Parysatis, consort of Darius II and formidable mother of Artaxerxes II, is the court’s steel in silk: a queen whose loyalty ran through bloodlines and whose power moved by counsel, patronage, and calculated reprisals. She championed her younger son Cyrus the Younger and, after his fall, bent all craft to preserving the dynasty under Artaxerxes—rewarding loyalists, unmaking enemies, and steering the palace through intrigues that could have shattered the empire from within. In the stories of Greek and Persian tradition she is both guardian and avenger, famed for a memory that never released a debt and a will that matched the empire’s breadth. Her influence made and unmade careers from Susa to Sardis; her presence ensured that succession was not a hazard but a managed passage. As Queen of Diamonds she is the sharp mind behind the treasury’s glint: dynastic survival as statecraft, the maternal power that holds a jeweled empire together.