The Month of Darkness

by Neriad13

Four thousand years ago, the ancient precursors of the Eyeless Gang found the boy who was destined to become their god. Standing in their way was his vengeful, greedy father, who would demand any price, any wish that they could possibly grant in return for the boy. But even with everything he ever wanted within reach, the one thing he could not give up is power over his son.

A crumbling black city, an outcast found,
Father a monster, mother under the ground
A beggar, a mongrel, a boy with no shoes
He fell to their hands to cage and abuse

And lo! in the month of darkness
And lo! his name destroyed
And lo! he still whispers in silence
And lo! he went into the void

- Serkonan street song

The three of them - four? - seven? - no, there was not enough room for seven, that was patently ridiculous despite how much rotgut was swirling around in his brain at present - stood in the doorway, their presence like a dark inkblot spreading beneath the surface of a still pond. They were swathed in formless robes, their faces shadowed beneath cavernous hoods. The edges of them bled together, fraying and warping before his very eyes. Now there were six, now twenty-one - no! He had to pull himself together.

"When facing danger, you stand your ground," his father had always said. "No matter if it's a chump looking to break your teeth or a ghost haunting your steps. You turn around, you tell it off and if it ain't going to be told off, you break its teeth."

The hairs were standing straight up on the back of his neck. The overwhelming desire to run was flooding his system, but they were standing in the shack's only exit. The flush of the rotgut was fast draining from his cheeks and the cold winter air from outside, raking his skin.

They had asked him a question. That much he could tell. The words themselves had meant nothing to him.

His fingers tightened around the neck of the jug he'd been drinking from. He thought of downing one last swig for courage and hurling the rest through the fat heads of the lot of them. It was heavy enough. He had a chance. And yet-

The longer he looked at them, the faster his mind raced, the more their numbers grew, the taller they towered over him, the deeper their shadows darkened. How do you break the teeth of something not of this world, Dad? He whimpered in the back of his mind, You never taught me any of that.

They asked him again.

The words were soft and sibilant, the accent strange. He understood. His grip on the rotgut jug loosened. Relief washing over him like a warm tide, he laughed.

*.*.*

A boy lay in the far corner of the filthy room, a heap of rags with pale blue toes sticking out. It was impossible to tell from this angle if he was alive or dead. He scarcely moved, scarcely breathed. If you looked away, you forgot he was there. If you passed him on the street, you would not have tossed him a coin. His edges blurred into every shadow. Eyes passed over him as though he did not exist. Not a soul in the Black City could have told you his name. His own father had forgotten it on more than one occasion.

"You must understand," the boy's father said, staggering to his feet with a drunken swagger disguised as pure charisma, "the boy is my only child. My last remembrance of my dear wife, may she rest in oblivion."

An energy rippled through the visitors. A slight rustling in their cloaks, though none of them seemed to have visibly moved a muscle.

He thought back on all the things they had told him, fragmented and strange though they were in his drink-addled mind. Of the Glowing Tides, the Endless Winter, the Blood Moons, the signs in the stars that had pointed them to this very house.

The boy was to become a god, they had said. They need only find the proper place and time for the ritual.

It sounded insane - though whether he or them were the mad ones was hard to ascertain at the moment. And yet...as they had spoken of their signs and portents, he had heard the longing in their voices, felt the great distance they had come to reach this place. This was the thing that members of their order had lived and died for. This was the single hinge upon which all of them staked whatever semblance they had of a life.

They need this, the thought suddenly flashed, dizzily, across his mind. They cannot do without it. They would pay any price I asked…

"It might be difficult for ones such as yourselves to comprehend," he said with a growing smirk, his voice dripping with honey, "but my boy is endlessly important to me. He is the last of my living kin, the family line itself. Were I to live without him…"

A hand extended from under a cloak. His heart jolted in his chest. The skin was pure, pasty white, a thin blue tracery of veins visible beneath the papery flesh. The nails were long and jagged, more terribly to look upon the closer they got. He could see the dirt beneath them, see the years circling the ancient arm like tree rings.

This was wrong! He shouldn't have pushed his luck. He shouldn't be here, with those, with that. He should have handed over the boy and just-

The hand stopped, palm up, exactly at chest level. Three gold coins, marked with the face of a ruler he had never heard of, slid from the depths of the sleeve and rested against the base of the being's long fingers. Hardly daring to breathe, fear sending icy sweat down his back, he reached for them.

Before he could extend his shaking hand, the visitor tipped every last coin onto the floor. He heard them hit the wooden planks one by one - clok! clok! clok! - his rage increasing with every metallic strike.

Oh, so they would make my stoop for my dinner like a beggar? he thought, his eyebrows tightening into one furious line. More fools, them. The price is higher now, the bastards and if they can't-

The hand turned upwards and more coins poured out of the sleeve. Clok! Clok! Clo-lok-k-k-k-k-k! A gleaming waterfall, a glistening cascade, more wealth than he had ever seen, than he knew existed, than his scattered mind could possibly comprehend! He fell to the floor in a gold-crazed delirium, sweeping it together into a pile, tasting it between his teeth - all real, all gold, all his!

"It is a difficult decision." the voice - voices? - spoke, hissing on the S's, the syllables all in the wrong places, the sentence wrong in a way he couldn't quite place as the words crawled like worms on the insides of his ears,"Take your time to think on it."

And then they were gone, nothing but the chill in the room and the gleam of the gold to remember them by.

The boy slept fitfully, moaning in his sleep.

*.*.*

The first thing he did was rush to the market and buy the biggest bottle of rotgut he could possibly lay his hands on. He drank it in the middle of the street, dribbling the strong-smelling nectar down his hairy chin like an animal, oblivious to all passers-by. The second thing he did was feel a jolt of terror at the thought of his boy being home alone. He careened around corners to get home again, crashing into beggars, smashing into fences, stumbling up stairs. Until he had barred the door behind him and cast about frantically in the shadows of the room, he did not feel safe.

There was the boy, right where he had left him, shivering in his rags, the movement barely perceptible, his small form nearly invisible against the darkness of the room. He fell to his knees and crawled to the corner where his son slept. Gently, he pulled the rags away from his face and ran a hand through his hair. The boy's eyes, the same color as his mother's had been, opened blearily, peering back at him with a profound amount of confusion.

From a distance, the gesture might have been mistaken for a sudden resurgence of fatherly affection. The reality was closer to a farmer looking in awe at a piece of livestock that he thought was worthless but had turned out to be a specimen far beyond his wildest dreams.

The boy could not get out. That much he was sure of. No more begging, no scavenging for table scraps, nothing. He must not be seen. He must not be taken from him.

There was only one place he could spend the night, until a more permanent solution was devised.

With a grunt, he rose to his feet and crossed to the other end of the room in three steps. In the corner of the house was a tiny hatch that led to the root cellar, such as it was. It was barely more than a hole in the ground. A grown man could reach his arm inside and nothing more. But a child, crouched in the fetal position…

The boy was sitting up now, glaring daggers at his father.

He kicked the latch open and bent down to open the shoddily-made door. It made the most pathetic of unoiled creeeeeeeeaks as it opened. Purposefully, calmly, cracking his knuckles for good measure, he strode the three steps it took to bring him back to his son.

The boy fought and bit, growling like a rabid dog as he was dragged across the floor by his hair, reaching out for every handhold he could possibly catch. When they had made it to the cellar (a far tougher affair than the man was ever likely to admit), the boy straightened his legs as stiff as iron rods, refusing to be shoved into the pit.

There was only one thing for it.

In their demands, the visitors had never specified that the boy had to be in perfect health. Wholeness was not a condition of their contract. It was a shame, the old shyster in him thought, to be selling such a generous bidder such obviously trashed merchandise, but there was nothing for it.

Sighing, the man placed his booted foot on the boy's extended knee and began pressing down. The boy's eyes goggled as his leg slowly began to bend backward. Barely a moment had passed before he cried out for mercy. The boot was lifted from his leg and he stood there, towering over his son, glaring down as the boy hurriedly tucked his legs into the pit, his filthy face white with terror.

The hatch slammed shut. He kicked the iron nail that served as a latch into place and just for good measure, dragged the heavy chest with all his earthly belongings on top of it.

*.*.*

He heard crying in the middle of the night, muffled beneath layers of wood, but still loud enough to disturb his slumber.

Too hung over to do much else, he threw a blanket over the chest and called it a night.

*.*.*

The next morning he bought the fattest goose in the market and ate nearly the entire thing himself, his hands greasy with fat, his beard speckled with crumbs of meat. The boy was given the half-chewed carcass to pick clean for his breakfast.

This was followed by a trip to the baths, a sneer as he flashed his gold at the incredulous workers, as he demanded the private chambers, the loveliest attendants, the richest lotions. His body more spotless than it had ever been in the entire course of his life, he felt more than a little foolish putting his dirty old clothes back on afterwards.

This was of course remedied by a trip to the tailor, a perusal of his finest silks and the selection of his most audacious pattern to celebrate his new status. He paid up front, dropping the coins onto the counter one by one, smiling nastily whenever one rolled to the floor and the tailor stooped to grab it.

As the month wore on, he negotiated to purchase the finest house in the city, a palatial villa high above the reach of the common folk, looking down upon the whole of the city from its perch on a hill. He filled it with furniture from the far reaches of the world, none of it matching in the slightest and all of it ridiculously gaudy, crusted in precious stones and shining metal with little regard for taste or style. He stocked the pantry with more food than he or his servants could possibly eat in a lifetime. When it inevitably went bad, it was taken to the trash pile at the edge of town and immediately replaced with the most expensive delicacies that money could buy.

At first he had an entire room stocked with the finest liquors of the world for his perusal, but he soon discovered that nothing was so fine as a slug of rotgut straight out of the jug.

As for the boy, he was given a room on the second floor with a warm sheepskin bed. It was the first time he had ever slept in any such thing, or owned a blanket which was not riddled with moth holes. But the door to his room was always locked tight. The servants were instructed to pass food through a slot carved into the wall, as well as handle waste, dirty clothing and bedsheets through that same slot. For baths, the boy was passed a bucket with a sponge and soapy water and very carefully monitored until he was done.

Perhaps a week after they had first moved in, the man was awakened by the sound of shattering glass in the night and a pair of bare feet dangling outside his bedroom window. Rushing to the second floor as though the wrath of an angry leviathan was upon him, he tore open the door to his son's room and was greeted with the sight of a boy too afraid to let go of the windowsill and too weak to pull himself back up. He had broken the window by working a leg of his bed free from its bindings and using it as bludgeon.

Calmly, he had the servants pull him back into safety and treat the cuts on his hands. Behind closed doors, he beat him that night and locked him in a closet until the window could be repaired.

The bed and the blanket were exchanged for a pile of hay. Bars were installed on the window.

The boy did not try to escape again.

*.*.*

The visitors stood in the grand entrance hall, their numbers softly undulating between five and eight, the darkness of their cloaks like a wayward patch of starless night in the midst of the gleaming splendor of the back entry hall.

The man lounged on his satin divan, lying in such a way as to make the finery of his clothes, the arrogance of his smile, the neat trim of his beard, most evident. The table before them was covered with pastries and sweets, drink imported from the far reaches of the world. The strangers had not touched a bit of it.

He had not expected them to, of course. But one must make appearances count.

"You have been exceedingly generous." he said grandly, languidly sitting upright, an emerald-studded goblet of rotgut in his hand, "But even so, I must admit, you ask an onerous thing of me."

"When my son is gone, I will be comfortable and safe within the walls of my home, with every luxury I could ask for. Ah, but all the grand rooms I have will mean nothing as long as there is no one to inhabit them! Where will I be in my old age without the comfort of my family? So…"

Here his eyes narrowed and a wicked smile spread across his face.

"I ask this of you now: return my wife to me from the grave. Surely this is but a small matter for ones such as yourselves?"

The figures seemed to turn inward for a moment, conferring among themselves, their voices an impenetrable whisper. After a moment, one stepped forward and withdrew a small effigy carved of bone from the depths of its robe.

"Bury it in her grave." it said softly, the voice all flutes and reed whistles, "She will rise in three day's time."

There was a rustle of fabric and they were gone, as utterly as if they had never existed at all.

The effigy, some twisted simulacrum of a person carved from the ribs of a long-dead animal and strung with silver charms, lay on the table among the sweets and bottles of unopened drink.

*.*.*

On the third day, he found her sitting on her grave.

He saw her from a distance as he entered the graveyard, leaning wistfully against the rotting wooden marker that was all he was able to afford when she had died.

She was wearing the clothes that he had buried her in - the dull gray homespun, torn and frayed with use, the threadbare shawl that buried her small, sad features in its woolen bulk. She was just as beautiful, just as sad as the day he'd buried her. But her eyes - those were different.

Wide, gray and empty.

Never again would she look directly at him when he was speaking to her. It was always a little to the left, at some invisible spot in the air that only she could see. At first he'd shouted at her, demanded that she pay attention when he was speaking. But when she turned the full spotlight of her stare onto him, it sent shivers down his spine and all he could see was a wide gray expanse of nothingness stretching into eternity.

He did not care so much for conversation after that. Instead, she was put to work for the greater part of her days - cooking and cleaning, scrubbing the imported tile floors until they shone like stars in the evening candlelight.

She never complained.

When she spoke, which was only after she had been spoken to, she never made a sound above a whisper.

She laughed obediently when he told a joke and smiled sweetly, though it never reached her eyes.

She wore all the clothes he chose, the jewelry he placed on her body, the scents he liked the most.

She never asked for anything - not money, not comfort, not silence, not affection.

When they made love in the bed with satin sheets, she would lay still and let him do anything he pleased.

He said she was perfect.

*.*.*

Twice, in the handful of times that the boy was permitted freedom enough to come downstairs for a grand feast, he was seated beside his mother. She was attired like a queen before the masses of supplicants begging her husband for charity, her wide gray eyes roving over the crowd but never seeming to take any of it in.

Twice, he sat there staring at her, taking in every wrinkle on her brow, the curve of her lips, the swell of her chest as she breathed.

Twice, he jerked away in a sudden fright, toppling her goblet of wine on a dress that had cost hundreds of times more than the four walls in which he had spent the greater part of his childhood.

Twice, his father had dragged him back to his room and beat him for his disrespect.

Twice, his mother stood in the hallway, watching, waiting, not a single line on her face as her son cried out for mercy.

*.*.*

"Ah, welcome! Welcome!" the man said grandiosely, ushering his guests through the gilt double doors into his newly remodeled entrance hall. He changed it roughly once a week now - whenever he got bored of looking at the same art, the same expensive furnishings. The tiles of the floor barely had time to set before they were to be torn up and replaced anew.

The visitors flowed in like water, their robes swishing gently on the floor. They filled the room like shadows, like wraiths, at once monstrously tall and diminutive as children. There were many more of them this time - they filled the room from end to end, or so his eyes told him.

His hands shook behind his back as he smiled widely, showing all his teeth.

"Please take a seat, everyone! I'll have the servants bring in more cushions if you…huh."

There were three of them sitting side by side on the couch. There had only ever been three. Where they sat, all light leeched out of the room, all sound drowned in the velvet darkness of their robes.

The man poured himself a glass of rotgut from the crystal decanter on the coffee table and quickly downed it.

"Well, then, gentlemen!" he said just a little too loudly, setting his glass on the table with far too much ceremony, "Shall we get down to business?"

He thought he saw the middle one tilt its head, but it might have been a trick of the light.

"I am well pleased with my wife. Never again shall I long for comfort in my old age! I thank you for her safe return and owe you my immense gratitude. I would consider that payment enough for the life of my son…"

The very air was pregnant with tension. The visitors were leaning forward, looming, rustling, seeming to grow even taller in the light of the setting sun.

"…were it not for a question I have regarding him."

There was a sigh like the rustling of many pages of books, that seemed to come from right in front of him and far away all at once.

He moistened his lips and eyed the decanter one last time before continuing.

"I am correct…" he said slowly, sounding out each word out as he said it, "…in assuming that my son is akin to a prince to you. That you have watched and waited and longed for him for many years now. That you would not have entertained my wishes were he not of great import to you."

"But!" he half-snarled, a mischievous glint in his eye, "Does it not seem wrong to you that the son should be a prince and the father, a nobody? Should I not be an emperor if my son is indeed a prince? Does that not seem much more fitting of my station?"

There was a murmuring, a susurrus far outstripping the amount of bodies in the room. It reverberated off the walls, vibrated off the curtains, trickled like the sound of many small streams over smooth stones. As one, the figures on the couch rose to their feet. A fold of the robe opened and a ghastly pale hand bearing a brassy, tarnished spyglass, appeared.

"Climb the highest mountain you know." a clear, high voice sang, holding the artifact out to him, "At the summit, look as far as you can see. All that you see will be yours."

"Ah! I thank you, kind si"- he started to say grandly, as he held out a hand to accept the thing.

There was no one else in the room.

The spyglass was luxuriating in the midst of a plate of powdered pastry.

*.*.*

The expedition took two weeks to plan. Between the hiring of guides, the purchase and packing of supplies, the vetting of everyone involved to ensure absolute secrecy and the ongoing research to determine what exactly was the highest mountain in the country, he was beginning to think that this was too much work on his part to qualify as a real payment for valuable services rendered.

But then he saw his diadem in his dreams, glittering as looked in the mirror at himself. He saw his kingdom, the hordes of worshipers bowing at his feet, felt the weight of authority on his shoulders. Never again would he be ignored. Never again would anyone cast him aside to rot.

They departed in the dark hours of the morning, swathed in furs and looped with vast lengths of rope, armed with steely crampons and climbing picks. The boy watched them tramp by in their heavy boots, through the slim keyhole of his prison. He knew nothing of their plans and less of his father's delusions of grandeur. But his sense of dread grew with the sound of every passing footstep, every jangle of their equipment.

They only thing he could do was lay on the pile of hay he'd been given for a bed and shiver, long into the early hours of the morning.

*.*.*

He had lost so many men.

He could see them all in his wretched waking dreams - their frozen bodies, their blackened limbs, their curling fingers reaching for a goal they would never touch. He trudged through the snow and the wind, in terror of rest lest he never rouse from the spot again, but his eyes heavy with a sleep that would not be denied for much longer. He heard voices that he knew were not there. He saw shapes that could not have existed anywhere outside his fevered dreams. But he could not stop now. Salvation was at the top. Glory was within reach.

His frozen fingers carrying him hand over hand, rime streaking his beard, his visibility nothing more than a few inches of stone before him, he clambered up the final route to the peak. He fell to the ground exhausted, the chill seeping in through the bottom of his pants, creeping down his limbs, seeping into his core. He felt himself drifting away, a weariness the likes of which he had never before felt burying him beneath freshly fallen snow.

If I close my eyes for a moment…

The ice on his eyelashes was too heavy to lift any longer.

NO! a voice from deeper inside him roared, snapping him to his senses. His eyes flicked open. He knew his purpose again and the cold anger that lay behind it.

He fumbled desperately in his jacket pocket, struggling to feel with numb fingers the thing he sought.

His hand closed around the spyglass and slowly, he drew it out.

The wind quieted. The storm passed. Sunlight streamed through a break in the clouds. The sky opened around him and he could see the crumbling city in which he had spent his entire life laid before him like a children's plaything. He saw the slums where his shack had been, the large white square of the bathouse, his own mansion perched like a dollhouse on its diminutive hill. The ruins, black and twisted, the product of some great catastrophe of centuries past, ringed the city for miles around, a minefield of charred stumbling blocks.

It was his for the taking. And everything beyond.

His breath a cloud of steam hanging in the frosty air before him, he raised the spyglass to his eye.

*.*.*

The Feast of Ascension was the grandest event the world had witnessed in millennia. Its splendor was an assault on the senses, its gluttony a marvel to behold, its backroom the place where the fortunes of small countries changed hands in a dizzying whirl of terrible speed.

Time had no meaning in the midst of the drinking, the purges, the feasting, the dancing, the music. How long did it last? None who attended could say. All they knew was that at the end of it, an Emperor had been crowned.

The ceremony had taken place in a hall of breathtaking grandeur, with pillars tall enough to pierce the heavens, windows so clear that light glittered like diamonds when it shone through them, a throne so magnificent that it put the stars themselves to shame.

At the moment the crown was placed on his head, a single ray of shining light came down from above to rest on his brow.

He had never been happier.

*.*.*

On the night after the coronation, when his glory had been dimmed a bit by a throbbing headache, but not diminished, the assassin sought him in his bed.

The Queen Consort lay there dumbly, her unblinking eyes coolly regarding the approaching shadow, her pale limbs still as the knife was drawn. The Emperor's life was spared only by the merest creaking of a floorboard. He sprang to wakefulness at the sound, his head pounding and his doom looming before him. With a wild scream, he seized the candelabra on the bedside table and after a desperate struggle, beat the assailant within an inch of his life.

The guards who were meant to be standing outside his bedroom door were strung up in the palace gardens as a warning to anyone else who would dare try him.

The Queen Consort was taken aside and punished for doing nothing to rouse him when Death was nearly at his throat.

She made not a sound as the belt struck her back, the bruises blooming like grave flowers on her ashen skin.

*.*.*

It would not be the last attempt on his life. There were to be many more than one jealous vassal with the means to wrest power from him in the weeks to come.

Anxiety oozed, thick and cold, into every crevice of his being. There were armed guards at every window, every corner, lining the garden pathways as he strolled. He slept with a rapier at his side and a vial of acid in his pocket. His food was tasted five times over, the linings of his clothes checked for needles at all hours of the day.

The loyalty of his men had to be beyond reproach. Any hint, any whisper, any joke of subterfuge was treated with torture and public execution. The slightest touch of displeasure from the common folk was given swift retribution by the closing of one more poorhouse, the crossing off of another law meant to benefit those not wealthy enough to pay the Emperor's Court in favors.

Only when the embers of rebellion were stomped out of existence and the throne rested atop a mound of murdered political rivals, did he find any kind of peace at night. The world was his to do with as he wished. All was as it should be.

But there was one thing that he did not have control over.

And that disturbed him more than any assassin looming in the shadows ever could.

*.*.*

In the midst of the palace's guest chambers, there was a room like any other. The door was made of sturdy oak and decorated with swirling filigree. Looking down a hall of like doors, one would not have been able to pick it out at a glance. But peering closer, the lines cunningly hidden behind clever ornament, there was a thin slot through which an outstretched hand could be fit.

Once a day this slot disgorged a chamber pot which was quickly exchanged for a clean one by a member of the palace staff sworn to secrecy so complete that his own family thought him dead. Once a week, a bucket of cold water and a sponge for washing were passed through. Ten minutes later, they were promptly returned. Food was given twice a day, or not at all, depending on how angry the Emperor was at the state of the world that day.

This was the boy's new prison. His interactions with the mute caretaker, his only contact with the outside world.

Its walls were bare and windowless. Nothing, save the chamberpot and the pile of hay that served as his bed, broke the monotony of that room.

When he was not staring at walls, he was pacing. When he could no longer bear to pace, he would weave strange little animals out of threads of hay by the thin line of light that shone from under the door. Every one of the had a name, a purpose, a story.

It was all he had in the world.

*.*.*

A few weeks into his duties, the caretaker of the Emperor's son fell ill. It was not an unusual occurrence. He was an old man, after all, and prone to head colds at this time of year. No one was there to notice him tossing and turning in his bed. No one but a small, hungry, voiceless boy knew of his abandoned charge.

All the chef knew was that the breakfast tray that she had put together an hour ago was still sitting on the counter and that she had very little patience for wasted food. Being somewhat friendly with the old man and knowing nothing of the importance of his duties, she placed the tray into the hands of her serving girl and pointed her in what she knew to be the general direction of its recipient. The girl knocked on quite a few doors before locating the right one, quite by accident.

The boy's hand had shot out of the slot and grabbed her foot on her third pass through the hallway. Luckily her scream had not been loud enough to draw attention and her fear was quickly gotten over, once she had seen how small and filthy the hand itself was.

She visited him often after that, in the small hours of the night when there was no one about to disturb them. She told him stories of the goings-on in the outside world, fairy tales that her own mother had whispered in her ear as she drifted off to sleep. Sometimes she brought small treats pilfered from the vast kitchens and listened to the boy gobbling them up as though he would never taste of any such thing ever again.

As the days passed, the anger at his predicament and the man who had done this to his own son grew in her breast until she could take it no longer. She had made up her mind. It would happen in the midst of the palace guards' early-morning shift change.

A single straggler, groggy from ill-gotten drink and fumbling to change out of his uniform, was drawn by the sound of her axe. She swung against the slat in the door, once, twice, again! There was an open window down the hall, supplies hidden in the courtyard…

By the time they stopped her, the slot was warped out of shape beyond recognition and splinters littered the plush carpet. Five more swings and the boy would have been able to wriggle free.

The girl was executed, without fanfare and without peering eyes, before the morning light touched the towers of the palace.

The chef was fired abruptly the next day and after she left the palace, she was never seen again.

The caretaker was locked in the dungeons on trumped-up charges of theft, where the cold and the damp finished the job his illness had started.

The Emperor sat awake in terror for two nights, pacing relentlessly outside the hastily-repaired door of his son's prison, rapier in hand, thoughts moving feverishly through his mind as his terrified sweat soaked through collar after collar. He snapped at the servants, insisted that his and the boy's food be tasted twelve times over before he was satisfied that there was no poison, accepted no blanket until it had been rolled out in front of him and shaken for needles.

The boy was not safe here. In the tightest cell, in the darkest dungeon, in the most secure hold...there was no method that might be used to snuff out all trace of human compassion.

What would the strangers do to him if they arrived and their prize was not there? How much longer could he keep him hidden before he was discovered and the secret of his power revealed to the empire? They had paid such a great cost. They were capable of so much more. And if any lowly servant could get so far as to widen a hole…

In the end, there was only one solution that soothed his anxiety.

*.*.*

The visitors swept in one by one, the swish of their robes like the lapping of floodwaters creeping across a lifetime of valued belongings. Their reflections shimmered in and out of focus on the crystalline tiles of the throne room, their formless bodies molding and melding with one another as they came forward, lining themselves up before the throne.

"Good evening, gentlemen!" the emperor said cheerily, his knife-like canines showing as he smiled. "I suppose you've come for your god. Well, tonight you'll have him."

With this he rose to his feet, throwing his shining cloak over his shoulders and revealing a thin golden chain snaking out from beneath his sleeve and trailing off to vanish in the magnificent wrinkles of his flowing robe. A loop of this chain he took hold of in his free hand and began to play with it, threading it through his fingers, caressing the smooth links.

"Yes, friends…" he said coolly, a devilish smile playing on his lips, "Tonight you will have him...should you grant me one final wish. Wealth is no object to you. Death itself is at your command. All the power of the world is shifted by a single word from your lips!"

There was a wild, haggard look in his eyes. He ran a sweaty hand through his hair, shifting it all out of place.

"But…"

The word hung in the air. The strangers murmured, clustering closer.

"...for all of the wonders you have performed, for all the majesty that you have bestowed upon me...there will yet come a day when all of it will be rendered meaningless."

His voice dropped to a whisper - pathetic, whinging, cracking as he spoke.

"I will die...and leave all your gifts behind, while my son will ascend and live beyond me. This is hardly a fair payment for services rendered, given the importance of what I am offering. So!"

He cracked a nervous smile, pressing the chain into the palm of his hand so hard that it left marks.

"Here is my final offer. You grant me immortality and I will give you leave to meet your god."

"It is done, then?" a high, cool voice asked, one robed figure separating itself from the crowd.

The emperor smiled grimly in return, his shoulders relaxing for a moment before abruptly giving the chain a sharp tug.

There was a cry of pain and the boy was wrenched out from behind the throne by the jewel-studded collar around his throat. He lay on the floor, gasping and shivering in the firelight of the hanging braziers. His hand shaking, his fingers straining, he reached for the collar, if only to put a cool finger on his burning flesh. The emperor put his foot down, the boy's bare knuckles crunching beneath his jeweled toes. A suppressed sob wracked the boy's body and a small trickle of blood appeared on his bottom lip, where he had bitten it to keep from crying out.

"There is a ritual." the hooded figure went on, tilting its head quizzically at the boy, "It is a simple thing, but we will need space around which to circle you. Silence in which our words might be heard."

"Hmm." the emperor grunted, frowning and rolling the chain between his fingers, "You give me your word on this, your oath?"

"So it is written," the figure purred, rolling its sleeve up to reveal a pale, bony arm, "So it shall be."

A small pearl-handled knife appeared from the folds of the creature's robe. Before he could register what was happening, the figure had sunk the blade into its own arm and with lightening speed, carved bloody symbols into the alabaster skin. The emperor's stomach churned in horror as he watched the blood flow in rivulets, running down the arm, dripping onto the floor in a garnet puddle.

The figure squeezed its fist and raised the bloody arm up to the sky.

"Mine oath is my flesh!" it shouted, its booming voice echoing around the cavernous chamber, "May mine flesh fall from the bone, may mine eyes rot in my skull, may mine heart betray me if this oath be broken! You will be immortal. So it is done."

"Done."

"Done!"

"Done…"

"…done."

The final word echoed around the throne room from the shadowy mouths of all the figures, their forms bending and breaking in the flickering light of the brazier.

"Are you prepared?" the figure asked, holding out its hand, still streaked with steaming blood.

"Yes." He forced the answer out between gritted teeth, past the dread roiling in his stomach, the smog filling his lungs, "It's time."

Fumbling for the small silver key in his pocket, he undid the gilded manacle that bound him to his son and turned toward his wife, sitting meekly on a stool beside the throne. She regarded him with empty eyes, her face a blank page. He kissed her on the cheek, gently taking her limp, cold hand in his and fastening the manacle about it, like a piece of fine jewelry. He held the hand for a moment longer, squeezing the ashen fingers, his thumb stroking the joints of her digits. With a resolute breath, he let go. The hand dropped back to her lap with a jingle of the chain. She stared into the distance, seeing nothing, knowing of nothing that had occurred.

He tucked the key into his breast pocket and turned around.

The strangers were arranged in a perfect circle, their robes, a ring of undulating darkness, unbroken by the firelight. The one with the bloody arm stood separate from the rest, its scarlet hand still outstretched.

His courage growing with every step, he strode toward the lone figure and unhesitatingly, placed his hand in theirs. He could feel the warmth and wetness of the stranger's blood, the solidity of their flesh. He inwardly recoiled at the feel of it, expecting nothing so much as the chill hand of a wraith, the papery touch of long-dead skin.

The long nails pricked his palm as the figure drew him, ever so gently, to the center of the room.

He would never be small again.

He would never know fear, hunger, longing.

He would never stop bending the world to his will.

He would usurp every power there was and make it kneel before him.

He would become a god that no son of his would ever be able to escape.

He stood in the center of the ring, shadowed faces looking at him from all angles, his feet firmly planted on the ground, his hands balled into fists at his sides.

A breath of air moved through the room, a gust, an exhalation, a low murmur - and the ritual began.

They danced in obscene and complex shapes around him, their forms bleeding and blending into one another, their voices undulating like snakes, the syllables lost, mangled, broken beyond all reason. He closed his eyes, dizziness creeping up on him, the world spinning beneath his feet, the whirlwind about him taking all semblance of sanity with it.

When he opened his eyes, a shadow was moving just below the surface of his skin, spreading like ink, shining like obsidian, his nerves crackling with energy when he lifted his hand to inspect it.

The chanting intensified, the dancing grew wilder and it was all he could do to not fall to knees, hands against his ears, mind shut tight against the cacophony. He felt himself swaying on his feet, saw his own shadow stand up and look him in the eye. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears, drowning out all else, a river, an ocean, a torrent, a-

And then-

He felt the knife sink into his flesh as though it were happening to someone else, as though he were reading it in a book, seeing it in a drawing. He saw it slip through his ribs in his mind's eye, parting nerves and muscle, piercing lung. Before he could scream, there was one slitting his throat, pricking his kidney, slicing his stomach.

He fell to his knees, the world going fuzzy around him, the iron scent of blood filling every crevice of his being.

The one with the oath carved on its skin strode forward, the pearl-handled knife in its hand, the blood, congealed and dark on its arm. He wept as the world turned and the stranger towered, impossibly tall, over him, the knife sinking at last into his heart.

*.*.*

He awoke to darkness. He could feel cool earth beneath his fingers, smell the scent of damp, of mildew. He put his hand in front of his face and try as he might, he could not see it, nor anything else in the pitch-black chamber.

His knees were scrunched uncomfortably close to his chest and something hard dug into his back from behind. He tried to wiggle into a more comfortable position and found that he could not. The things in the darkness pressed at him from all sides, all awkward, strange angles and chill surfaces.

He buried his face in his knees for a few moments and tried to calm himself. When he was steady enough to be able to think this problem through, he reached out a hand and took hold of one of the objects on a shelf beside him. It was smooth, round and icy to the touch. Further inspection yielded the presence of a rough cork on top. A bottle?

Straining against the confines of the space, he worked the cork free and took a sniff of the contents. Vinegar, spices…cinnamon and cloves. It was filled with frigid liquid and small, crisp spears packed tightly inside. He ate one, the crunch of it sounding tremendous inside his head, in the deathly stillness of the room.

Pickles.

His heart beginning to race, he tore everything off the shelves, touching it, tasting it three times over to be sure. Jam. More pickles. Softly moldering root vegetables.

There was a wild laugh in his throat and a cold sweat running down his back. Fools and their idiot magic! This was how they saw fit to treat an emperor? A god among men? More pity to them, if the curse they'd written on their flesh was real at all.

It was a simple matter, getting out. The boy had proven that to him on more than one occasion. All it took was patience and the jiggling of the trapdoor above until the clasp deigned to wiggle free.

He braced his hands against the splintery wood and pushed.

It refused to budge.

He strained against it, knocking and banging, screaming for help until his throat was hoarse, his shoulders burned with the effort, until his hands were raw and bloody, until his legs were so cramped that he could he could feel them no more, until his mind was flayed, destroyed with want, with hatred, with hurt.

He could not have told you of the moment when hours turned into years.

The centuries passed him by, smooth as silk in the icy darkness.

The concept of millennia was beyond him and yet, he lived on, his soul locked in a shadow of his own root cellar, eternity stretching ever before him.

*.*.*

The boy lay on the ground beside the throne, his hand throbbing in pain, his horror too great to even cry. He had seen the knives flicking in and out of the visitors' whirling cloaks, saw the blood of his father pooling beneath their feet. He had heard the sound of bones cracking and whispering of spells over a body that had stilled.

With one last hiss of air, the chanting ceased. A silence more complete than the boy had ever known fell over the room. The white-skinned stranger made no sound as it glided toward him, its red hands wrapped around a soggy bundle, a necklace of shining rubies dripping on the floor as it walked. A silver key, streaked with red, dangled from a chain around its wrist.

Without a word, the figure got to its knees and bowed low before the boy, the bundle presented in outstretched hands. The thing twitched like something alive, straining against the confines of the cloth that bound it. The boy scrambled to his feet and tried to back away from it, but the chain was tangled around his ankles and he crashed to the floor again, striking his elbow against the hard, cold tile.

He could feel the presence of hundreds of eyes on him - curious, longing, pitying, hopeful, every shadowed face waiting in breathless anticipation of what he'd do next.

The stranger offered the gift again. Its hood brushed the floor, its head a shapeless mass of darkness.

He could see the body of his father where they'd left it, sprawled on the shining tiles, his blood growing darker as it dried, the hole in his chest a mess of twisted bone and muscle. Robed figures flicked in and out of existence around it, some of them touching, poking, but never disturbing.

His hands shaking, his back against the wall, he held out his palms to receive the thing they meant to give him.

It was warm and wet against his skin. It pulsed in his hands, oozing blood as it pumped. The tip of his tongue between his teeth, he peeled away the shred of dark fabric and...

It was a human heart.

Strung with charms, scratched with symbols, stabbed through with bits of bone.

He held it to his chest and wept.

"Shhhhh…" the stranger whispered, wrapping its bloody arms around him in a gentle embrace that he had only ever felt when his mother alive.

"Soon…" the figure whispered hoarsely, its voice heavy and choked with tears, "…you will need not feel sorrow or pain…"

The arms around him started to shake.

"…or hate or love…"

They were crushing him.

"…or fear or joy…ever again. You will be free of all the things that hold us back. In your world…none will have to suffer as you did."

The embrace loosened and the boy let loose a trembling breath, the tears pouring down his face gradually drying to a halt.

The palace vanished before his eyes, fading away like old ink on parchment, crumbling without a sound, dead and desolate ground taking its place. As they passed by the remains of the stool upon which the thing that was called his mother had sat, there was nothing but a pile of dust.

In the whirl of activity that was the strangers preparing to leave, he barely noticed the click of the manacle as it locked around his captor's scarlet wrist.

*.*.*

The boy - he did not think it was quite accurate to say "man," though he was without a doubt not anything like a child any longer - lay on the roof of an abandoned whale oil refinery and looked up at the stars. He knew none of their names. When he had last seen them, they were different. Time had warped them all out of shape beyond recognition. It had changed him too - broken him irreparably, cut him off from the stream of existence for thousands of years. There was so much that he had forgotten. So much he had lost. He had felt nothing but numbness since it had happened, a void in his soul where the core of who he was had been taken from him and abruptly shoved back without warning. It was not easy to process.

Billie banged the spoon on the rim of the pot, signaling that the stew was done. Obediently, the boy got up and sat cross-legged before the fire. She ladled out two portions into two old tankards that they had stolen from a shifty pub the day before. He sipped at the hot broth and poked at the hunks of meat with the pocketknife she had given him as a "rebirth present."

Liquids went down easier. There was a trauma in chewing, a horror of grinding flesh against bone within the confines of his own skull. In the first week of his freedom, he'd barely eaten at all, save for the broth Billie had made by boiling the flesh and bones of rats for hours.

He drained the stew of liquid and ate exactly two pieces of meat, finding it unpleasantly chewy but giving it a go for Billie's peace of mind.

They washed the pot and utensils in seawater once stained with the blood of leviathans and laid out the sleeping bags in the office of a long-gone floor manager. Billie let the lamp burn as she drifted off to sleep. She knew that he was afraid of the dark, though they'd never spoken of it.

In the stillness of the dead factory, he took out the Heart.

After all this time, it still beat. The surface was like leather, the charms were all tarnished and the bones were yellowed beyond recognition, but still, the monster lived inside it, crying for help through all eternity, screaming for vengeance when his son listened close.

"Please…please…please…" it whimpered when he squeezed it, "I'm sorry for everything. It'll be better, I swear! I will be emperor and you will be a prince. And your mother…"

He squeezed it harder, wondering if it was possible to cause pain to such a thing.

All of a sudden, in his mind's eye, he saw the image of a small boy locked in an even smaller room, the earth pressing in around him, the violence of a grown man's boot forcing him down.

Something cracked inside him.

Staring out at the world through a barred window while those who were alive lived and breathed and moved below.

A trickle of water dribbled through a crack in a dam.

The screaming of the only person who'd ever shown him any kindness as she was dragged out of earshot.

Rock shifted and the trickle became a stream.

The royal jeweler fitting the collar around his throat and the click of the lock as the key turned.

The hole widened with frightening speed.

"Soon…you will need not feel sorrow or pain…or hate or love…or fear or joy…ever again. You will be free…"

How could they?

How could they do that to a child?

How could they do that to a person, a human being, to a boy, to a man, to a-

The barrier of numbness that had protected them all these last weeks crumbled as though shaken by a cataclysm that had ended civilizations. He cried as he had never cried before. Hiccuping, gasping for air, snorting, dripping with snot, hurling that damn Heart against the floor again and again and a-

Billie held him as he sobbed into her shoulder.

"Let it out." she whispered, "It's okay. This is normal. It's all part of being human. Let it go and you'll be fine. It happens, I know. But you're free now…to feel whatever you need to, to do whatever you do to get through it. And if anyone tells you otherwise…well, there's value in a good blade, isn't there?"