he had been given dominion… free reign to wield cruelty across the Spanish Main, a shadow of terror under the guise of conquest.

I tried to speak, to protest, but the words caught in my throat. “But—”

The minister cut me off immediately, his face as impassive as carved marble. “Your daughters, regrettably… are now his property.”

The sentence fell like a hammer upon my chest. The walls of the office seemed to close in, the polished floor and velvet curtains becoming irrelevant. My mind fractured, unable to process the enormity of what he had just declared. Words ceased to enter my ears, replaced by the numbing sensation that crept along my arms, down to my hands, as if the blood itself had turned to ice.

The minister's eyes bored into mine like twin augers, unyielding as the iron spikes of a Spanish inquisitor's rack. His face, etched with the hollow piety of a man who had long ago traded his soul for the illusion of righteousness, held no flicker of mercy. “It is necessary,” he intoned, his voice a monotone dirge that slithered into my ears like smoke from a funeral pyre, barely even a sound, yet heavy enough to crush the air from my lungs. “The darkness that would otherwise sweep unchecked across the Indies and the Old World alike. Empires rise and fall on such sacrifices, Señora. Your daughters, currently... are the ink with which we seal the ledger of fate.”

Forces beyond comprehension churned in the shadows of his words, empires clashing like thunderheads over the wine-dark sea, conquistadors' blades gleaming with the fever-dream gold of El Dorado, whispers of ancient pacts forged in the blood-soaked soil of Tenochtitlán. None of it mattered. 

Not the maps unrolled across his desk like flayed skins, nor the flickering candlelight that danced mockingly over the silver crucifix dangling from his neck. All that existed in that suffocating chamber was the unbearable truth, a barbed wire coiling tighter around my heart: my children were no longer mine. 

Luisa, with her laughter like wind chimes in the mango groves, and little Isabella, whose tiny fists had once clutched at my shirt in the cradle, they were pawns now, spirited away on midnight ships bound for courts where scheming cardinals and immortal mad men bartered souls like bolts of silk. Pawns in a game of gods and conquerors, where I, a mere countess with soft hands and a conscience unscarred by the New World's cruelties, was powerless to touch them. To even whisper their names without invoking the Inquisition's shadow.

The room tilted, the walls of polished mahogany closing in like the jaws of some leviathan from the deeps. My vision blurred at the edges, not with tears, for what right had I to weep when they could not… but with the red haze of a grief too vast to contain. 

Memories surged unbidden: Luisa’s dark curls tangled in the salt breeze as we raced along the Barcelona shore, her voice piping promises of pirate treasures buried in the dunes; Isabella's chubby fingers tracing the faded scars on my forearms, relics of a life where I pretended to be a soldier before my father caught me… Gone. All gone, to fuel this mad crusade against an encroaching night that cared nothing for a mother’s love.

And then my mind fractured fully, splintering like the hull of a galleon under cannon fire. Time slowed to an almost imperceptible crawl, the minister's lips still forming the tail end of some pious platitude, his breath a stale fog of cloves and wine. 

The world narrowed to the gleam of silver on the table before me, a heavy silver candlestick, its base wrought in the shape of a coiled serpent, the flame atop it guttering like a dying star. My hand moved of its own accord, fingers wrapping around the cool metal with a quiet certainty that belied the storm within.

It was as if I had been possessed by something ancient and utterly controlled, a primal fury older than the cathedrals of Toledo or the ziggurats of the Aztecs. I became nothing more than a passenger in my own body, hurtling toward oblivion on rails of rage.

I rose without a word, the chair scraping the flagstone floor like the rasp of a blade on a whetstone. The first blow landed with a wet, resonant thud against his temple, the candlestick's weight driving his skull sideways as if he'd been struck by the hand of God Himself. He staggered, eyes widening in that split-second of disbelief, a gasp escaping his lips, half-prayer, half-curse. But there was no time for divine intervention. 

I swung again, and again, the motion mechanical, inexorable, each impact a thunderclap in the cocoon of my silence.

The only sound I made was that of complete and utter rage, a low, guttural roar building in my chest, escaping not as screams but as the raw, animal exhalation of a beast unchained. I did not hear my own fury, nor the minister's faltering pleas as they bubbled into wet gurgles. His face, once a mask of sanctimonious calm, bloomed into horror: first a mottled shade of crimson, veins bulging like rivers on a map of conquest; then deepening to bruised indigo, the skin splitting under the relentless silver arc. 

The cheekbone caved with a sickening crack, fragments of bone grinding beneath the impact as blood sprayed in fine mist, warm and coppery, flecking my shirt like the freckles on Isabella's nose. His eye swelled shut, the lid ballooning purple and obscene, while his nose splintered into jagged shards, two simple, ruined shapes that tore free with a spray of cartilage and gore, dangling by threads of flesh.

He flailed weakly, his ringed fingers, adorned with the court's gaudy opulence, clawing at my wrist, but it was the grasp of a drowning man clutching foam. His mouth worked futilely, teeth scattering across the table like ivory dice from a gambler's throw, each one chipped and bloodied as he tried to scream for help, for mercy, for me to stop.

“Please God, please!” The words slurred into a crimson froth, his pleas devolving into choked whimpers as the life ebbed from him. A feeble old man, this messenger of my undoing, who had dared to stand before me in his starched robes and declare that I could not save my daughters! 

That Luisa's fate was sealed in some unholy bargain, her innocence the price for staving off the abyss. And that Isabella was merely collateral to their dangerous game of power and control.

His body slumped at last, folding over the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The candlestick slipped from my numb fingers and clattered against the parquet, its flame hissing and dying beneath the smear of wax.

Silence fell so complete it felt as if the room itself had inhaled and held its breath. Only the distant toll of vespers from the cathedral spire and the urgent fumbling at the door told me the city kept turning. Boots thundered in the corridor—halberds clattering like a death knell.

I stood very still, chest heaving, hands trembling with the aftershocks of violence. The metallic tang of blood coated my tongue, a raw, personal proof of what I had done. Shame and relief braided through me in odd, bright strands. For a moment the polished Countess had been nothing but a woman with a broken heart and a weapon in hand.

Even in that charnel hush, a small, furious ember glowed. I did not believe him. I would not. My daughters were not property to be traded under the tables of princes and viceroys. They could be taken back; they could be made safe in hidden coves where the sea met the sky, far from the grasping hands of kings and priests. For them I would burn the world to cinders. Let the Inquisition brand me heretic if they dare, I will sail under a black sail before I kneel again.

With the slow, deliberate motion of someone reclaiming control, I set the candlestick back on the desk, gently, as if smoothing a child’s hair, before I let the first hot tears come. They were not just for the minister or the words he'd spoken; they were for every compromise, every polite bow I had ever offered in exchange for safety that proved paper-thin. They were for the spectacle I had made of myself here: a noblewoman who had to become a criminal to act like a mother.

And then my mind, sharpened by grief and guilt, swung to work: practical, cold, and precise. Emotion had lit the fuse; reason would plot the explosion. I would need three things, and I named them in the silence as if reciting a litany: a ship to chase the horizon, a crew of outcasts like me, and killers forged in the same fire of loss.