Macabre Things
An excerpt from Sickening Travels
Arnold’s darkened face and unseeing eyes passed thru Aydan’s mind repeatedly as he lay in bed. It was not hard to ignore the rash of whispers all around him, which even Laten was not silencing at this point. The image of their defeated captain sprawled across that cold granite floor joined others in Aydan’s head. Sir Twixfeld’s emaciated form, splayed across his four-poster bed, flickered before Aydan’s eyes amidst flashes of Arnold’s fate. The governor of Dekenton, whom Aydan had never seen in his life but knew with grim certainty to be dead, returned to him and fed that dread that lay deep and heavy in his belly. His father, asleep forever, bent-necked and bruised, burned thru it all and branded Aydan’s mind with the man’s unshakable image. When Aydan’s eyes split open in horror, he saw him still: The pitch black of their sleephall was the perfect canvass for such macabre things.
He was on his feet, armed with his sword and draped in a surcoat, and shuffling carefully thru the darkness before another waking nightmare could pass thru his head. He could see utterly nothing, but his instinctual awareness of the layout of their sleephall, row upon predictable row of beds, led him safely thru the simple maze to the great oak doors that he saw with his hands. When he cracked one of them open to pass out of the hall, no light from outside betrayed his actions to the others inside. He sighed. The adults had evidently extinguished all the lights in the wing in the hour or two since the youths had returned to their hall to try at a fruitless sleep.
To Aydan’s great relief he came across no one as he creeped thru the halls of their complex. Despite the tragedy that had rocked them just that very morning, there was a strange quiet. No one stopped him, and he stopped to find no one. His feet took him down that old familiar path without even needing to be told.
His first visit since the Turn of the Tide. The early morning air was sharp against his cheeks, but it was not snowing at least. The moons hung in the air above him like spectators and illuminated the beaten path thru the snow. It was not always that the castle graveyard was very well kept in the Wintertide, but it seemed that someone was keeping the ways clear for any visitors during this one. Or perhaps the place had seen so many visitors as of late that they had cleared the paths themselves. Aydan still had to trudge thru a final stretch of untouched snow to get to the site whither he was headed.
No ornaments decorated the humble stone that marked the spot where Armillis Knight was buried. The name was etched into the rock, clear and well-crafted, which Aydan had always appreciated. Two years were carved below the name: 353 and 393. A dash connected the two. There was no way of telling that this grave belonged to the former second-in-command of the Red Guard. Aydan could examine it effortlessly in the light of the moons. His eyes fell on the more recent of the years. His throat grew tight.
He had come to visit his father’s place of rest less often in recent tides, particularly compared to the months immediately following its initial creation. But he tried his best to do it when he was able to get away from the halls for at least a minute, which this time happened to be that early Wintertide morning. Perhaps his and Akacia’s covert visit to the princess still inspired him despite the misfortune of having been caught. One way or another he was there again. His grip tightened around the hound’s head of his sword as he embraced the gusty silence of the night, trembling.
He would not stay long. He was freezing in his soaking boots, after all. He would just observe this moment. The moment that had sprung spontaneously from the spontaneous calamity that had stricken the halls that morning. He mulled over that symmetrical year, the pair of symmetrical years that defined the life of Armillis Knight. The knot in his throat gave way to a tear that broke free from his eye. As he stood there in his perpetual mourning, his chin in his chest and his eyes squeezed shut to stem the flow, the same old question floated to the surface of his tormented mind: Why did he do it?