I had another idea I needed to get down due to some uncanny numbers I worked out, so have this. I'll have my laptop back by the end of the week, so be ready for more!
-Inky
You are cursed, says Leviathan, its words felt in the prince's soul rather than heard in the air. The Cenobite, new and raw and unnamed, looks up at his god with open fear; but then, they always did. It is a tradition, It goes on, when a new regent is crowned. The Labyrinth itself places the curse, to ensure no royal shall forget their fallibility. It is your responsibility, to bear or to break.
"What must I do?" The prince asks, his voice still too young and too human for his wretched, regal form.
That is for you to find.
The curse goes like this: on his one hundredth year, he will fall into a deep and impenetrable sleep. The prince learns this in his first year, and it is sung to him by the Labyrinth, woven into the moans and gasps of the souls being ripped apart and reshaped. He drops his knife which was set for the skin of an old man with a history long unpunished, and for a moment the condemned man thinks he is spared. It does not last; the prince sinks his chains into his subject, and the cries only momentarily distract him from the frightened shaking of his hands.
He only gets one hundred years, when some Cenobite have lived for a millennia. Were he not worthy of being Leviathan's favorite, he would weep that it was unfair.
He gives up finding a cure on the first night of his sixteenth year.
The prince, like any proper regent, is respected. Loved is not a term spent so freely; such an emotion is more precious than pain, kept locked away to be shared only with a rare and special few. He is respected, admired, feared; a prince of order and discipline, a true Son of Leviathan.
The sixteenth year is when the curse often manifests, he's learned; he has told nobody the conditions of his, and so he is congratulated by his favorites on an anniversary without incident.
It is that night, alone in his chambers, that he decides that he will not give in to his dread of what may be. What matters is his duty, and souls, and exploration; what may come is for the future, and if he is meant to succumb to his curse then so be it.
He takes a pin from the center of his forehead and wipes it clean, then presses his finger to the dull tip. He swears on a drop of dark red blood that he will make the rest of his hundred years worthwhile, that he would give his all to the Labyrinth and to Leviathan, and that he will trust his fate to them completely.
The ground and sky accept his offering with a tremble that pulses through him. Every soul grows still to hear their sound.
He is still an admirable prince. He is dignified, controlled, coveted; Cenobites nurture aches to either be him or be his, to have either his ethereal demeanor or undivided attention. The curse is far from their minds, trained on flesh and fortitude, and only Leviathan and the Labyrinth truly know that he is still cursed at all.
For fifty years, he is content.
He has stopped counting, but after many years he loses his breath for the first time.
The girl who called him to her world is radiant even in her fear; her name is Kirsty and she is on the cusp of her eighteenth year and she is perfect. He has seen many like her in his time - brown eyes, dark curls, pale skin - but there is something in how her features come together and the way she looks at him as both awe-inspiring and awful that arrests his attention and seizes his mind.
She is quick-witted, enough to temporarily escape her contract in exchange for another, one who has slipped from their grasp and back to the banal world past the box, aching and incomplete. The prince almost wishes for her to fail, but he stopped wishing early into his second year.
She succeeds, and he is impressed. She succumbs to temptation to see her uncle's fate, and he is endeared.
she escapes, and he is smitten.
It is when he is sent back by her hand that he feels what he did not expect for decades; the last days are upon him.
Outside he is calm; inside, he panics. How can this be, he wants to demand if his gods, I am not even into my seventieth year, how can I be so close to the end? Leviathan and the Labyrinth betray nothing, silent and steadfast.
That night, for the first time since the Labyrinth last sang to him, the Prince prays with trembling hands.
It is on the eve of what he has confirmed as his sixty-seventh year that he sees her again. She is beautiful still, strong, dedicated and deluded on the soul of her dead father. He allows her to go free into the Labyrinth; he promises her that they will have eternity to know her flesh.
As she runs from him, he laments his exclusion from the promise.
"You were all human," she says. Kirsty has done more than explore; she has peeled away the covers over the secrets they didn't even realize they'd kept from themselves. Now she stands, eyes insistent, soul burning as she lays their truth before them.
The prince looks at the photo in his hands, and he knows the man who looks back. He remembers slowly and in reverse; chains, hooks, his own pink hands working open the box for the first time. And he remembers something else.
Elliot Spencer became a Son of Leviathan when he was thirty-three years old.
The prince understands as he looks back at Kirsty. He understands as the false Cenobite doctor enters the room, he understands as he turns to face the harbinger of his curse.
On the eve of his one hundredth year, the prince saves Kirsty Cotton and falls into a deep, impenetrable sleep.
Today's my birthday, Kirsty thinks with bitterness as she kneels before the dead man. She is eighteen today, and her emergence into adulthood is christened in blood. She tries not to think about it, focusing on the former Cenobite.
He is beautiful even with such a terrible pallor; some part of her wishes she could see him as he was before the Truth, just once. She has returned after defeating Channard and getting Tiffany home; somehow she cannot bring herself to leave.
She will stay, she decides as she looks at him; and whatever the doctor did to him must have been temporary, because she can see the color draining and the scars emerging once more in his face. She waits and watches, and after several minutes the prince is restored to his true self. His pins glisten in the faint light. He is more beautiful this way, she thinks, and feels a pang of sadness that she will never know him now.
Kirsty leans forward, her hair on his shoulder. "Thank you," she whispers, "for saving my life." She kisses the prince on his cold lips for just a moment, then pulls away.
The prince opens his eyes.