Amplified by her magic, the queen's screams rang throughout the entire castle.
Ashura rushed to her bedside, pushing blindly through the frantic crowd of midwives, physicians, and healing mages. There was blood, so much blood, too much blood. It was everywhere, staining the hands and clothes of the doctors, drenching the bedding, even splattered on his wife's sweat-streaked face. He dropped to his knees beside her and clutched her hand. "What's happening?" he demanded of the attendants. "What's wrong? Do something!"
He never heard the reply. His wife let out such a horrible, groaning cry that he almost fainted. Her bloodshot blue eyes were wide in her ashen, contorted face. He looked into her eyes and repeated, over and over, "It's all right. I'm here. It's going to be all right. I'm here, I'm here..."
Her free hand lifted to touch the tears on his cheeks. "Ashura..." she whispered, before her whole body convulsed in a wrenching spasm. She screamed again. The massive bloodstains on the coverlet grew even larger, hot crimson liquid pooling in the bedclothes.
"No! Don't..." he begged her, gripping her hand tightly, so tightly, as though he could hold her to this life by that pressure alone. "Don't go... Don't leave me. Please, please, don't— Don't!"
Then she went utterly, terribly still.
"No..." he whispered. "No..." The hand he held was limp. He clung to it with both of his. He looked to the attendants. "Someone, do something. Please, do something..." His voice broke on a sob.
A physician spoke, his tone grief stricken. "I'm sorry, Your Majesty..."
Ashura turned away from him. Trembling, he gazed at his wife. Wet with perspiration, her long, golden hair spread out across the pillows. Her eyes were still open, wide and blank and cloudy blue, staring at nothing. He reached out a hand and gently closed them, then kissed her slack lips.
"Your Majesty," one of the midwives spoke hesitantly.
"What is it?" he ground out, barely holding himself together.
"Your Majesty, the babies..."
He froze. "Ba—babies?"
"Majesty..." A man, that time. One of the physicians. "They were stillborn, Majesty." His voice held so much sorrow. "Twin sons, Your Majesty. I'm so very sorry..."
Twin sons... He stared down at the lifeless face of his dearest love. His dreams, it was all just as in his dreams. It had all come true. Why had no one believed him? Maybe this could have been changed; maybe his wife and sons would still be alive, if only someone had believed. Why did no one ever believe?
He threw back his head and howled his denial and anguish to the uncaring universe. Then he collapsed over his wife's still form and wept.
The world dissolved into flurries of snow.
He was huddled over the body of a woman, weeping bitterly. He felt cold, so cold. Frigid wind cut through his clothes, and snowflakes clung to his hair and skin like cobwebs.
Another gust of freezing air tore at him, and he finally looked up.
A gasp escaped his lips. Corpses surrounded him, uncountable numbers lying at grotesque angles in the snow. The woman beneath him was not his queen, but a total stranger, with waxy skin and lifeless features. With revulsion, he wrenched himself away from her and climbed to his feet.
He wiped his tears away and looked around. "Where am I?" he said aloud, bewildered.
Drifts of snow blew across the barren earth. A lofty, colossal wall made of stone blocks rose up around him in a great circle, defining the boundaries of a deep, gigantic pit. The sheer height was dismaying. In the center of the pit, an unsightly tower reached into the forbidding sky. No vegetation grew anywhere, no bird called, no insect chattered, and nothing but snow and tiny ice crystals moved. It seemed nothing lived here at all. There was just unnatural silence, and the wind, and the snow.
And the corpses.
Overhead the sky loomed gray and ugly. Bodies of all ages dotted the desolate landscape, dressed in unfamiliar styles of clothing. But for that, the strange surroundings, and that fact that these people hadn't been torn to shreds, he might almost believe that this place held another of his future killing sprees.
But when he reached out with magical senses, and failed to detect anything, anything at all, he knew he no longer stood in his beloved Seresu. This place was foreign, alien—and worse, magic didn't work here, not at all. He could feel nothing of the mystic, not even the power at his own core, and it frightened him. There was no place in all of his world like this.
He considered the pit's steep, curving wall and its brutally ugly tower, and wondered if, perhaps, there might not be anyone else alive in this bleak place. From where he stood, he could see no way out. He thought that if there was any way to escape, it had to be on the other side of the tower. He started picking his way around the pit, trying not to stumble over any of the countless dead, irrationally hopeful of finding another living soul somewhere along the way.
He walked for what seemed like hours, although he didn't think he traveled very far. Time seemed confused in this place. The wind pushed against him, and ice pelted him, as though the elements were trying to bar his way. He passed innumerable bodies, of adults young and old, of children, even of infants. Many bore varied marks of murder and formal execution, but a large number showed no visible injuries. Perhaps they had died of sickness, or even poison? Yet, however they had died, they displayed no signs of rot or putrescent flesh. In fact, none of the corpses appeared to have decomposed at all.
The whole situation mystified him. By all rights, this foul pit should reek with the stench of decay and putrefaction, even in this cold, but all the bodies appeared as though they had only recently become deceased. Closer to the tower, the dead grew even greater in number, piled atop one another in grisly jumbles of limbs, heads, and torsos.
Finally, he reached the opposite side of the pit. At the base of the tower, surrounded by repellent heaps of corpses, he at last beheld another living human being, a blond child. A young boy, barefoot, dressed in filthy rags. He was horribly emaciated, with crabbed, pinched features and bulbous, protruding eyes that proclaimed him the victim of starvation and unimaginable poverty. His stringy, unkempt hair reached past his ankles.
The boy scrabbled at the tower, attempting to scale it. "Fai!" he screamed desperately. "Fai!"
Ashura looked upward. High up, near the very top of the stone column, he could make out a barred window. Was someone else up there, imprisoned at the pinnacle of the tower?
A thin, reedy cry drifted downward, answering the boy on the ground: "Yūi!"
Ashura shifted his gaze back to the boy clawing at the tower's stone blocks, and knitted his brows. He moved closer for a better look. There was something about the child that gnawed at him, something he should remember...
Sudden recognition jolted him. He fell to his knees in the snow, just staring at the boy.
This boy was one of the twin princes he had seen before, in another dream. The princes who were cursed, who had been standing before a harsh, immovable sovereign for judgment in a country called Valeria.
One of the very princes he had been tempted to steal away from their own world.
It seemed so long ago. He remembered that twins in that world were an ill omen and brought great misfortune to those around them.
He stared up at the barred window. The other twin? Was that who was up there? Did that mean both were here, but eternally separated?
Why were they here, abandoned in such a hideous place, imprisoned in such a horrible manner? He looked around at all the corpses, and wondered just what had caused this much death. Could it have come about because the twin princes had been born and allowed to live? He wanted to reject the idea. He wanted to believe it was absurd.
But it wasn't absurd. His own curse would eventually force him to deal this kind of massive death to his own country.
Was abandonment in this hellish place the children's punishment for bearing their curse of being twins? No matter what had happened, this treatment was inhuman. How could their own kinsman have done this to them?
It would have been far kinder to have just killed them outright.
The boy appeared much older now than he had in the previous dream, an eternity older, but Ashura knew that his appearance was deceptive. His cracked and disfigured skin, his ragged hair and nails, his emaciated body, all gave him the appearance of a gnarled old man. But the boy was still just a young child. Horribly abused and traumatized, damaged almost beyond recognition, but his height and frame gave his true age away.
As Ashura watched, appalled and sickened, the child clambered atop a pile of corpses heaped against the base of the tower. He dug scratched and bruised fingers into cracks in the stone blocks and climbed up, handhold by bleeding handhold, until his grip failed him. He tumbled back to earth, crying with pain and despair.
Ashura couldn't bear to see any more. He turned his head aside, closing his eyes, and berated himself for his lack of action before. This dream, and the last, both had been sent to him as punishment for his failure, for all his failures in the past, and the inevitable failures to come.
He should have found a way to make someone believe in his prophetic dreams, to save his queen and his sons before they had died in agony. It was his fault they were gone. He had foreseen their deaths and failed to prevent them. It was no one's fault but his own.
He should have sought out the cursed twins when he had first encountered them. He might have discovered a way to free them of their ill fortune, if only he had searched hard enough. Instead, he had abandoned them, and now they were trapped in an obscene hell where no magic worked, where no spell of his could ever find them. He was as much at fault for their fate as the kin who had condemned them.
Just as he knew he would fail to save his country. Instead, he would destroy it. Seresu's death would be on his own head.
He forced himself to look first at the child crying at the base of the tower, then to the barred window so far above. Mercilessly, he committed the scene to memory. It would be his penance for all his failures, past, present, and future.
And he felt longing, too, heartbreaking longing for these two doomed boys who under other circumstances might have been his own.
"Ah, children, you were born to the wrong world," he sighed regretfully, feeling moisture gather at the corners of his eyes. "You should have been born in Seresu. I would have cherished you."
As he reached out to the poor, sobbing child, the dream faded away.