People Disappear All the Time
"Sing me a song of a lad that is gone,
say could that lad be I?"
-Robert Louis Stevenson
Two soldiers trembled in their armor, metal scraping against metal, their bones rattling like a toy to amuse a child. Each had their helms drawn over their faces, as if it could protect them from ghosts seeking retribution for the wrong done to them. Duty kept their feet shuffling inch by inch, but superstition reached out his talons, sinking them deep in to the men's shoulders. "Are you certain this is where the queen told us to go?" The taller of the two asked, the tremor in his voice growing with each passing second. His fingers skimmed the hilt of his sword, preparing to draw it on some tortured soul that could not buy their fare into the afterlife. Who would provide coin for a witch, after all? Let them rot in purgatory, that would serve them right for their curses upon all of Draiocha. A just punishment, and accusations promised a just reward, for humans were a brutal species. The macabre seduced even the purist of hearts, and watching a disliked neighbor burn at the stake conjured joy no potion could imitate. By the end of the day, men and women alike danced upon the ashes of the fallen, sharing a drink with folk they despised more than heap of bone on the pyre, some new scheme formulating in their devious minds.
The stockier knight's head bobbed, maintaining a grip on his stead's reins to make escape quicker. "Frieth, Evander. She said we'd find him in Frieth." He shuddered, his mind unable to grasp how a man could survive for three years alone in the ruins of their founding city. The dense air settled over his shoulders and Evander yanked his helmet from his head for a breath of unrecycled oxygen. "Maybe we should tell her we couldn't find him?" the other offered, eying the woods with unease, "Surely not finding the prince at all would be better than finding him driven mad by the witches, or even slaughtered as the beginning of their revenge. Killing the heir to the throne does sound like one way to disembowel all of Draiocha."
The pair passed a crumbling structure, moss infiltrating the cracks in the stone, a bandage over a gaping wound, an attempt to heal something far too broken. Yet the rubble opened up into a clearing, hints of cement still burrowed beneath the invasive wildlife. "Perhaps the spirits have gotten to you, Anslem," the taller Evander said, eyes wide, incredulity seeping into every corner of his tone, "The queen will have our heads if we don't find him. You know what she said, no one would miss us." Their boots crunched against the stone and dirt as they continued their cautious steps throughout the city, and Anslem protested no further, though each passing moment left him more uneasy than the last. No witches had sprung out at them yet, but it was only a matter of time.
As they rounded a corner, the smell of burning wood permeated the air in a thick cloud of fear and Evander stiffened, shooting a worried glance in his friend's direction, "It's them," he mouthed. This was it, they'd die in a realm no one dared enter, a feast for witches starved from their revenge. The ghosts intended to roast them as they had been. His heart pounded in his chest, an erratic thump that left him gasping for breath, but smoke contaminated anything his lungs could drag in, and Anslem raised his hand, insisting the taller man stop. "I'll go investigate, stay here, if I don't come back in five minutes, run." He started forward but paused to glance over his shoulder, his face twisted like a mother who'd lost her son to the horrors of war, "And don't forget me, the rest of the world will, but you cannot. Or it will be as though I never existed at all."
Evander opened his mouth to protest, but no words passed his tongue. Truthfully, he'd never been a good liar, empty promises never settled well on his shoulders, and he could not, in good conscious, tell his friend that he didn't want Anslem to be the one to go. Fear kept his feet deep in the dirt and his limbs stiff. So, the stocky knight continued on, his boots leaving deep imprints in the unrestrained, vivacious grass. He followed the smell and the distant noise of a crackling flame. "It's just Prince Arran," he murmured, sucking in copious amounts of air only to expel it after a few seconds. "It's just Prince Arran. The witches are gone, the witches are gone." Trees the size of the castle in Kreonis loomed above the knight, slowly itching towards him, their canopies during into coverage to hide the atrocities he feared would befall him from the rest of the world.
A honeyed voice floated before him, silken and dripping with sugar. His ears lapped it up, the soft hum enough to convince him of the owner's beauty without so much of an uttered word from her lips. Anslem's racing heart tugged him towards the sound, his eyes begging to be privy to the Siren's song.
No. His hand shot down to his blade and he unsheathed it, the dulling metal catching the glimmer of sunlight between the leaves. "Now, where's that witch?" he asked himself, his pulse beating at a completely different rhythm than the unseasoned warrior was used to, though the adrenaline helped him stay focused rather than collapsing into a bubbling mess. He stumbled forward, and panic consumed his body as his sloped eyes latched onto a woman's figure inside the remains of a hut. She stood before a pot, tossing herbs into the boiling water while a flame crackled beneath it, a melodious tune threatening to seduce Anslem once more. Fire seemed to blaze from her skull as well, thick curls licking at her chin, kindling stuck in a few places. Her frame remained hidden behind a thick olive cloak, but the knight had no doubt that it was as captivating as the rest of her features.
He shook his head. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. She will kill you if she has the chance. Steel growing heavy in his palms, his hands shook as he raised his blade, prepared to skewer the supernatural woman and send her straight to Hell if that's where she was to go, "Be gone, witch!" He cried, and the woman let out a strangled cry, her body jerking away from the knight and the herbs slipping from her grasp, the entire stem falling into the pot. Her hands stayed up, a similar expression of panic mixed with confusion painted across her appealing features. She took a step away from Anslem, her voice raised louder than necessary, "Please," she begged, and the knight's knees wobbled. Some talented witch she was for she had him under his spell with nothing but a word. Yet, for Evander, he refused to crack. "Please," the witch repeated, even louder this time, "I've done nothing."
A frown twitched at the man's lips, his mind churning to catch up with his eyes and ears. There was something familiar about the witch – one could not say Draiocha was filled with redheads – and that voice…he'd heard it before. Anslem took a step forward, his arm burning from the strain of holding up his weapon for so long, when realization suddenly kicked in. Three years prior, the Princess Marsali had been burned at the stake while a bag covered her head. A simple courtesy for the second born of King Myron and Queen Nerissa, and yet, by the time the bag burned, she was far too gone to truly identify. Wracked with grief and anger, Prince Arran had recoiled away from the nation, apparently to Frieth, and left the future kingship to the younger prince, Lucas. Yet this woman was unmistakably the mad princess, the devil's daughter, but she should be dead. His voice shook like his hands, like his knees, like his entire body, "Either you're a ghost, milady, or you fooled all of Draiocha."
Anslem's focus remained on the princess, his ears unfocused and his mind clouded with confusion. Perhaps that was the reason, or maybe a sheer talent, but before he could so much as blind or acknowledge the presence of someone else, his blade clattered to the ground, his arm burning from a new impact, and a sharp metal pressed against his throat while a strong grip latched onto his stocky form. "No one will believe you, lad," a new voice hissed, his deep voice low and imbued with an unveiled threat. Anslem twisted his wrists to raise his hands, squeezing his eyes shut and praying this was nothing but a figment of his imagination. That when he opened them again he'd find himself in the barracks, Evander snoring beside him. Instead, when he peered one open, he watched Princess Marsali's Savros eyes flicker between him and a figure behind him.
"Arran!" she shouted, and Anslem's body went slack in his apparent prince's grasp, "Arran, there's another one of them, let him go." With an indignant huff, the hold on the knight loosened and he sucked in a deep breath, wheeling around to find a flabbergasted Evander lingering in the threshold. Prince Arran did not lower his blade, even if it was no longer pressed against Anslem's throat, instead, he brandished the sharp point in a circle at both knights in a silent warning. The stocky man finally found his attention drawn to the runaway prince, and the resemblance was unmistakable. His red curls had grown out more and dirt added more than three years too his sharp features, but nonetheless, he was as handsome as he had been when he left the castle. The shaggy stained undershirt seeming to fit his frame better than elaborate doublets, and a shadow of a beard dusted across his jaw. A matching pair of piercing blue eyes stared back at him, no recognition for the lowly, disposable knight, nothing but hostility and apprehension glared back at him.
Evander stepped forward, gathering his courage and vocal cords faster than Anslem, if the other knight could even do such a thing anymore. His cadence started slow, attempting to control the open flame suffocating the room and wielding a blade, and he had the deadly training to use it, "Your Highnesses, my name is Sir Evander Godfrey and this is my companion Sir Anslem Shiveley, your –" he began to stutter, his nerves getting the better of him. Before Queen Nerissa, the two of them sweat through their underclothes, nearly pissed their pants, too. Neither had a way with words, and neither had the finesse to speak to people as dignified as the man who was meant to rule their country in the coming years. "Y-your…" Evander tried again, and Prince Arran grinded his teeth together, seizing the knight's failure as an opportunity to speak for himself.
"I don't give a damn who you are," he grated and Princess Marsali rolled her eyes, her arms crossing over her chest with a huff. Her lips parted as she seemed to prepare herself for a counter argument against her brother, but without so much as glancing her way, he raised a finger, to which the red-haired witch raised her eyebrows and tilted her head to the side, a displeased expression settling onto her features. Arran ignored it for a time, "What are you doing here."
Anslem regained his spine and finished for his friend, "Your grace, your mother sent us. You've been ordered to return to court." The prince's twin sister's arms dropped and she pulled her cloak tighter around her body at the mention of the very people who tried to execute her for a crime neither of the knights were sure she'd committed. And while they'd hoped the news would soothe the prince's temper, it seemed to only aggravate him further.
Like a feral beast striding towards his prey, Arran closed the distance between them, "Arran," Marsali attempted to get his attention but he pressed on, his neck curled to where his Savos eyes bore into the knight's simple mud brown. "Brother!" the princess raised her voice higher, sterner, and Prince Arran twisted his head to look her way, finally reigning in his anger long enough to listen to reason, "No man concerned for their soul would come here without a reason, and to see if a princess they had no reason to believe was still alive still lived would certainly not be cause for the superstitious, and after all the work mother did to help us escape, she's not going to simply slaughter us now," calculating azure irises skimmed over Anslem and Evander's form, and a new expression flooded in, pity, perhaps? "She would especially not entrust these fools with that task. They want something."
Flashing Anslem a tight lipped, inauthentic smile, Arran created a bit more distance between them, brushing some dirt off of the knight's shoulders before clamping down on them, "That's precisely what I want to know." His fingers curled, his grip tightening, "Why am I summoned back to court?"
Evander spoke again and Arran nearly started, too absorbed in the stocky knight to remember the taller one, though he slipped back into a dangerous but easy stance, "The queen did not tell us, you're right, they would not trust fools like us with that information, though before we left, we heard a rumor that King Myron was overturning your renouncement of the throne. I believe he wants to make you his heir again."
Helloooo welcome to my new story. Since the information was not in this chapter because I wanted to post it today but I'm getting really freaking tired, I will give a brief overview of how this selection is going to work but it will be clearer next chapter.
There's a law in Draiocha that allows a prince to challenge another prince's status as heir to the throne. This law not only requires the other prince to prove himself worthier (while the first one gets to do nothing), but it begins a Selection. A girl from each major city in the country comes to compete for either one of the princes, in this case Arran or Lucas, and also has to prove herself a worthy queen. The Selection is not used in every generation, sometimes there are arranged marriages, sometimes kings find love, but the Selection is used to tip the scales. The prince that finds a queen they not only love, but one that will serve the country well, stands a much better chance of being king. It ensures that they will have a wise advisor and can secure future lines for the royal family.
As this chapter was only an introduction, there are still bits of the plot I didn't talk about here, but you can find more information on my profile and feel free to ask me any questions! I am more than happy to answer them. The form for the SYOC is also on my profile, this is set in the past, though in a completely fictional world, so we're talking medieval…renaissance…etc.
I sure hope I'm not missing anything, I'm sorry if I am, I'm nearly falling asleep at my computer (so like I haven't even read over what I've written…whoops).
That's all I got for now!
-Hailey