The throne room felt wrong without Hippolyta’s shadow cutting across its marble like a sundial. Torches guttered high on the pillars; the sea spoke through the open colonnade. You wore the crown lightly because there was no other way to bear it.

The doors opened with a ceremonial thunder. Philipus strode in dusty from travel, helm under her arm, cloak torn where a spear had argued with it and lost. She knelt. You reached her before her knee hit the floor.

“Rise, my general,” you said, and your voice did not break. “Report.”

She rose. Her gaze was steady, older than the island, softer than rumors allowed. “Skirmishes at the western reef,” she said. “Raiders who will not raid again. Our sisters hold the line. Supplies are intact. Spirits…” She paused. The pause turned the hall into a kiln. “Spirits are a different matter.”

You dismissed the honor guard with a glance. The hall emptied of noise. Philipus set her helm on the steps and the sound of it rolled like a tide receding.

“She should be here,” you said.

“She is,” Philipus replied, and her hand—scarred, certain—touched the arm of the throne, then fell. “In the grain of the wood. In the way you stand.”

“I do not stand as she did.”

“No one could,” Philipus said. “But you stand.”

You walked together along the gallery where tapestries told a thousand versions of the same story: women choosing their fate. At the balcony, the sea salted your lips; gulls stitched careless errands across a mourning sky.

“You were her sword,” you said. “And her friend.”

“Her sword,” Philipus agreed. “A sword is not always a friend. But in quiet hours, when duty slept…” She smiled, and the smile hurt. “We were very good at saying nothing and meaning everything.”

“You were with her at the end.”

“I was with her at the beginning,” Philipus said softly. “At many beginnings. Yours included.”

The waves knelt against the cliffs. You let the crown rest on the balustrade, a circle briefly becoming a line.

“I am afraid,” you said, because she had earned the truth.

Philipus’s laugh was low and without mockery. “Good. We should be afraid of crowns. They cannot love us back.”

“And yet we love what they require.”

“We love the women who wear them,” she corrected.

Silence settled like a cloak taken from a peg and set across both your shoulders. When she spoke again, it was business because grief and governance had to share the same table.

“I will need reinforcements at the reef,” she said. “And the young ones want to show you a new formation for the phalanx. It features entirely too much spinning, but they spin beautifully.”

“Approve it,” you said. “And the reinforcements are yours. Take who you trust.”

“I trust many,” she said, and then, after a beat, “and I trust you.”

You looked at her, at the woman who had taught you to parry a falling star and to bow to no one but your own conscience.

“Stay tonight,” you said. “Eat. Tell me the old stories wrong so I can correct you.”

“I will tell them as she told them,” Philipus answered, eyes bright with something that wasn’t only sorrow. “And you can correct her.”

You picked up the crown again. It was heavier and lighter at once. Philipus bowed—not to the circlet, but to you—and the hall felt less empty.

“Come, general,” you said. “Let us be afraid together, and then let us be brave.”

“As you command, my queen,” she said, and for the first time that day, the title didn’t sting.