Solstice’s End : Plot Drop
The festivities faded before dawn broke. Laughter followed to bed chambers as party-goers sunk into their beds or into small heaps in various corners of guest quarters, the ruddy flush of over abundant wine and ale colouring cheeks. Lovers clung to one another— it is so long a night, fae and human alike whispered to one another, hands pressed together in the reception of alms, too long to be alone. And they slept, with lips parted and sweetened dreams of coming harvest, of warm air, of fresh fruit, with juice that ran down the sides of their mouths with each bite. They slept as the sun rose and licked stripes of orange and red across the horizon. A beautiful morning was promised and delivered after the longest night of the year gave way to the prelude of war.
It was a maid who found it, the first to wake and venture beyond the warmth of a bed pulled close to a fire, scurrying through the abandoned halls like a lone mouse. It would be a large effort, to get the grounds and the castle immaculate once again, before the guests could wake. It was her that ventured out through the glass doors of the erected cathedral, and she who saw the first dark drops stark against the packed, white snow. The dawn was still pale and the morning was so new. Wolves roamed the grounds, wild beyond all attempts to tame them, and small prey were often left in sorry little piles of scrapped fur and snapped bones. A gruesome task, but she would remove it before it could be discovered. The blood trail widened as she ventured further into the garden— she would need to call for someone who worked the grounds to bring a broad shovel to upheave the walkway and reveal the pristine white once more— and widened further, until the path she followed opened up to an undecorated part of the garden, nothing but fresh snow and a view of the endless stretch of unforgiving ice.
The smear of it was so thick and dark it was nearly black. Heat rose from what was left of the ripped creature, and as the maid neared her stomach roiled. The metal shop scent flooded her senses, sticking to the surface of her tongue like a mouthful of copper pennies and iron nails. The presence of these horrors brings on the absence of sound, not unlike the dampening of the world after a heavy snowfall. The maid did not realize she was screaming until she felt the ragged burn of her own throat.
Fresh snow fell like fat flakes of white ash as a crowd began to gather. It did not bury the body. It did not cover the blood.
What was once a man was splayed out, displayed with wide outstretched arms and spread legs, arranged carefully and set like a jewel placed upon a bed of crimson velvet. Tears of red run down the tributaries between the eye and the ear, leaving a smear down the pale, bloodless face. His eyes— which had once been a clear, depthless blue— were now empty space, the hollows still weeping. The death wound was indiscernible from the carnage that ravaged him from throat to belly, the messy work of something worse than animal. There is no other way to name the state of the former King of the Mortal Lands than torn apart.
It is the words that chill the soul. The stark letters painstakingly drawn with a shaking hand, a hand that had been buried deep in the guts of the man and then scratched along the hardened surface of the old snow. They frame the crown still placed upon his silver-and-black hair in ichor.
‘ WEAK FLESH MAKES WEAK KINGS ‘
A declaration, read like an old proverb. A mortal’s flesh, split and broken and left in pieces upon the ice on a sacred night–– the meaning is clear. An old hunt has once again been renewed. War, no longer idle on its haunches, had been invited back into the world.
