The sun rises, but it is pale and dim and distant.
His sleeves are too long for his small arms. He sometimes wonders what'ss the use for them, linen ruffles that prevent his fingers from reaching his scepter quickly or from untying his belt by himself. So far he figured they were useful for flicking off annoying rukh fluttering its tiny sparkling wings on his eyelids. Even that he doesn't do often. Black rukh moves too lazily to disrupt his sleep and feels more like a swarm of unsubstantial flies on a sweltering day and comes with comfortable, familiar sense of acceptance.
Sometimes he pretends to flick it off though, because when Falan sees him she laughs and makes cooing noises and sometimes calls him Tess and he doesn't correct her. He likes seeing her happy. They've been telling him that no one in this world can be happy, because this world is wrong and should have never existed, and he is fine with that, because all he has seen of this world are the walls of his palace. And he does not even care if the palace disappears, as long as Falan can be content. Falan is nice to him, even when she does not laugh. Maybe then would that Tess person come back and they could laugh at their long sleeves together.
The others laugh at him as well. He tells them everything that's on his mind and they laugh, but their laughter is high-pitched and cold and they cover their mouths with their hands even though their faces are already covered with silken veils.
He asks Falan. She does not answer, but the corners of her eyes wrinkle and that is how he knows she is smiling. It is nothing unusual. Falan rarely talks to him and lately, she is rarely present. She told him to stop calling for her in tears when the pain from lectures or bad dreams returned. She told him she was not his mother and he asked her what does it mean and the corners of her eyes wrinkled. She hugged him, and that was how he knew everything was alright and everything is alright now and everyone is good just like the world they are trying to destroy is not.
But when they tell him that braided hair would make him greater Magi and he asks her to braid it for him, she just leaves without saying anything, and he figures it is not his place to ask why.
The sun is stained with black like an ink spilled on a desk.
The peaches from the Royal Garden are pale and pink and taste of moonlight. He thanks his ability to fly, because that way he can reach the very upper branches, where even the starlings and Koumei's pidgeons do not dare to wander. Fruit from up there is juicier and he can pretend not to hear Emperor's servant calling him to attend to his duties.
He catches himself preferring lower branches lately.
The girl has red hair of royal family, but hers are tainted with pink, not unsimilar to those peaches. That is how he knows something is amiss right away, that and the fact that he has been seeing her hiding under a writing desk when no one else is in sight. Sometimes, when he is bored, he sits on her windowsill and, hiding behind the heavy velvet curtains, listens to her talking with imaginary people, and when even they leave with approaching evening, talking to herself. He finds it amusing that she imagines herself to be a princess of golden halls, when the real golden halls are just around the corner and are neither sparkling nor dreamy like they are in fairytales.
At least that is what he assumes. He had no one to read him fairytales and later, when he could read them to himself, he was bothered because the happy endings never included chaos and destruction.
They start talking when she reaches out of the window to take a peach and he lets her fall out.
He tells her that peaches are pieces of sun that fell on Earth because the sun saw her being sad and wanted her to brighten up. He tells her that to cure blisters from her swordmanship training she needs to turn twenty times on her left foot. He tells her that if he had cut his hair, he would lose his powers and would be expelled from the court and had to live as a beggar. He is infinitely amused that she believes him and even more annoyed that once, he believed it all as well.
He asks her once jokingly to make her hair into a braid to see if she has some magical powers. She refuses, at first because her hair is too short to braid, and later because she tells him he cannot braid hair properly, and he rememberes that he never managed to ask Falan how to do it.
He tells her that his braid is filled with dreams and she believes him and he is not sure whether it is really lie this time.
They talk even now, now that she was introduced to the Royal Court and acquired her own annoying servant that calls to him to the upper branches and whom he sometimes listens to, her own djinn and her own place under the sun. He secretly listens when she talks to her imaginary people nonetheless, because one of them has hair the colour of ink and she reprimands him for teaching her nonsense and asks how to save him from his despair. He never gives an answer, just like imaginary people do, and she sighs and lets him go home before it is time for a bath.
She asks to become friends one time. He says no, because no one has ever taugh him what friends are.
He watches her silhouette in flickering light of candles and reaches for a peach before he remembers that it is autumn and all the pieces of sun have fallen down and rotten.
The sun is tar black and cold, cold, cold.
Someone inside his head is screaming. The screeching, unbearable, maddening sound stifles everything else, the feeling in his fingers as he holds his scepter, the scent of blood as the blade slices into the illusion's chest, incomprehensible howling of his king in fight with his own twisted mind.
His hands are moving by themselves. Or the scepter moves them, he does not know and nothing would change if he did. Nothing would change if he was the one with control over them. They would be unwavering like they are now, sure of their task, sure of its justification. It might be Il Illah screaming about unforgiveness, but the words are his own.
Il Illah blames Aladdin for the path of his destiny. He, Judal, blames him for showing him other possibilities.
He hears his voice asking the question that never occured to him to ask. He could have asked Falan why he was the one to endure the cleanings, the trainings, the pain and the nightmares that were nothing but memories concealed by the ragged veil of Black Rukh. Why he was the chosen one, when there were other Magi, the ones he was told about, the ones that were too clueless and jaunty to grasp the macabre state of the world. And Falan would not have answered, but wrinkled the corners of her eyes instead, because that was what she did when she did not want to give him an answer or did not know how to.
He never asked because his life was the only kind he knew and there was nothing that had felt wrong. Nothing that felt different from other lives of other people. He was a child, and for a child it was natural to think that everyone else was spending their nights writhing in pain as their soul was being forcibly torn from the Great Flow of Rukh.
Had he asked, they would laugh, just like they did by mere sight of him. Had he known what he does now, he would tear the unsubstantial shackles and-
They would find him and put him back, because at that point, there have never been any other choice anymore. Unlike his king, who faces his choice right now, before his eyes, and the choices have pale skin like Falan and soft smile like the peach princess. He watches him struggle, climb the wall of his own conscience, his broken nails leaving trails of blood on the sharp stone wall that ars as real as his effort to hold on to the possibility of having a choice. He thinks that if he was capable of such a feeling, he would admire him.
His king has no voice to scream for him.
His king makes a choice by himself.
He makes that choice with him.
He wonders why there is no meaningful recollection. Not a memory of his parents he could never meet and whose faces he would have never known if Aladdin didn't show him in his selfish parade of self-importance. Not a memory of Falan, her eyes filled with so much emotion that it spilled over and nothing was left but dull obedience. Not a memory of his princess, who was ready to save him if he just figured out what he was supposed to be saved from.
He realizes none of them is important.
He recognizes the emotion he never expected himself to feel.
Happiness.
We will destroy this world and create it anew.
The sun has set.