The True Tale of Queen Lamia

The True Tale of Queen Lamia

  Prologue: A Sleepless Whisper

  There is a ruin beneath the skin of the world.

  Not seen. Not mapped. Not named on any chart.

  But it waits—deep in the broken folds of Otherworld, where sunless winds crawl through sandstone ravines and temples crumble in permanent twilight.

  Here, in a crumbling circle of standing stones etched with sigils older than Olympus, a handful of cloaked figures knelt in reverence.

  Their eyes were shut. Their mouths bled.

  In the center stood a woman—barefoot, veiled, trembling with power. Her voice rose and fell in an old tongue, chanting words that had been forbidden since Corinth fell. Around her, bowls of blood simmered in sacred iron, lit by ghost-flames that neither smoked nor flickered.

  The ritual had begun.

  “To she who lost her children to a goddess’s theft.”

  “To she who was denied immortality by coward gods and found it in blood.”

  “To Lamia, the Sleepless Queen, Serpent of Night, Mother of Monsters—hear us.”

  And she did.

  Somewhere deep in the wastes, Lamia stirred.

  Her red hair spilled over cold stone like spilled wine. Her serpent’s tail coiled beneath her, twitching in slow agitation. Her golden eyes fluttered open—not from rest, for she never slept—but from vision.

  “They’re calling me again,” she whispered.

  The wind did not answer. But she was never alone.

  Shades of the dead—half-formed and whispering—circled her throne like obedient hounds. The floor trembled faintly with their hunger.

  Her gaze unfocused. Her fingers twitched. The curse of Hera surged in her skull like a burning wire—visions flashing: fire, blood, stars. A name. A dagger. A scream.

  She hissed through her teeth.

  “It’s getting clearer,” she muttered. “The noise is almost words. The fog is almost breaking.”

  The Lamiai priestess—miles and worlds away—collapsed into ecstasy as the whisper hit her mind like wine and thunder.

  And from cracked lips, she repeated the prophecy that was whispered to her cult:

  “The crown shattered shall be remade. When blood calls blood, and serpents rise, She shall return with sleepless eyes.”

  The others fell prostrate.

  And far beneath the earth, in a broken place where sunlight feared to tread, Queen Lamia began to smile.

  Act I: The Queen of Libya

  Long before she wore fangs. Long before her name was cursed in a hundred tongues. She was a queen.

  Lamia of Libya. Daughter of Poseidon, lord of the deep, and a mortal woman whose name history has long since forgotten. Born of salt and sand, half-god and half-human—a heritage she loathed. She considered her mortal blood a flaw, a chain. Something to outgrow.

  From a young age, Lamia stood apart. She was not just beautiful—she was divine. Her hair burned red like sunlit wine, her voice could soften stone, and her eyes held the glimmer of something eternal. Kings courted her. Priests bowed. Sorcerers offered her scrolls, and generals their swords.

  But she wanted more.

  She did not seek a throne to rule mortals. She wanted immortality. The spark of divinity that made gods unaging, undying, unbreakable. And if the gods would not grant it to her, she would take it.

  She turned to Hecate, goddess of night and magic. In secret, Lamia became a witch-queen—studying rites carved in obsidian and whispered under eclipses. She learned to twist shadow into glamour, to bind spirits with honey and iron, to mix pleasure with power and weave enchantments into touch and voice.

  She saw her beauty as a weapon. And with it, she seduced Zeus.

  It was not difficult. The King of Olympus had never needed much convincing.

  Their affair was passionate, hidden, and scandalous even by divine standards—Zeus, uncle to Lamia, found her irresistible, and she used his desire to conceive children not out of love, but design.

  Each child would carry a spark of godhood.

  Each spark could, with the right ritual, be drawn out and consumed to empower her own.

  Lamia planned to raise them until the right moment. Then offer them on the altar—not in cruelty, but in ambition. A blood price for eternal divinity. Her own flesh, repaid with immortality.

  And had the world not noticed—she might have succeeded.

  But the gods see many things.

  And Hera—goddess of marriage, patron of oaths, once warm and wise and now worn thin with grief over her husbands affairs—heard the prayers of a servant girl in Lamia’s palace.

  They said Hera no longer cared about Zeus’s infidelities.

  But that wasn’t true.

  She had simply grown numb for the pain.

  Until now.

  When she heard Lamia’s plan—not only to sleep with her husband, but to sacrifice his children—something old and furious reawakened.

  Not jealousy. Rage.

  Not for herself. But for the children, for the unspoken oaths a mother should have to the safety of her offspring.

  That night, under cloak of divine shadow, Hera’s priestesses stole into Lamia’s palace. One by one, they took the infants—sons and daughters alike—and spirited them away to temples, sanctuaries, and distant lands where Lamia’s magic could not follow.

  When Lamia discovered her children gone, she screamed. Not once. Not for a night. For days.

  Her voice shook walls. Her grief curdled into something dark.

  “She took them,” Lamia sobbed. “She killed them. Hera murdered my children out of spite.”

  The servants fled. The nobles bowed lower. Her own people began to fear her.

  Her sorrow, like her ambition, had no end. And in her rage—denied her children, her ritual, her throne of divinity—something inside her broke.

  And the world would pay.

  Act II: The Theft of Innocence

  Lamia had once wept.

  But now she burned.

  The palaces of Libya shuttered their doors. The temples that once praised her fell silent. Her servants disappeared into the hills, and the brave few who stayed swore they saw her pacing the halls at night, speaking to spirits no one else could see.

  She no longer spoke of justice or power. She spoke of retribution.

  She cursed Hera's name. Cursed Zeus’s weakness. Cursed her mortal blood. Most of all, she cursed the children she had almost used to be borne into godhood—and the world that had robbed her of that destiny.

  “If I cannot rise through love,” she swore, “then I will rise through blood.”

  She turned again to Hecate—not as a disciple, but as a supplicant of shadows. She called upon older rites. Darker ones.

  Magic that tasted like iron and fire. Magic paid in flesh and blood.

  She devoured scrolls of deathless transformation. She walked barefoot into catacombs and learned the names of nocturnal spirits. She began to drain the life from her lovers—and soon after others, women and even children as her hunger grew, chosen not at random, but by astrological precision.

  Each victim was a step in the ritual. A note in the spell.

  And with each sacrifice, her body changed.

  Her beauty remained, but it became unearthly. Her limbs too graceful, her gaze too intense. Her teeth, once perfect, lengthened into fangs. Her strength grew serpentine—coiling, crushing, silent. And one morning, after a night of devouring a noble’s son beneath a black moon, she awoke to find her legs gone.

  In their place was a coiling serpent’s tail, vast and powerful, capable of crushing marble. Her mortal half was dying—by her own will—and the monster she had summoned in herself was finally answering.

  Libya bent beneath her.

  She declared herself Witch-Queen, and any who refused her worship were slaughtered or disappeared into her dungeons. A terrible tithe was set: one child from each family, taken by dusk. One young soul to fuel the queen’s eternal power.

  And from the mountains came new followers.

  The Laestrygonians—a tribe of cannibal giants who hailed her as dark mother and goddess. Under her banner, they raided cities, shattered shrines, and brought prisoners in chains to Lamia’s blood-soaked courts.

  The air over her palace became thick with screams and incense.

  Yet this was only the beginning.

  In time, Lamia no longer ruled just the living.

  She began to command the restless dead.

  She summoned Lemures, Larvae, and other wandering shades—souls with no rest and no voice. She gave them form, purpose, and names of her choosing. They guarded her sleep (when she still had it), spied on her enemies, and whispered prophecy through bone and mirror.

  Her cult grew. Not just followers, but transformed disciples.

  Witches—men and women alike—who gave themselves over to her dark rites. Who bathed in the blood of the innocent. Who gave up their human names and became something else.

  The world called them the Lamiai.

  And with every soul she devoured, every rite she performed, Lamia’s name was no longer whispered in awe.

  Only fear.

  And she… was at last satisfied.

  Act III: The Witch Queen Ascends

  They no longer called her mortal. They no longer called her queen. They called her Mormo.

  A word older than language. A name that meant nightmare given flesh.

  Lamia had transcended.

  Her human heart had long since calcified into something else—sacrificed on the altar of vengeance, ambition, and monstrous sorcery. Her voice still purred like velvet, but behind her smile coiled an ancient, inhuman hunger.

  She no longer needed food or rest.

  She craved only life—to drink it, to bleed it, to break it open like fruit and taste the spark of the divine within. She still wore a woman's face, sculpted and ageless. Her beauty was beyond mortal comprehension—but her serpent tail wound for meters behind her, scaled and strong enough to crush men like reeds.

  And at her command came not armies, but plagues.

  A court of nightmares:

  The Laestrygonians, her giant followers, now clad in armor forged of bone and bronze, feasting on flesh with religious devotion.

  The Lamiai, witches who had mutilated their humanity in pursuit of power—some with fangs, some with serpentine torsos, some with eyes that bled poison, others with hooves and horns or lions paws..

  The Dead, tethered by rites too ancient for Olympians to unbind—ghosts of the slain, all bound in chains of soul-magic and obedience.

  She ruled a kingdom of ash and shadow stretching across the north African coast, reaching into the Aegean. Her enemies fled into mountains, her name cursed in both torch-lit temples and battlefield banners.

  But it was not enough.

  Lamia wanted Europe. She wanted Olympus. She wanted Corinth—the city of marble philosophers and silver-tongued priests. The city that dared call itself wise. Clean. Pure.

  She wanted to stain its streets with blood and wine.

  And so she came.

  In disguise, cloaked in glamour, wearing the face of a foreign noblewoman—no tail, no fangs, only beauty and mystery. She planned to seduce its thinkers, to sway its oracles, to poison its politics from within.

  But there was one man she had not counted on.

  Apollonius of Corinth.

  A sorcerer. A philosopher. A man born of divine insight and sharp truth. And one of the few mortals who had ever looked into Lamia’s eyes and seen what she had been—not just what she had become.

  She approached him by moonlight, voice like music, words like silk.

  But he only looked at her and said:

  “You wear your sins like jewels. But the dead you’ve devoured scream louder than your silken voice.”

  The illusion broke.

  So did her patience.

  And under the darkened sky, a battle erupted.

  Spells cracked across Corinth’s walls. Ghosts clawed at the earth. Lamia shrieked in fury and despair, her visions spinning wild, her mind splintered by curses old and divine.

  Apollonius did not break her with blade or fire.

  He shattered her with truth and the terrible power of true names.

  He named her deeds. Named her victims. Named her lost self. And when her cult fell back and her body writhed in magical collapse, he bound her not in chains—but in fate.

  She was cast out.

  Her court was scattered. Her soul cursed anew.

  And so fell Lamia, Witch Queen of Libya, beneath the white walls of Corinth.

  Act IV: The Curse and Exile

  Lamia’s fall echoed louder than her reign.

  The gods do not easily tolerate mortals—or demigods—who try to cheat their way into divinity. And though Lamia had trafficked with powers beneath Olympus, she had still touched the affairs of their pantheon. She had deceived Zeus, desecrated Hera’s sacred image, and raised herself not as a queen among men—but as a rival among gods.

  And so they cursed her.

  First came the priestess of Hera.

  Clad in twilight-colored robes, silver hair braided with viper bones, she stepped into the ruin of Lamia’s broken temple. Her voice rang with divine wrath:

  “You who twisted love into hunger. You who tried to steal the flame of godhood from your own womb. Hear your punishment.”

  And with a chalice of honeyed ash, she poured out her curse:

  “You shall see—but not when you wish. You shall know—but not what you seek. Madness shall be your only clarity.”

  From that moment on, Lamia’s gift of prophecy—once her most precise and potent magic—fractured. Her visions came like storms now: wild, feverish, riddled with contradictions. Truth bled into hallucination. The future revealed itself in riddles too cruel to be useful, and too vivid to be ignored.

  Then came Zeus.

  He did not weep. He did not defend her. But he looked upon her with the guilt for the role he played in her sins.

  “You were my niece. My mistake. And you should never have been given the chance to become this.”

  His hand raised—not in justice, not in mercy, but in guilt.

  “You shall never sleep again. And in your sleepless eternity, your visions will come like storms. Wild. Unbidden. Unending.”

  The world dulled. Lamia’s eyes could not close. Her body no longer required rest—but her mind did. Sleep, the only balm left to her fractured soul, was stripped away. Forever.

  She was cast from the world.

  The last rites were performed not by gods, but by witches.

  Hecate herself, perhaps in sorrow, perhaps in cruelty, opened a path through the veil.

  And Lamia was banished to Otherworld—the shadow-realm, the nightmare between worlds, where the sun never rose and mortal prayers never reached. There, in its black canyons and haunted ruins, she slithered into obscurity, madness biting at her heels like wolves.

  But she was not alone.

  Act V: The Lamiai Cult and Lingering Shadow

  Even in ruin, Lamia endured. And what endures can always return.

  In the darkness of Otherworld, her whispers became doctrine. Her madness became scripture. And those who had followed her into exile—the witches, the twisted, the seekers of forbidden power—gathered like moths to her crumbling throne.

  They were her disciples, the Lamiai.

  Witches who sought more than mortal magic. Men and women who offered their humanity in trade for monstrous gifts. Fanged. Scaled, sometimes horned or hooved. Eyes aglow with borrowed foresight.

  They drank blood beneath eclipses. Tattooed Lamia’s sigil beneath their skin. Danced to rhythms only the dead could hear. And when their rites reached their peak—they, too, became Mormo.

  Twisted. Immortal. Damned.

  In the modern world, the Lamiai are hidden—urban sorcerers in bone earrings and velvet suits, sex & blood witches in rooftop gardens, necromancers beneath cities with serpent tattoos coiled up their backs. They teach others, in secret, how to follow Lamia’s path. How to twist themselves until only power remains.

  And in the wastes of Otherworld…

  Lamia waits.

  Sleepless. Sight-cursed. Mind adrift in a sea of madness.

  But there are whispers.

  That her madness is fading. That her visions are growing clearer. That she is learning to focus again.

  And if she does…

  If she breaks the curse…

  Then one day, soon—

  The Queen of Monsters will rise again.

  Epilogue: The Queen Who Dreams Without Sleep

  She does not dream.

  She cannot. Sleep is denied to her. But in the deep, lightless corners of Otherworld, Lamia pretends.

  She coils her long serpent body around the ruins of a forgotten temple—once a shrine to herself, now choked in black thorns and whispering ash. There, beneath a ceiling of obsidian sky, she sits upon a throne of bones and broken marble, her many eyes wide, yet distant.

  In the stillness, she weaves her memories together like spells:

  —A palace of sunlit marble in Libya,
—The seafoam smile of Poseidon.
—Her children, their laughter stolen by a goddess.
—Zeus's shame, his mouth pressed to her throat in lust, then scorn.
—The taste of blood when the power finally surged into her veins.

  She does not dream.

  But she remembers, and memory is close enough.

  All around her, the Lamiai stir. They bring her offerings—incense, carved hearts, scraps of poetry scrawled in madness. They whisper riddles in her ears, begging for prophecy. Sometimes she answers. Sometimes she screams.

  Sometimes… she smiles.

  For though she cannot sleep, Lamia is learning to focus.

  The storm of visions that once scattered her mind now spin tighter, clearer. She sees cracks in the curse. Gaps in the veil. And in those spaces, she plans.

  A new age is coming. The world has grown strange and soft. Magic is rising again. Witches bloom in neon and silk. And soon… soon…

  A queen will be needed.

  Not of crowns and courtrooms.

  But of fangs. Of blood. Of shadows.

  And when that day comes, Lamia will rise—not as a relic, but as a reign reborn.

  She will not sleep. She will not dream. She will rule