1 Chapter 1

"And that's how the Queen died."

What? That's it? That's the ending? After all these quests and planning and plotting this is how she dies? Her own husband? This is exactly what happens to powerful women who are hated on by unworthy males, thought Sky exasperated as she shut her laptop off.

It was blinking 6:25 pm on her digital watch as she decided on her next course of action. Sky has been sitting at this library located in the very heart of University of Chicago for the last 4 hours, the last dregs of coffee turning into a cold tasteless liquid. 

Graphic visuals of what she just read ran through her mind as she grew fidgety. She could feel a weird burst of energy growing through her which she had to dissipate somehow. And thus she did what she had been planning on doing for the last 3 weeks. She looked up National Academy of History. 

This particular institution holds the solution to her itch that started over a month back and now has developed into a full blown ulcer. 

Sky first came to know about this particular place when she was reading the 126th journal about the long lost Empire of Scarpetia and it's powerful reigning queen Antiope. Apparently the last remaining portraits and artifacts of this empire are being preserved in this museum which is about 30 minutes away from where she was sitting right now.

Antiope lived rent free in Sky's consciousness from the time she first heard about her in an obscure paper she dug up during her research about dynasties. Sky is a final year research scholar at the very same university she is sitting at right now but unlike her other fellow scholars, her obsession with her study object looks borderline hysterical. 

The museum closes at around 8pm which means she has about an hour to look around and satisfy her curiosity. 

The first night that she started reading about the Queen was a comparatively warm one and she sat in her balcony reading through the papers. By the time she finished through the entire stack, dawn was breaking at the horizon. Such was her devotion, she took all the remaining papers to the nearest coffee shop and continued on her journey. It has been like this for the entire last month. Every day she thought of paying a visit to the museum but got so lost in the daily lives of Antiope and her Greek God like husband Dominic that it was too late when she finally wound up her studies. 

But today seemed like a genuine opportunity and especially after what she just read, she had to make the visit.

Antiope was not only a great queen but also a prolific botanist. She knew her way around most plants including poisonous ones. She had an entire collection of most deadliest untraceable poisons there were and in the end she died because of one of her own creations.

She was horrendously betrayed by her husband whom she loved with all her heart, for whom she gave up so much, all because,that brat of a man could not handle the fact that he was to be ruled by her wife. Fragile male ego - destroyer of everything beautiful. 

She could sit no longer still. She got up, checked out of the library and hailed a cab. She bought a ticket and entered through the awning gate of the museum. Sky was a dreamer and for most of the time dwelled in her own land of fantasy and stories. It has always been like this since she was a toddler, since the time her father took her to adventures via stories and brought her to this very museum for the first time when she was 5. She has visited this place many times while growing up but the feeling she had for the first time stayed with her for ever. 

It was showing 7:10 pm on her watch. She was one of the very few moving upstream in the great of crowd of those leaving the museum. She looked up her location and traced her destination on one of the multiple maps posted on the various corners of the place.

She felt a cold ripple pass through her as she crossed the threshold to the segment that was marked "Empires of the Yesteryears".

Sky wandered through the various alleys until she found what she was looking for. This part of the museum was completely deserted. The exhibits included a beautiful big picture of Queen Antiope reading a book out in the garden, another one showed her sitting on a chair looking mournfully out of her window towards the setting sun. Besides these pictures there were multiple vials made up of the most fragile looking crystal which must have held her created poisons.

Sky felt a tingling sensation at the tip of her fingers as she raised her hand to touch the melancholic portrait of the Queen. 

"Hey what are you trying to do?", a heavy baritone jolted Sky out of reverie as she hastily stepped back from the picture. 

"Don't you know you aren't supposed to touch the exhibits? Quit fooling around and leave the premises immediately. It's almost time anyway." - 

"I am sorry, I didn't mean to touch it.", Sky immediately apologized. "I will leave right now."

Saying so, Sky pretended to wander off to the other side of the aisle and waited till the guard left. 

She returned as soon as he left and stood staring at the Queen's face again. The face seemed weirdly lively and unknowing to her own self her hand started to rise towards the portrait again.

And this time no one stopped her. Her hand kept approaching the picture until her fingers brushed against the painted surface. Immediately on contact her legs started to feel wobbly and her vision started to swim and eventually darken.

A groan escaped Sky's lips as she tried to open her eyes against the sunlight. "How long was I out? Where am I?", these thoughts went through Sky's head as she tried to sit up. 

Finally when she was stable enough she looked around and found a room that felt eerily familiar. But she couldn't exactly place in her memory where she saw this room until her eyes fell on an ornate chair placed near a balcony overlooking a sky with setting sun.

With a dropping feeling in her gut Sky realized she was in the very same room where Antiope's portrait was drawn. 

She was in Scarpetia.