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killtheprophet-blog · 2 years

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||: THE INNOCENT

On the day it begins, crown prince Mathias Florent of Exhal is bored out of his mind. At eighteen years of age, the prince is accustomed to boredom, having sat in on affairs of state since he was twelve. He wants to learn it all, he truly does, but he finds his mind wandering during meetings, trailing more often than not into anxious questions of what he would do when he was in his parents’ situation. More often than not, he leaves these meetings early.

Today is one such time. The meeting was on the topic of rebuilding the temple in Danyara, fixing it with installations that would better represent the kingdom’s dedication to the future. The updates the visiting priest had laid out for them sounded curious indeed, and Mathias felt awful for abandoning, but the extensive conversation surrounding the future had begun to overwhelm him.

“Fear is natural,” Sil says now, perched next to him on the battlement, legs swinging in the late morning air. “You don’t need to be ashamed of your fear.”

Mathias sighs, matching the rhythm of his swinging with hers. “You’ve said that before.”

“You haven’t listened.”

Mathias bites back a snappish reply, lowering his head in mortification. She’s right. “The future is too big,” the prince murmurs. “There is too much of it. I try to envision it, to enclose it all in a little ball that I can hold in my hands, but it keeps unraveling. How am I to take responsibility for that?”

“Don’t,” Sil shrugs, then laughs at Mathias’ openmouthed horror. “I mean, not yet. You’re still young, and your father and mother still hold the throne. You still have time to learn, to observe, to live without that pressure. You should take advantage of that. Let the here and now matter more than the then and there.”

It sounds nice. It sounds very nice. To live that way would be glorious, freeing. Like Sil. Mathias’ best friend since birth, Silhouette is the daughter of one of the palace stewards, and she displays a level of brevity and carelessness that Mathias is both in awe of and envious of. Even now, leaning out over the edge of the battlement in a heart-stopping gesture of daring, she glows. Her tanned skin turns gold in the high sun, and her burnished-bronze hair, only a few shades darker, glints like metal in the same light. Mathias holds her in much higher regard than he should, he knows, but it is hard not to when the young woman is all he wishes he was.

“Sometimes I think you should rule in my place,” he says, realizing he has spoken aloud only once the words are out.

Sil chuckles, tipping back just when it seems she is about to slip over the edge and fall. “I have no claim. I don’t think they’d allow me anywhere near that throne.”

“I could commit treason,” Mathias suggests. “A coup, maybe. Choose a royal decision to oppose and take it too far. They would lock me up on the spot if they thought I was a threat.”

“Treason is messy,” Sil shakes her head, a mischievous grin spreading across her round face from ear to ear. “A scandal would be better.”

Mathias raises an eyebrow, unable to avoid the smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “Did you have something in mind?”

“Not particularly, but I am sure I can come up with something if need be.”

Mathias sighs again, lifting his legs and executing a practiced spin that lands his feet on the stones of the battlement, his back to the edge. “It’s tempting.”

“But…?” Sil prompts, performing her own flawless spin to face him.

“I don’t think I’m quite ready to give up just yet.”

Sil’s grin this time is proud instead of mischievous. She tilts her head onto his shoulder for barely a moment, then hops to her feet and grabs his hand. “C’mon, Highness. Let’s worry about the here and now.”

The royal palace is an old building, one of the first built when the Travelers first landed on Exhal from the Wild Lands. It represents a place of strength, a foundation for a steady and sturdy kingdom to come. It is a constant throughout history, something that was born with the country and will die with it, too. The gaps between the stones in the walls hold thousands of whispered secrets, and the earth beneath the floor is composed of the bones of time itself. Wandering through the palace halls sometimes feels like walking through the heart of the world, the murmurs of the inhabitants becoming the pulsing of blood running through the building’s veins, the drumming of your feet the beat, beat, beat. The deeper you go the further it swallows you, blending you into the surroundings like a smear of ink. And Mathias has never been deeper than this.

His father, King Reyne, is wary of the prince’s explorations. He worries that something will happen, that the bowels of the palace hold secret horrors that will take his son from him. An irrational fear, but a fear all the same. Mathias shares the same fear, but unlike his father he uses it as a reason to go. If he pushes at it, at the edges of what he is afraid of, maybe they will give way. If he falls through them, perhaps he will fall into the jaws of something darker and more vast. Or perhaps he will learn to fly. On the other hand, he does feel a twinge of guilt. Reyne has so much he is concerned about already, what with three regions, each with their own lesser regent, to maintain.

Mathias’ mother, the Queen Lilah, encourages him to explore. She always says that a sense of curiosity is a gift to a king, a willingness to dive into the unknown something that will serve the prince well when he rules. She tells him that his father has the same wondering nature, but he chooses to cultivate it through research and literature instead of adventure. “He stays buried in what brings him comfort, and refuses to even touch his toe to the cold water. He is a stubborn one, that man. Dear to me, yet endlessly infuriating in his immovability.”

Rhys often describes Mathias as the juxtaposition of his parents. In his words, there is no better demonstration of the king and queen’s opposing natures than the son they made together. With his father’s quiet caution and his mother’s brash determination, his mother’s calm logic and his father’s overactive mind, the crown prince is a quilt of contradictions, a paradox of will. Mathias himself always thinks this makes him sound like some sort of accidental mess, but Rhys reassures him that it is a very good thing, as it means there is no one else like him, and there never will be. “You will shine in the history books.”

Sil says they all think too much.

Currently, the only thought Mathias has is that he is lost. Wandering the depths of the palace is a regular pastime of his, but there is so much of it that it is easy to get turned around in the lower levels. As the aforementioned ‘foundation’ of the country of Exhal, the palace’s own foundation is sunk several layers into the ground, brick and wood taking root below to ensure that it will stand even when everything else has faded into dust. The darkness and earthiness of these deeper rooms and halls evoke a particular feeling of being buried, of the ceilings preparing to release and pound you into the packed-dirt floors, watering whatever creatures may dwell there with your blood. Due to this, they hold mostly dungeons, cells, and darker things of which Mathias does not wish to think.

He is not entirely sure how he got here. He was wandering, as he does. Sil was with him, but she slipped away, called to some daily task she had forgotten. He hadn’t been paying much attention to his movements. He had been trying not to think. And now he is decidedly lost.

The walls down here seem more compact, the stones set closer together so as not to allow any cracks. No one has bothered to lay a floor down, and the thick soil crawls with worms and assorted insects that curl around the prince’s feet. Whatever hangings that once adorned the walls are now tattered and rotten, barely anything more than a fragile film dusting a portion of the room. There is no light down here, not even enough to allow Mathias to locate the torches in their sconces that he knows to be present. Shadows flit back and forth at the edges of his vision, becoming hands that grasp lazily at his clothing as he wanders past. He tries not to let the panic set in, telling himself that they are only shadows, there is nothing they can do to you, nothing at all. But his breath has begun to quicken, his heartbeat seeming too loud in the empty room. Is it a room? He isn’t quite sure.

Terror is scratching at the edges of his rational mind, twitching aside the curtains. Claws sharper than knives tearing into the part of himself that understands that there is nothing to be afraid of, ripping the mask in two to reveal the scared little boy beneath. Not a king. Barely even fit to be a prince.

Suddenly unable to catch his breath, Mathias reaches for the wall, desperate for the shock of cold stone under his fingers to bring him back to reality. His fingers find nothing but damp air and the scent of something rotten on his tongue. He gasps as his feet slip, having leaned too far in confidence that there would be something solid to fall against. Alas, he is unable to catch himself in time, and momentum carries him into darkness.

He expects to be falling for only a second, landing on the floor within the blink of an eye. But just like the wall, his expectations betray him. It is as though the room itself (is it a room?) has dissolved into an empty void designed to trap him within. His heart stops dead as the air whistles past him, confident that at any moment he will be swallowed up and disappear forever. But then, in a rush that knocks the breath out of him, he lands.

Something crunches underneath him, and Mathias worries for a split second that his bones have broken. But the absence of pain and continued mobility tell him otherwise. The panic fades for a brief respite as he lies there, taking deep breaths to calm his racing heart. Then the desperate fog in his brain clears, and he realizes that what he is lying on is not dirt, nor is it stone. Nor wood or cloth or any other material a floor could rationally be made of. Nor is it solid. It shifts as he moves, things sliding and clacking against each other. Something is digging into his back, something hard and sharp and unyielding. His hand finds something smooth and rounded, and he digs the pads of his fingers into it, lifting it up to his eyes as they adjust to the blackness. He can still barely see, but he can make out enough to recognize a human skull. Gaping eyes and a grim smile, tendrils of inky darkness crawling out of every crevice. He knows it’s just a skull like any other, but in his frazzled mind the angles of the face almost look… familiar. For a moment, the puzzling notion distracts him, until his other hand finds itself plunged into a ribcage, and the truth of where he is dawns on him.

He has fallen into a pile of bones.

Shaking, Mathias tries to pull himself into a sitting position, flinching every time he feels the ancient remains moving under him. His thoughts have transformed into a buzz of white noise that leaves no room for anything else, which is honestly probably a good thing, as his capacity to overthink is often a hindrance rather than a helping hand. He crawls on all fours across the impossible boneyard, searching for an end, any end. He can’t find his purchase on the smooth, shifting material, and the travel is more repeated collapse than crawl. He squints into the curtain of shadow ahead, searching for any sign of anything other than the bones.

When his fingers sink into something soft and wet, it is almost a relief, the simple reassurance that there is something else there with him. Then a creeping cold shocks his spine, and he shudders as he pulls his hand free. Something slick sticks to him as he does, and he forces back the bile that rises in his throat along with it. He scrambles backward with a desperate, fumbling fervor, slipping and having to pull himself out of cascades of bones multiple times. His limbs find other, warmer, squishier things as well, things that he recognizes but wills himself not to. Then his back hits a wall. A wall. Something solid and familiar in the impossible graveyard he has found himself in. No, he realizes suddenly as he turns himself slowly to feel it, catching the golden outline that promises escape; not a wall. A door.

Sobbing in relief, Mathias shoves his shoulder into the door. It gives way easily, and the prince falls through, landing on the carpeted stone he is used to. The door swings shut behind him, and he presses his back to it, in the irrational terror that something will follow him through. He closes his eyes, inhaling deep, heaving in irregular breaths as his heart tries to find a beat. There isn’t enough air out here, he can’t get it in, his chest is squeezing in, the muscles contracting in on themselves and suffocating him. He can’t breathe. The boneyard has got him. It let him leave, but not before it sank its hooks into him to ensure that he would never escape. He will become one of them soon enough.

But then there is a hand on his shoulder, a voice, words he can’t quite make out. Arms around him, rubbing his back in soothing circles as his erratic heart steadies. Then, blissfully, shakily, he can breathe again, and the gentle words whispered in his ear come into focus.

“Breathe, your Highness. You’re alright. You are watched over. Breathe. In, and out. Like waves on the shore, just like that. In. And out. Slowly, now. That’s it.”

He doesn’t recognize the voice, but the arms around him are warm and secure, and right now that matters more than anything. He lets himself rest there for a moment, waiting until the trembles have subsided enough that he feels able to move before pulling away.

His rescuer, as it turns out, is the priest of the Judge whose meeting with the court Mathias had left early. Eskell, if he is remembering tars name correctly. A wide figure with brown skin a few shades darker than Mathias’ own and unruly dyed-green curls reminiscent of a dog’s fluffy pelt, the priest looks like a friend, someone who can be trusted. Tars warm eyes are filled with concern as al studies the prince, hands still resting on the young man’s shoulders.

“Are you alright?”

Mathias nods, not trusting himself with words at the moment.

“Did something happen?”

This time the prince hesitates. “I…. I saw something.”

“What did you see?” The priest is gentle, urging, but not pressing. Genuinely curious, genuinely worried. That small fact alone gives Mathias the courage to continue.

“It was… there was… something that can’t have been. I saw it… I think. It was dark. But I felt it… I knew. But I also knew it couldn’t be.”

“What was it?”

Mathias shakes his head. “I can’t… just look behind the door.”

Eskell’s brow furrows. “What door?”

“The-” Mathias glances over his shoulder at the space he knows he emerged from. There is nothing but wall. Wall, and a tapestry of a wooden door cracked to reveal skeletal hands reaching through. “I… but I saw…”

“Look at me,” the priest tilts the prince’s head up with a gentle finger. “I do not doubt you. The gods work in ways entirely other than ours, and I have faith in that. You have to choose which you have more faith in: what you see, or what you know.”

Mathias nods, gaze straying to a mirror on the wall opposite. In it, he sees himself. His hands are coated in drying gore, and his eyes are as hollow as a skull’s.

Behind him is a wooden door, cracked to reveal skeletal hands reaching through.

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