Tap, tap, tap.
Dripping water is the only sound which fills the room. Mocking my capture as it repeatedly falls onto my scalp.
How long had it been, I wondered. My hands chained to cold stone and my feet too mangled to move. It was the only thing I could do. Wonder. I could wonder about the current state of the world, the livelihoods of my people, of the barbarians who took me. But inevitably, it was all pointless.
What use was wondering after twelve years, or a hundred? When time begins to meld and ages become moments, you find yourself no longer able to feel hate—unable to feel purpose. All that is left is an indefinite longing for what you could’ve had. For what you lost.
Yet, even as I stand here. Chained and wounded. My eyes, gone they may be, call out to me. They beckon me with a future far ahead, or perhaps far closer than I could have ever surmised. Every day I see it, and every day a little of what was lost returns to me.
I await the day.
Amidst my daily deliberations, I hear the sound of metal clanking. The steel mechanisms holding me in this cage twist and contort as the door shifts open. My sight is long gone, thus I may only feel the light against my skin. Warmth. A sensation I had thought I’d forgotten.
I hear—barely—a group shuffling into the thin space. Their armored hands grip my forearms, tearing me from the restraints, uncaring of my injuries. I scream as they force me onto what’s left of my feet. They do not care.
My voice is hoarse, weakened by a lack of water and an injured throat. I hardly recognize it as my own, but its echoes are so pained, so bestial that I have no choice but to accept it as mine. What other creature could make such sounds? What other prisoner has suffered as I have?
The armored soldiers grip me tightly, ignoring my pleas and cries for mercy. They drag me along a splintered floor, out toward a hall of smoothed stone. Though blinded, I can still feel the beauty of it all. In each inch of flooring I can sense the years of work it’d taken to build. The blood, sweat, and tears sacrificed to erect a modern miracle of architecture.
I weep for my people, knowing the sorrow in their hearts. How they must feel seeing a false king resting in a palace never meant for him. For a conqueror. Our captor.
In what feels like moments, I find the stone transformed into carpet. Red silk that stretches far ahead of me, a fact I know even without the ability to see. I’ve seen this very room hundreds, millions, of times. All for the same reasons save for a few, but that was a long time ago.
Now, before me stands the origin of my plight. Or rather the descendant of it. The wretched bloodline which put claim to a land they had never deserved. Seated upon a throne he was unworthy of.
I know it, though I cannot see. I know the False King stares down at me. Draped in clothing befitting his stolen position and tightly grasping a golden sheathe in one hand. His eyes are hollow, devoid of the light that should’ve come with his young age. He simply stares, observing.
As the guards push me to the ground, I find myself unable to speak. Not because of fear, I would never find myself frightful of this man. No, I’m wary of the words that may leave my mouth if I dare to speak. Of the truths I will unveil.
He adjusts in his stolen throne, leaning on his hidden blade as he analyzes me.
“Yes…it’s just as grandfather told. Not a day past his prime, yet somehow he’s persisted through millenia. Tell me, Oracle, what have you seen of my future?”
I scoff. The same question. I’ve seen castles fall, empires rise, and civilizations burn. And every time they find me it’s the same, meaningless inquiry. I’d find it humorous had this not been the billionth time I’d been asked. Roughly.
“I have seen little.” A blunt response, deserving of a fake crown.
The False King’s brows raise, for a moment a flicker of light is seen. A wicked zeal focused on me. I resist the urge to scowl, resist the desire to scream and reveal this man’s lies, the lies of all the rulers before him. I want to call out the blood they spilled, the blood of my people. Yet I cannot, for what good is the truth when spoken to zealots?
Instead, I continue.
“…But I will tell you the same thing I’ve told your father, and his father, and all those who came before him. Knowing the future will do you no good. Your interference will only make things worse.”
He looks at me. At the bloodstained cloth covering the sockets where my eyes used to be. And he smiles. A hollow, empty smile. Devoid of the jubilation that should’ve conceived it and instead born of a twisted ambition.
“Yes. The consequences of knowledge. But that truth only dissuades those who know their future contains naught but misfortune. But not I. I know of my future, and I know you do too. How long will you attempt to convince yourself otherwise?”
I nearly lunge at him, but maintain my composure. Because he’s right, I know exactly what the future entails, one separate from the future that’s kept me sane. From the hope. It’s merely a possibility, a deviation of fate born from a reason I do not know.
A possibility that he succeeds.
But I cannot accept that.
“I have seen your future, but it does not hold what you seek. Just know your death is imminent. You will suffer, alone and cold. Straying further and further away from the gods as they denounce you.”
“Ah, but the gods are dead, Oracle. I cannot stray from a corpse, I’m afraid. Though perhaps I should be grateful, it is their blood which built this home of mine.”
I move. For the first time in millenia my body surges with power as my face contorts in a resentful scowl, the guards attempt to flank me to no avail—because they feel it. They feel the remnants of the gods they spoke of, of the gods they abandoned. I am what remains of their blood, me and my brothers and sisters.
One swings his blade down at me, trembling as the weight of its iron wrestles against his will. My leg—what remains of it—blurs. He doesn’t see me move, but by the time he notices I had his weapon has left him, along with his hand. He screams. I do not care.
Another turns to face me, wielding a mace of sorts, but he doesn’t move. Fear encompasses him when my gaze pierces through the essence of his being. I stare and he falls to his knees, unable to take a single step forward.
My eyeless visage meets the False King’s piercing gold pupils. Still lightless, yet containing a curiosity that once was not there.
“Know this, Augustine. Our blood will not be washed away by a False King who sits on a stolen throne. I swear by my name as the last son of the God of Fates, you will perish. Whether by my hands or another’s. That is the future I have seen.“
Augustine stares. Then, the darkness in his eyes begins to alleviate, allowing light to breach through and peer at my battered frame. It isn’t the gaze of a demi-god, but somehow I find myself stepping back.
“Then allow me to declare with certainty, Son of Moira. You can swear upon as many corpses as you wish, you can bring a thousand demi-gods to my doorstep, you could bring a god back from the dead, and I still would not fall. For I am Augustine au Dell’oro, First of my Name and Founder of Highcrest. I am the King born in Ichor and I will see to it that your bloodline leaves the realm greater than your putrid progenitors had.”
I scowl, but he simply stares at me. The light in his eyes is almost blinding, as if gazing into the stars which illuminate the sky. Filled with unbridled ambition, and much to my despair, I feel myself tremble beneath his gaze.
I fear the possibility, the infinitely small likelihood that fate changes. Could the laws of this world bend beneath a mortal? A human man, at that?
At the back of my mind, I feel a faint certainty. One that besets my psyche with dread.
If anyone could do it, it’s the False King.