Carmina ruled over Kish the same way that she once did over Nineveh, in gloom. During the day, the lights of the underground city became just a little brighter than in the night, maintaining a constant twilight, when not just darkness. She said the eyes would get accustomed and energy savings were remarkable, but the truth is that she just liked it that way. She could by all standards declare herself Empress, as her reign was composed by several kingdoms, on Earth, and above; but by doing that she would be admitting that the real Empress had died, something she refused to accept to her last day, so, she was Queen Carmina Drekkva; Crom queen in a city of humans.
In the fifteenth year of her reign, nuclear electric generators failed, and the city went dark for a week. The problem was fixed reopening Hedvika coal mine in Moravia and installing a thermo-electric plant a mile north-east of the city's entrance, with old machinery from the nuclear generators. It became a source of hard labor for Kish inhabitants.
Electromagnetic and fire weapons were prohibited and ceased to be manufactured under her rule, the only source of old weaponry, a former arsenal in Wurttemberg, was dismantled and sealed. In that environment, organized crime started to rely in cold steel to function, and that diminished their reach considerably. The only sophisticated weaponry in the city were the Queen's personal weapons: The Black Vulture of Kish and a short spear. Besides that, Royal Guard in charge of palace's security merely used MA-1895 rifles, and ancient, bolt operated fire weapon. They also served as police, but their rifles were necessary only in rare and specific situations. The inner part of Carmina's palace, including the throne room, was accessible only for the Queen and the witch Sephia, her lover and closer ally, to whom she had granted the title of Duchess. The palace was guarded by two Qatrian goats, and insignificant number compared with the legions she commanded in Ekron and Sibara, but more than enough considering that threats to her security in Kish were inexistent.
For fifty years she sat on Kish's throne, accompanied by crystal statues of past enemies; all that time she fought against the shadow of her past, with the priceless aid of Sephia. Carmina's affiliation to necromancy and dark arts in general, made her especially susceptible to spiritual decomposition, and her past battles against a powerful necromancer, Gog, had let her soul damaged beyond repair. Moreover, her spirit had already been artificially transmuted into physical shape two times, the last one, intentionally diminishing her molecular cohesion using rat eyes instead of cat ones, the original and suitable configuration. That difference made her spirit gradually reject the cohesion achieved by her transmutation.
The first years of her second incorporation, that coincided with the first years of her reign over Kish, quickly became nightmarish as molecular disintegration manifested as flesh and bone decomposition, with painful consequences. She was literally rotting from the inside out. It was around the fifth year that Sephia came with a simple, but brutal idea: transfer her soul into a new vessel, a young and physically alike her, new container; that would allow her to impose the same shape that she had as a girl on the new vessel and keep her own identity. This process was, of course, to be performed by Sephia.
The first vessel was a homeless redhead girl whose absence was almost unnoticed, as homeless disappeared continuously by the action of a cat-eyed scientist at the forbidden low levels of the city. It was a complete success, the Queen looked younger and happier from one day to another, and not many noticed that her height had diminished an inch, and that some years later, it had returned to be the same as before. Her red curly hair, her blue sclera eyes with dark-blue eight-pointed stars instead of irises and pupils, white vertical lines crossing their centers and the moles under her eyelids, all that remained the same; only her vulture wings were lost, as they were a feature too heavy to replicate. Her black tiara was no longer necessary, in fact, it was incompatible with her new incarnation.
That state lasted twelve years and then internal necrosis started to attack her organs again. Three years later she occupied a second vessel, an orphan girl of age twelve. It brought some social complications, as her appearance was clearly younger than before; even if she was barely seen in public and Sephia ruled in her name for all administrative purposes, she was still occasionally spotted by her guards and had to appear in some official ceremonies. Rumors and speculation began, especially when some years later she grew up and became a woman again. She obviously never issued any clarification statement. But nothing happened, she was strange and fearsome enough to be beyond human comprehension and scrutiny.
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Queen Carmina in her Second Vessel
Eight years later, that body started to decompose too, so in two more years, she occupied a third vessel, a ten-year-old redhead orphan. By that time, her "transference" was a formal urban legend with all sort of grotesque details, but never as grotesque as her reality. The problem with vessel replacement was that girls not only had to be redheads, but also occult sensitive, a rare feature in Kish humans, and of course, they had to be fifteen or younger.
When she had been forty years on the throne and was in the tenth year of her third vessel, a redhead girl, ten years old, daughter of an important citizen disappeared. The Queen remained unseen, even for her guard for four years, until she appeared for a ceremony, and looked less than fifteen years old. The father of the missing girl used his connections to try to initiate an investigation, but he appeared stabbed to death a couple days later.
This way, Carmina was serving fifty years on the throne, almost ten years occupying her fourth vessel, and haven't been seen in public for the last two because, she had been rotting inside for the last three.
