Chapter 9 #3
“In some ways, it was a freedom. I spent a lot of time with various staff around the Keep, learning the skills of their trade. Tailors, cooks, gardeners, soldiers. As I grew older, I learned how to sneak out, thinking my disappearance and rebellion would grant me some attention. It didn’t, of course.
They were too concerned about who my brother was going to marry.
But it still enabled me to make my way into the lower rings.
I learned how to play cards. To drink. Gamble.
Laugh. And in the process, learned about the lives of those less fortunate than myself.
If I was the crown prince, subjected to the constant attention of the king and queen, I wouldn’t have experienced any of that. ”
Done sewing, the prince’s hands stopped moving.
Cerise straightened into a sitting position, absorbing the prince’s words.
She’d met many people, and none were so open about their life.
In Vhypael’s Temple, the children hoarded and traded secrets like money.
In the war, it was safer to not be vulnerable, to not get close to people, since either you or them were likely to die.
“You’re rather forthcoming,” she said, uncertain how to respond. Unsure if he wanted the sympathy she wouldn’t offer.
A wry smirk tilted his lips. “Another thing I learned during my many years trying to mold myself in different ways to get approval from the king and queen. Life is much more satisfying when you let go of others’ perceptions and embrace honesty. In what you do and say, as well as who you are.”
Cerise grunted in agreement. It was one of the reasons her and Eirwen left the kingdom.
Since they were born, Tyrnoraen suffocated them of who they were, who they wanted to be, trying to fit them into different boxes.
Lost Children. Templar. Cleric. Retired veteran. Instead of simply Cerise and Eirwen.
She held the prince’s gaze, his face soft and open. There was more depth behind his eyes than she’d first noticed. Maybe he wasn’t just a rich, selfish, arrogant prince.
But if she spent too long staring, she worried she’d drown.
“You still haven’t explained how you know the stars,” she said, pulling layers of clothes over her like blankets, preparing to sleep.
“That is a recent passion of mine,” he replied, laying down on his back as well. He put an arm under his head and stared at the tent ceiling. “Did you see it? When Azkanix died?”
“I did.”
It’d be a memory she’d never erase.
She’d been tending the garden with Eirwen, back when the world had seasons and plants sprawled over their land.
A great groaning sundered the earth and the skies darkened to a rippling mass of black and purple, Azkanix ripping his way through the broken mortal world to conquer the heavens.
His skeletal fingers, as long as Tyrnoraen’s towers were tall, stretched over the sky.
His gaping, unhinged maw, breathing rot and decay into the air, was wide enough to swallow cities.
In a blinding flash of golden light the heavens split like marble beneath a chisel.
Beyond those fissures, beings large as kingdoms and too beautiful to comprehend, poured their molten magic through the rift.
Azkanix screamed with the force of a thousand banshees while the Celestials ripped him apart, their light seeping into every unholy pore.
Azkanix erupted into fragments of death, hunks of cursed bone falling like meteors, shredded flesh and misty blood raining over Sylvenath. In the same moment Azkanix burst, Eirwen summoned the power of Zyrdriel, covering their land in a pure white shield.
Whole pieces of the Ix-God plummeted to the ground, the bright, sick green of his necromantic magic eating into the earth. The molten light faded as the Celestials sealed the heavens, abandoning them to a cursed plane. The Celestials may have saved them from undeath, but did not spare their dying.
“I did, too,” the prince said, shaking Cerise from the memory.
“For days, weeks, it haunted me. It still does.
I started to sketch it, hoping that would purge it from my head.
In doing so, I spent too much time thinking about the curse.
Wondering how to reverse it. It occurred to me, if we could find a way to remove the bones, could we lift his corruption, too?
It would be impossible to remove them all, so what if we focused our efforts on those most essential to his being?
Those most likely to store the greatest amount of his power?
I started etching him over maps of the night sky, calculating based on memory and location where his body stretched over Sylvenath.
“I interviewed people from different parts of Tyrnoraen, asking them to describe to the best of their abilities how his body expanded over them from their viewpoint. I’m not a skilled astronomer or mathematician, so I consulted with various clerics and scholars with the map, and through anecdotes and equations, we came up with our best estimate for where he was when the Celestials slaughtered him, calculated the trajectory of his eruption and where different fragments of him were likely to lay.
The next step was figuring out how to survive beyond the boundary of Tyrnoraen, which is blessed from several Celestials, similar to your cabin.
We also needed to figure out how to remove the bones and what to do with them.
“While we worked on that, I spent more and more of my time beneath the night sky. Looking at the stars. Wondering where beyond that veil the Celestials were. The more I looked at the stars, the harder it was for me to look away. The untouched, uncorrupted beauty of them. A reminder of what once was, of what the world could be again. A reminder that somewhere beyond our mortal plane, this curse doesn’t exist. It alleviates my anguish, knowing that. ”