I saw Her then. She was exactly in the spot she where we had met before, only the battle had pushed and pulled itself back over the same spot. The battle, which Antoni and my men were apparently losing, had left her behind. She was alone in the open field.
She was in the exact same position, atop her mutilated horse which stood in a self replicating puddle of rats. Her blue, pleated skirt was simply a tatter wrapped across the rigid waist of her full plate suit of armour. Her blue tie, however, was pristine. Her entire body, from neck to feet, was wrapped loosely in bandages. She was looking down at the ground. Her eyes stared straight into the earth and rapidly scanned back and forth, as though examining this precise placement, wondering why, of all the places, she was in this one specifically.
The Queen of the sky stirred. Her scraggly, braided green hair turned grey and fell out. Red buds quickly sprouted from her head and grew to her neck. She turned her head towards me, while casting her eyes down to avoid my gaze. Cracks appeard in her polished steel armour, running from her heart towards her fingertips. From where the cracks intersected, blood issued forth at a drip. From beneath her skirt bubbling black pitch began to flow. It was flowing slowly at first. As I watched the flow accelerated and small foetuses began to appear in the stream. The sticky pitch sizzled and burnt the horse as it crawled downwards carrying the abortive children. When the Sky Princes and Princesses were finally ejected by the drooping pitch, they fell towards the ground and were feasted upon by the swarming vermin. All that ate the foetuses died. All that ate the dead, died. The pitch then dissolved the lifeless vermin into more steaming tar. Soon there was nothing between her legs but death.
As I watched the demonstration, I felt as though she might know my pain of being surrounded by the living, while being only able to love the dead. She snapped her eyes towards me then. She did not look into my eyes. She had no need to, for she saw into my soul long before we had ever actually met. As she allowed me to stare into her eyes, I fell into her. I saw her soul was a place equally barren and dead as my own. It was this place she was trying to express into reality. I knew she understood me as no other person in existence or beyond would ever be able to. I saw her all encompassing empathy for me, for what I was. I saw that she understood what would happen next; she knew I thought she was the most perfect and beautiful woman in the world that could ever live; she knew why she could never bend me to her and make me love her:
She was not dead.
I dropped my sword, and my shield. I hadn't had much use for them anyways. I removed my armour, too. I stood there in the cold, completely naked. The bandages around her unravelled, and reached out for me. The softly wrapped around my wrists, they bound both my ankles together, and then lifted me. Her bandages scrolled back around her as she brought me nearer. I couldn't break contact with her eyes. She pulled me close.
She had let so many thousands of men look into her heart; she drove each one of them completely insane as they tried and failed to comprehend what was inside. Aftewards, each of them inexplicably had set out to find for her what she had lost. I realized then how other men looked into her; they only saw her as beautiful for what she had once been, a happy little girl. They had all felt as though a world which could destroy such naive innocence was a world that should be destroyed itself. The world and the people that made it, should all be punished for what it had done to the one divinely innocent being they had ever known.
As they all punished the world, they began a search to find that part deep inside of her that had been lost so long ago. They swarmed around her, capturing land, destroying cities. They raped young girls and built cathedrals to house their bulging, pregnant bodies. They brought the babies to be sacrificed. They had bathed their Queen in the babies' blood, believing somehow they could transfer that essense of innocence BACK. As though they could cast out all the pain in the world by inflicting more pain to the world. In doing so, her followers had excoriated any slightest hint that was left inside Cracky's heart.
And they had damaged tens of thousands of other girls. My mind reeled into the future, and I saw how each tormented, pregnant child was herself destined to become a painful echo of the Sky Queen in her own time. But that is not mine to solve. I, myself, am the key to releasing this Cracky from this curse. I know the secret to it now. To be a grown woman, and yet to yearn for childhood. And to always be surrounded by nothing but toys. Dolls. Playthings.
She wrapped her arms around me and embraced me. I put my hands around her throat. She kept looking into my eyes. I felt her pulse race. It began to slow.
I don't know when the beating ceased. Her eyes stayed open, and I fell into them again. Her soul was empty now. I saw all those bubbling adult foetuses replaced by emptiness. Calmness. Beauty. I took the reigns of the horse, and I left the battle behind. There will be a new Sky Queen, a new reluctant angel. You can destroy an entire planet, but you can't kill a single Cracky. You can only release her from her torment.