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CJ Mann III 🏳️‍🌈✍️📖 @cjmann3.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This might be illegal, but I reworked a scene from QUEEN FOR A DAY for today’s #Sustember prompt. Cobeah goes to the Royal Orchards seeking silence and fresh air. Instead, she finds sharp blades and dark magicks in the shadows. #AmWriting #WriteSky #WritingCommunity #DarkFantasy #MythicFantasy

Less than a day after being crowned queen, Cobeah found herself hunted for her deeds. With her back pressed to an apple tree within the royal orchards, she held her breath as a twig snapped nearby.

Something small and fast hummed through the air. Cobeah turned as a quoit punched into the tree beside her head with a wet, wooden thud.

Silence dropped over the glade like a hood. The birds vanished mid-song. Insects stopped their buzzing as if someone had pinched the world shut. Even her own breath sounded wrong, muffled inside her skull. A magickal shroud of stillness settled around the orchard row, and her ears popped with the pressure of it.

Another quoit came, a dark disc spinning out of the shadows. Cobeah ripped one of her own from behind her back and snapped it up, knocking the hurled blade aside. The clash rang once, flat and ugly. The silence swallowed even that.

A figure stepped out from the darker-than-usual gaps between trees. An assassin, wielding blades and magicks. A deep hood hid their face; the cloth shimmered with warding, ensuring nothing beneath would catch light. Black-dyed boiled leather lay over a loose shirt and trousers, obscuring form and gender.

A scream for help would only get her killed before anyone arrived, if they could arrive at all. The magickal silence dampened everything. Nothing left this row of trees. No cries. No clash. No dying noises to draw the royal guard back in.

“I’ll wait here while you run off for reinforcements,” Cobeah said, and her voice sounded wrong inside the bubble, like it belonged to someone else. Only a snort answered her. “I hate easy fights. You know even if you succeed, I’m taking you to the abyss with me.”

A blade flashed on her left. She turned aside, quoit snapping up to knock the dagger away. The attacker rushed in; she pivoted and checked them with her offhand quoit, a sharp clack on leather and bone. They were testing her, learning tempo and searching for hesitation.

They would find none.

To fight with quoits on land differed from a ship’s deck that bucked and rolled beneath you. She had trained for both. At sea, she favored fast jabs and jerking cuts, ending things quickly no matter the cost. Here she kept low, longer arcs, feet sliding over loam and using trunks as cover and constraint. She kept her vitals on the move and out of harm’s way, herding her attacker into angles where they could only reach her head-on.

A sudden trunk met her back with thick, rough bark. Low branches hung above. Nowhere to roll. Nowhere to dodge.
An apple hung at the edge of her vision, fat and bright; calm.
Cobeah snatched it from the tender branch and hurled it point-blank into the hood where a face should have been. It burst. Chunks sprayed. Juice splattered across warded cloth.

Before the assassin could react, Cobeah threw a quoit after the apple.

The disc flew true and buried itself deep in the shrouded hood. Blood poured from the darkness before the body crumpled to the ground.

Her survival instincts eased, just enough for fury to flood in behind them. Pure rage at being hunted like a wild animal by anyone willing to jeopardize the realm in an attempt to remove her when it could least afford weakness.

“Who are you?” she asked the corpse, and her voice sounded like it belonged to a different kind of storm. “And which of the many assholes trying to disrupt my reign sent you after me?”

Artemis Quinn 🏳️‍⚧️🎨📚 undead & thriving 🦇👻😱@vampireantihero.com

#Sustember | Day 11 Flash fiction time! How would you tackle this? Let's play! 👀 #WritingQ #WriteSky #WritingPrompt #WritingCommunity #QueerWriters

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