Season 1: Survival of the Fittest

  Ch 1: Awakening at the End of the Line

  The first thing Nysera noticed was the indignity of the bench.

  Hard, cracked, and stained with ancient chewing gum, it was hardly fit for a dog, let alone a woman of her standing. She shifted, grimacing at the sticky chill biting through the thin fabric of her dress, and surveyed the chaos before her with the disdain of a queen overseeing the aftermath of a particurly idiotic rebellion.

  Flickering emergency lights cast long, grim shadows over the crumpled carcass of a derailed train. Paramedics and police bustled like ants around it, barking into radios, hoisting stretchers, and generally creating more noise than results. Sirens screamed in the distance, harmonising poorly with the drunken howls of what she could only assume were peasants in the streets beyond.

  Nysera straightened her spine. She was perfectly fine. Not a scratch on her, save for the tragic loss of one heel, snapped cruelly beneath her as she’d evidently been hurled onto this miserable bench. Her hands clutched something tight against her chest. She looked down.

  A book.

  It was battered and worn, the corners curled like dying leaves, the spine cracked from countless readings. Across the cover, in eborate gold script, read the title: To Ruin You Tenderly.

  Nysera blinked. Surely, this was a tome of great magical import. Why else would she have clung to it through—whatever camity had occurred?

  She brushed a speck of ash from the cover and opened it. Tiny, cramped handwriting lined the margins in different colours, curling around the printed words like ivy. She skimmed a few sentences, catching phrases like "devastating betrayal", "slow-burn yearning", and—goddess preserve her—"thigh clenching intensity".

  Nysera snapped the book shut with a shudder. Some sort of… romantic grimoire? A manual on seduction and warfare, perhaps?

  "Madam? Are you alright?"

  A man in an orange reflective jacket loomed nearby, blinking owlishly at her. Behind him, chaos reigned: bodies bundled onto stretchers, panicked sobs, distant shouting. He crouched slightly, speaking as one might to a cornered cat. "You've been through a lot. Can I get you checked out by one of our paramedics?"

  Nysera arched an eyebrow. "I have suffered worse betrayals at breakfast," she said crisply. "Attend to someone who needs you."

  The man hesitated—clearly untrained in recognising true nobility when he saw it—then gave a nervous thumbs-up and scurried away.

  Nysera rose, smoothing her bck skirt with careful dignity. The heel of her left shoe clicked authoritatively; the broken right dragged awkwardly behind. She abandoned both with a sigh and strode barefoot into the swirling London night.

  The air hit her at once—a wall of sour beer, burnt oil, and what she could only describe as public despair. She wrinkled her nose delicately.

  "Why," she murmured, stepping around a puddle that smelled faintly of regret, "does the very atmosphere reek of sour hops and defeat?"

  A group of men in neon tutus stumbled past, one bellowing a song about losing his dignity and his wallet. Nysera watched them with the same expression she reserved for particurly embarrassing court jesters.

  "Raucous peasants," she muttered. "Celebrating what, precisely? Their own hopelessness?"

  The streetmps overhead flickered in sad, erratic spasms, casting sickly halos across the gum-spattered pavement. They reminded her of dying stars, the st gasps of a doomed world clinging to some paltry pride.

  A girl in a skin-tight silver dress—heels in one hand, chips in the other—sobbed quietly into her kebab on a bus stop bench. Across the road, a chicken shop, its windows fogged with grease and ambition, pulsed under a flickering red sign that read simply: #1 Best Chicken.

  Nysera paused. "Low-budget temples," she said under her breath. "Where the faithful come to worship at the altar of food. Interesting."

  A Deliveroo cyclist whizzed past, nearly clipping her with his enormous insuted backpack. "Watch it, love!" he barked.

  Nysera raised an imperious eyebrow but deigned not to respond. It was, after all, beneath her to correct the manners of every passing serf.

  Further down the street, a pair of men attempted to fight each other with what appeared to be inftable fmingos. Nysera considered the scene gravely.

  "So this is the new world order," she said aloud. "A kingdom of fools, lit by the dying embers of its own dignity."

  A discarded McD's cup rolled against her bare foot. She kicked it aside with regal disdain and marched on, the tattered paperback still clutched against her ribs like a relic. Magic was dead, power was a memory, but some things—pride, disdain, the ability to rise above the rabble—those were eternal.

  Ahead, the city loomed—grim, sprawling, imperfect.

  Nysera smiled thinly. "Very well," she said, stepping off the curb into the unknown. "Let us begin."

  A screech of delight snapped Nysera's attention sideways.

  A gaggle of women in pink feathered tiaras descended upon her like a pack of well-meaning wolves. Glitter clung to their hair and dresses; sashes bearing slogans like Bride Tribe and Sober-ish Queen fpped wildly in the breeze.

  "There she is!" one of them cried, pointing at Nysera with a manicured finger tipped in fluorescent green. "I told you we'd find her, babes! She wandered off! You cheeky cow!"

  Before Nysera could correct their error—firmly, decisively, with the kind of authority that once had entire courtrooms silenced—one of them slung a fluffy pink boa around her shoulders.

  "Come on, Queen," another giggled, pressing a pstic flute of violently bubbling liquid into her hand. "You looked like you needed rescuing!"

  Nysera gnced down at the gss suspiciously. It was neither tea nor any wine she recognised; it fizzed like a potion concocted by mad alchemists. Still, the women beamed at her with such unguarded warmth that for one treacherous moment, she hesitated.

  A true noblesse adapts to her surroundings.

  She lifted the gss with all the gravitas of a queen toasting at a war council.

  "To conquest," Nysera said solemnly.

  They roared approval, clinking their gsses against hers with enough force to nearly upend the contents.

  The drink hit her like a velvet-cd hammer. Sweet, sharp, and mercilessly potent. She coughed once, catching a mouthful of glitter for her trouble.

  "Atta girl!" someone crowed. Another arm wrapped around her waist, and just like that, Nysera found herself swept along, barefoot and bewildered, into the heart of London's fluorescent underbelly.

  They paraded down the street, shrieking songs she did not know the words to, posing dramatically with strangers, and—at one point—trying to climb a statue that bore an unfortunate resembnce to a weeping angel.

  Nysera tried to maintain decorum. She truly did.

  At first, she corrected their grammar mid-song. Then, she offered sage advice about how to maintain strategic alliances in marriage. Then, when one of them began sobbing about her ex, Nysera patted her hair awkwardly and decred, "He sounds like a lowborn traitor unworthy of your tears."

  By the time someone thrust another noxious drink into her hand—this one with a small, pink umbrel bobbing aggressively—Nysera was tipsy enough that she no longer minded the absurdity.

  She ughed—an imperious, clear sound that startled even herself—and was immediately crowned Queen of the Hen Party by unanimous decree.

  Someone adjusted the feathered tiara atop her head. Another kissed her on the cheek, leaving a glittery smear.

  Nysera, conqueror of kingdoms, destroyer of courts, staggered down the pavement with her new retinue, barefoot and resplendent.

  Perhaps, she thought fuzzily, not all peasants were without their charms.