Chapter Twenty-Four
Theo
In the many stories that my mother had told me in my youth, there was one thing that was always repeated. It was always written so that the hero in the end of the story defeats the evil man and lives happily ever after. And maybe that is not quite how reality unveils itself for people, and perhaps it is the hopeless romanticism of the old world’s writers that longed for such endings.
The heroes who I had known throughout my journey were all denied the happy endings that they all deserved. Bernard died saving those helpless children from the king’s Hawks, and Seth was taken away by the king and left for dead in the rivers. And my mother died with only a glimpse of happiness in her eyes.
I had never quite understood her pessimism or her optimism. She was always more taken away by the books that she hid from the entire kingdom than she was by any element of the real world. She used to talk a lot about the old world, sometimes dramatizing how amazing it was and in other times criticizing the blankness and emptiness of it.
I never did understand why she would explain it that way, and perhaps it took me a lifetime to understand that a human only sees things through the lens of how they feel. Matilda was sad. I had never gotten the chance of seeing her truly happy, for when she did really get close to happiness, she died. All her depression was expressed in her attachment to a past that she had never seen, which served to only justify her distraction from the present even more.
I would be making a big leap comparing my mother to the king, but while they were both quite different they were quite the same. My mother only saw the world bright when she was reunited with my father, and only through the lens of love was she able to wear a profound smile on her face. The king, however, had always only seen the world through the lens of emptiness. He had nothing to live for except maybe that ideal image he had of himself being all powerful and worshipped by the many who never had the chance of knowing who he was. They were similar in the way they lived in the past and different in how they went about it. The king wanted nothing but to be as powerful as the kings he had read about, and my mother also romanticized that kind of past but she did so through ignoring the present. He did so by destroying it.
I would never forget the face of the king the last time I saw him. He wasn’t alive but dead, in his human form, dwelling in his own blood and in a pool of that dark red liquid that was the poison of his own making.
It all happened so fast. Elise and I were sitting in the stinking dungeon, embracing, giving one another the power of each other’s body and waiting for the strength to rise from within.
“If we get out of here, how would we live our lives?” she asked me with a subtle dreamy look in her eyes.
“We will, and when we do, we will roam the earth to find a sea that still has life in it. When we find it, we will build a house of stone and live there,” I said, dreaming of that sun and the grains of sand stuck to the bottom of my feet.
“I want to take all the people that the king made suffer and reunite them somewhere where they can all live together and in peace,” she said, “and when I’m sure that everyone around us is happy, I can live the rest of my life knowing you and only you.”
A smile formed on my face. I felt the strength of my muscles suddenly surge through me again when the muscles of my cheeks stretched my smile.
“Let’s go,” I hurried to stand up and lifted her off the ground. “We need to use whatever strength left in us to get out.”
I looked through the window of the door and saw that there were no guards outside. Not a single soul was out there. I knew it was our chance. I wanted to take my father’s body with us, but when I went over to where his body was, it was gone. Elise was behind me, and she pulled me up before the tears formed in my eyes.
Suddenly, the sound of running and screaming came roaring from the outside. Many guards were coming our way. I didn’t know what to do, I thought of hiding until they came inside, but by the sound of it, we were quite outnumbered.
“Hide,” I whispered to Elise, “I’ll deal with them.”
“I’ll fight next to you,” she said.
We stood hand in hand, far behind the door. We waited for the noise to come closer, and we didn’t wait long. The door was kicked open, my hands were clasped in a fist, my heart racing. I took a step forward, keeping Elise a little behind me, but the unexpected happened.
“Get out,” the guard shouted.
We both stood frozen, unaware of what was going on. The guard was standing there and unwilling to fight us.
“Go!” his shout was louder. “The guards have revolted against the king, drowned him in his poison. King Harold is dead.”
I didn’t believe what I was hearing, but I had already learned that only the unexpected kept happening to me. I held Elise’s hands and quickly rushed outside of the door. Still fearing any kind of unexpected danger, I stiffened my hands when I walked next to the guard, and he didn’t move a bit.
We ran outside, up from the dungeon and into the castle. There was broken glass everywhere. The huge chandelier had fallen on the entrance of the castle, and the king was lying on the ground right under it, crushed with his own poison. From the looks of it, the whole thing was planned. The chandelier had several glass cylinders that were full of the dark red liquid that the king used to suppress the dragon form. It seemed like the guards had pulled the chandelier down once the king was standing under it, stopping him from turning, and plunged their swords into his back. He was left there to rot with many swords left in his body.
Hand-in-hand, we found ourselves under the sunlight, rejoicing in the freedom that we finally had.
“A lifetime of knowing one another,” I said, as we both swirled under the sun.
“Let’s go to the village at once and sit by the willow tree. I want to relive every moment I was deprived of,” she said eagerly.
“Why do the past? How about up there?” I said, eying the ocean blue skies.
End of Book 3