Act 3: The Obsolete Prince

October, 191-

"….mein gott, Klosterheim! The creature is an imbecile - I don't know how much longer I can stand this!"

"Patience, Lady von Bek-Minct, patience. Imbecile or not, he's the only one who can use the sword."

"It's not right that he's the only one who… while I… I am of sound mind but a WOMAN— the creature belongs in a zoo!"

"Control Ravenbrand, control the Balance. It is very simple, Frau. His father's papers give no indication of where the blade lies. It will be found." The little man's dry voice rustles through the doorway where Odalric, tall young Lord of Mirenburg, too frail to serve Kaiser and country, slumps upon a windowsill watching a large, metallic green fly slowly beat itself to death upon the glass against a background of winter rain.

Fresh from a tour of certain discreet, exclusive brothels to complete his gentlemanly education, Odalric agreed to the marriage because he was a man now, and a man must have a wife even as bloodlines must be continued.

Or so he'd been told by Father Lobkowitz, the family pastor.

Marriage was not the pleasure he'd been assured it would be, starting with their wedding night when his new bride, an older, widowed distant cousin, told him that his bizarre appearance and childish ways disgusted her – "Don't touch me, freak!".

He had to wear stiff clothing that itched instead of his father's shabby old silk morning suit, waist length milk-white hair cropped short.

He was to sit still, not fidget or pace. He was to mingle with her friends when he'd rather sit in his library, a thousand and one or more worlds at his fingertips. He was to listen to music, not play it, beloved Stradivarius locked away, key conveniently lost, the servants and physician he'd known since birth replaced by strangers.

"No more childish things, Odalric – take those ridiculous spectacles off and look at me when I speak to you!" she'd snapped, "No more scribbling on the walls! No more engines in the solarium. No more nuts and bolts in the Limoges serving dishes. Mein Gott, stop rolling your eyes at me – you are an adult!"

He was also not to drive himself in his little electric runabout. He was from now on to be driven wherever he needed to go; the people were restless and he was too precious to risk— likewise, horses.

Father Lobkowitz was a liar. Marriage was a joke. The only one not laughing was Odalric.

He looked down at a tug at his stiff, itchy sleeve and smiled, silvery lenses glinting in the stormlight streaming from the tall window. His little stepdaughter was the only pleasure that came with marriage.

Holding up her favorite doll, which was yet again broken, the six-year-old giggled, putting a finger to her lips, "Shhhhhhhh!"

The rain became snow. With a flourish of his long-fingered hand, Odalric pulled a small silver coin from the child's ear, giving it to her before the two of them slipped away hand in hand, Lady von Bek-Minct and Klosterheim her advisor arguing about him over a bottle of his best red wine, to enjoy in private the last little bit of pleasure allowed him.

Unless his wife found out and took that away, too.

Blowfly

How long did it take you to learn to make eye contact, little ferret? the dragon whispers inside my head. I crouch upon a door marked "EXIT" that's also a guitar case, broken mirror stars above, silver waves and streams of red poppies surround me in the crystalline blackness. To obey just enough to be overlooked?

"None of your goddamned business!" I yell into the brilliant void, door heaving beneath me.

Something immense and unseen leans forward upon one elbow, head cocked, scrutinizing me from the void, The Kaiser's Army is where he-I-WE learned it, the dragon pretending to be a man murmurs. Autism is what some call it… As with von Bek and the Nazis, Zodiac's rank, his position, protected us until it didn't— do you know your roots?

"East Prussia, Bavaria, Austria, Saxony— so?" My makeshift life raft heaves, forcing me to flatten and hold on, stomach churning.

Do you know their stories? Thunders around me in a whirl of poppies, blow flies and the stench of burning human flesh. Tell me a story– there is the sound of a whip against bare skin, a strangled gasp… I demand you distract me from the pain!

"What do you mean, demand?" I snap and then slap a hand over my mouth. Myriad red eyes watch me from the entwined branches overhead, black on black. Annoyed at being ordered around as I am, I don't want to throw up, not with an audience.

Tell me a story! The dragon roars from the between the worlds, the drone of a single metallic green blowfly beating against the blue of a merciless September sky.

Against the piercing stars…

Nauseated, I mumble. "…once upon a time, one of my great great grandfathers and his pregnant wife fled Saxony, taking passage in the dead of winter. The baby died and was tossed overboard wrapped in an old blanket. The end."

…

…

… I sag by the wrists from the rigging of a strange ship upon a strange sea in a strange body not my own. There is the sound of a lash hitting flesh beneath the burning of a strange sun, and the flesh is mine.

…that was never the intent of he, we, I. The harsh drone of flies, the slapping of waves, softens. There is a throbbing strip of pain between my shoulders, only my body is not mine.

"Once upon a time," I mumble aloud through bleeding salt-cracked lips to no one and everyone who might be listening, "There was a prince of a small city known for its ironwork and clever toys, a prince obsolete before he was born…"

There is a sudden crack, followed by a burning stripe across my back. I become myself when my unlikely lifeboat-door-guitar case abruptly runs aground, tumbling me onto broken toys and worn glass pebbles. "Who cares about some goddamn obsolete weirdo prince?" Shoulders and arms aching, I stagger upright, "I come from blacksmiths, carpenters, and stonemasons. We BUILD palaces, not live in them!"

Zodiac is admittedly perverse. The dragon sounds offended. Even coming from a bloodline created by mysel— by the man who bleeds, dreaming of you and I high above the deck of an very foolish enemy's warship—there are rules…

"I don't care about rules or who dreams of whom!" I kick the guitar case-EXIT door. With a growling squeal, it rebounds, cracking me on the shins. I sit down hard upon the strange beach rubbing my injured dignity. "Fuck-fuck-FUCK!"

The dragon laughs, appeased. Are you ready to listen, my dear little foul-mouthed ferret about what it took to make the Balance protect itself?

"Do I have a choice?" I snarl, staggering upright to get a better look around me. Something large stumbles unseen through dark wheat towards the black horizon where a house of many parts looms against the piercing stars and something underfoot causes me to stumble.

Distracted, I look down. The bald head of a porcelain doll stares back up at me with empty sockets. It gives way with a muffled pop beneath my boot in a puff of shattered porcelain.

No. The dragon chuckles. You don't.

The Rose Engine

"Unbelievable!" Odalric's wife exclaimed, gesturing the servants, all strangers, forward, "Take all of this rubbish away! Out! Out!"

Weathering his wife's displeasure, the obsolete prince stood submissive in his worn workman's apron and shabby silk morning suit, staring down at the green and black diamond patterned floor of his little workshop hidden away in the palace armory, surrounded by his tools, his books, the violin he was building in its cradling spool clamps, his new gramophone and stacks of wax cylinders, clockwork Rose engine in the corner steadily whirring away at a fine ebony vase.

"As for you, Ilse, I am ashamed to be your mother!" she snarled, yanking his little stepdaughter off her perch on Odalric's workbench, scattering the tiny brass cogs the child had been handing him one by one while telling him about the new foal she'd found in the stables as he repaired her doll. Ilsa wailed, dropping her doll, whose porcelain head shattered on the flagstones as her governess dragged her off, "Odalric! You. Are. A. Lord– ACT LIKE IT!"

Unable to keep up with what was happening, Odalric awkwardly placed himself between the burly men, violin cradled to his chest. Behind him, a servant tipped over the Rose engine with a crash of fragile gears and precision blades. Crimson eyes oscillating wildly behind his dark glasses, the albino clumsily whirled, whatever it was that lately dulled his multiple streams of thought tangling his tongue into screams of incoherent rage.

"See Herr Klosterheim? A useless, red-eyed simpleton except for the family sword which only he can wield – it's obscene!"

"Dear Lady von Bek-Minct," Klosterheim said from where he stood watching his employer's rage with a blank expression. The simply dressed man stepped aside, allowing the physician who'd come as part of her entourage to enter the armory turned workshop, voice a dry wheedle, "All is well, all is well. Doctor Spitz will keep him quiet until the Great Conjunction. Control the man, control the blade. Control the blade, control the Balance. Control the Balance, control Creation."

Two servants tackled Odalric, pinning him face down on the sawdust strewn floor where the footworn motto, "Do you the Devil's work" was carved, knocking Odalric's dark glasses off and breaking his nose as the physician, another stranger, approached. "If you will but roll up his lordship's sleeve—"

A rack of ancient weapons tipped over with an echoing, metallic crash in the big room, taking the gramophone and a scattering of wax cylinders of music with it.

Lady von Bek-Minct screamed.

Captive Audience

—playing the violin at the basest of theatres, walking between worlds, ideas stolen and bartered for, bride and child abandoned— Black poppies dance around me in the brilliant darkness. To find himself upon a battlefield facing an enemy not worth the effort– of friends who are enemies, of enemies who are friends, of coerced consent.

"Blah-blah-blah! A much posher story than mine." I scowl across the endless field, remembering family stories of filthy tenements and watered-down milk at full price in the immigrant slums of St. Louis. "Okay. So, some prince with a weird name done got his ass kicked for making a shitpile of bad decisions. Boo fuckin' hoo!"

Tell me a story.

"No. How about YOU tell ME how to get the fuck out of here?"

How dare you, now, of all times! The dragon roars in the darkness between dreams, between worlds, ruby eyes blazing. What YOU want is not what's at stake here!

"Don't jerk me around, you son of a bitch. This isn't my shitshow!" Scowling, I sit down on the guitar case/EXIT sign, arms folded.

The house of many parts looms distant against the cold stars.

The shadows flicker, becoming tall men moving cautiously through the endless midnight field, so many giants against the dark network overhead and I don't care.

…

…

…very well, dirty little ferret, we shall bargain. Are you listening?

"I'm listening."

Once upon a time a dragon was born where everyone said they wanted dragons, but what they really wanted was what the dragon had and not the dragon himself…

The Moonbeam Roads.

Nose no longer gushing, Odalric sat up, set aside the sword cane of his father, and groped for his dark glasses.

His long, pale fingers found them.

With a practiced motion learned during his one disastrous month at a British boy's school at age eleven, Odalric straightened them and put them back on, the world around him in sudden, sharp focus.

Lady von Bek-Minct lay unconscious upon the worn tiles of the armory. Not that the Prince of Mirenburg would have cared had he known. Wife or not, Paula was a very, very unpleasant person. As was Klosterheim, her advisor.

Odalric'd had quite enough of unpleasant people.

Silent passenger in his head alert, the strange child of a strange mother pulled from dream, rose, absently fiddling with one of the little opium cigarettes that he'd smoked since childhood to quiet the noise in his head and ease the pain in his joints, looking around him with delight at the amazing Mandelbrot lace surrounding him. In his rage, his terror, he'd finally entered the ganglial maze of the Moonbeam Roads – the notes he'd found among his father's papers weren't nonsense after all.

Grinning, hair streaming loose down his back, Odalric pocketed the cigarette, and picked up his father's sword cane and restored violin in its case. Paternal silk top hat with its green and black diamond hatband jaunty, he chose at random a silver strand of the ever-branching neurons of reality, previous reality fast behind with each eager step.

A game of ferret and dragon.

The house of many parts abruptly stands up on four reptilian legs, turns its back door to me, and lumbers into the blackness.

"Son of a bitch." I sit down upon the guitar case/EXIT sign. "I'm too fat and too old for this shit!"

The dragon chuckles somewhere in the dark high among pulleys and sandbags, furled sails and hempen ropes. It seems the Angel of the Perverse is well named.

"Get bent!" I grumble.

Already have – 'tis the cheapest way to humiliate an enemy when you lack imagination. The dragon goes silent for a long time, allowing me to push my way through the waving field of black wheat and dark poppies in peace.

Red eyes watch me from the shadows, as dark human shapes loom searching against the darker horizon.

The Angel of the Perverse too, has encountered the… unimaginative.

I stop dead in my tracks. "And the unimaginative always… pay?"

A large metallic green fly circles me once.

Twice.

Thrice.

Of course. There is a slow burn hidden in the dragon's reply.

"Fuck off." I say, breaking the uncomfortable silence.

A bristly black head of ripe wheat slaps me across the face.

A silent chuckle in the dark.

Rubbing my smarting face, I look down.

The fly dances upon a small, amber-colored bottle full of marbles half-buried in the dirt beside a puddle of blood which reflects the dark branches and red stars overhead.

Once inside, you will need these.

I crouch, studying the bottle. According to the label, some powerful pills once lived there.

The unimaginative take our dreams and turn them into weapons, the dragon muses To us 'tis a stick with a beautiful curve. To them, 'tis a club.

"Hmph." Something taps against my knee. Pocketing the bottle, I look down to see a rusty little wind-up toy tank with a bent main gun.

My attention gained, it trundles towards a right-angle trail through the wheat and poppies that I hadn't noticed before, gun at a jaunty angle, rusty key slowly unwinding.

When I don't follow, the main turret swivels to point at me, treads steadily pulling it down the trail.

I can go no further, the dragon says. I have leant you a guide through the maze.

"What maze?" I rise. Arms folded I glare around me. "I don't see—."

Look.

I look and then look again.

"Oh." The whirr of the tank's key is a cicada song in the brilliant darkness. The ebon stalks are no more than paper and string waving in a cosmic wind created by a rusty, sputtering electric fan, a scarred stage beneath my feet, broken stage lights overhead, "This is beginning to feel like a really bad rip-off of "Labyrinth" minus David Bowie and his bulge."

Just remember, my dirty little ferret, as I send you after a particularly willful rat, the best intentions often create the worst results and that the left hand is often better than the right.

"Whatever." I grumble, pushing the guitar case ahead of me while crawling after the little tank. I stop, the black wheat and blacker poppies are a lot taller than I remember from a minute ago, "How do you know that I'm the ferret and not the rat?"

There is a fading chuckle, (Or was it a sob?) from the sea which ebbs and flows between worlds while the shoulders of the man who bleeds slowly dislocate.

Gasoline

Paula von Bek-Minct screamed, falling back a second time as her despised husband, in a burst of oily black smoke, walked out of nowhere and back into the armory turned workshop less than five minutes after disappearing.

Her husband was older, broader of shoulder than she remembered as he strode past her and set aside his ebony cane before sweeping clear his workbench with a crash and unrolling a set of diagrams.

Klosterheim nodded. The servants who'd been ordered to break up this childish space stepped forward.

The Lord of Mirenburg looked up, reflective silver lenses meeting flat shark's eyes. One pale long-fingered hand with sharply filed nails reached into the front of his morning tailcoat and casually pulled out a handgun with sleek, unfamiliar lines. The lord of Mirenberg gently placed it on the worktable and then pointed at the armory door, saying, "Leck mich am arsch, Herr Klosterheim." in a deep, flat voice full of hidden teeth.

Klosterheim, immortal but not stupid, swallowed his rage at the insult, ushered Lady von Bek-Minct out of the armory, retinue close behind.

There was the sound of a large key turning in a large lock.

The dry little man who'd once held the Holy Grail in his hands and then rejected it because it did not live up to his expectations, shrugged. Let the white rat play. There was still plenty of time before the Conjunction. As for Lady von Bek-Minct? She would be easily distracted by her own ambitious fantasies until no longer useful.