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XERXES

The human mind can be the most terrifying thing in existence. It can also be the most powerful thing in existence. It just depends on which god it’s listening to.

He should have never taken his next breath.

Xerxes’s eyes burned even before his sand-crusted lids slid open. He turned his neck and winced at whatever stone was digging into the back of his head, cursing the palace servants who hadn’t washed his bedding properly. His back ached like the flesh had been scratched off. His legs were too stiff to move too. It was as if he’d been mercilessly tossed around in the back of a bumpy wagon for days…

His vision sharpened. Xerxes gazed up at a dark room, void of colour and softness. Damp, chilled air hung like a soggy presence above him, smelling of strange spices he couldn’t place. He rolled up to sit with a wince, finding himself on a dirty stone floor speckled with flecks of moss in the cracks. A coarse moan slipped out as he climbed to his feet on wobbling legs, spotting scuffs on his boots and a tear in his pants at the ankle. He did a full turn, taking in three stone walls slick with moisture and a dark ceiling. The fourth wall had a pale wooden door with a barred window, shallow light spilling in from the other side. Xerxes drifted toward it, sniffing and running a finger over his dry, cracked lips.

The light assaulted his tender eyes when he peered past the bars. He blinked until it was bearable to look, his moisture-filled gaze narrowing on scarlet banners and glossy pillars covered in glyphs he couldn’t interpret that stretched down a long hallway in even intervals. Polished white floor tiles marked a path with brassy inlaid stones, and the faint hum of lyre and harp music hummed nearby, mixing with thick scents of body oils, perfumes, and dry leaves that made him want to plug his nose.

His robe of nobility was gone. Xerxes swallowed and patted his empty shoulders, then lifted his right hand where his signet ring was meant to be. That was gone too. “Divinities,” he whispered from a dry mouth as the vision before him blurred. He rubbed his left eye, thinking about his wretched marking.

His marking.

Xerxes yanked up the sleeve of his nightshirt, blinking down at glowing violet branches of runes inching down his forearm. He replaced it in slow, careful movements, his sleeve drifting to his wrist. Then he grabbed the window bars viciously, shaking them until they rattled against the wood panes, and he shouted, “Where in the name of Boreas am I?! Someone get over here and answer me!”

The distant music was his only reply from the idle hall. He kicked the door with a bare foot and winced when pain shot into his toe, then slammed his palm against the useless spindles with a growl.

Xerxes squinted, trying to remember the last thing he did, the last thing he ate, the last person he spoke to. He glanced up at the gloomy ceiling again, cursing the Celestial Divinities for all the blanks in his memory.

A cold whisper trickled along his ear and Xerxes froze. He glanced to his left, tilting his head a fraction. “Who’s there?” he demanded. He whirled, rubbing his prickling earlobe as he scanned dark cracks in the stone walls of the cell. The sensation reminded him of the desert wars, of encountering the Vafat when he…

A weight crashed into Xerxes’s chest, and he inhaled.

Images of Vafat filled his mind, dizzy recollections of being surrounded in the Per-Siana palace, of having powder thrown into his face from a white-fleshed creature. Memories of navy and silver walls teetering and the room spinning as he collapsed. Moments of brief awareness while being tied up in the back of a large desert chariot, the taste of sand dancing over his tongue, the heat of the journey tingling his flesh like he was still living through it.

His shaking hand lifted to his forehead as the stone walls around him moved in and out of focus.

No wonder his body felt like it took a beating. He’d just crossed an entire desert.

Celestial Divinities, have mercy.

He turned back toward the window of light, and his breath caught at the scarlet and copper beyond, at the spicy perfumes in the air, the unfamiliar music, the glyphs… Xerxes closed his eyes, his fingers paling around the bars as his greatest fear of the last six months flooded into his body and soul, knocking against the edges of his mind, tempting him to resort to old ways before it was too late. This had to be a nightmare. He would wake up soon and still be in the palace or with the army in the desert. He had to.

Because if he didn’t, Per-Siana—his kingdom—was doomed.

He stumbled backward, a hand flying over his rolling stomach as he tried to calculate how long he might have been passed out, sleeping on this stone floor. If he’d crossed a whole desert, it could have been at least a week since he was captured.

One week. Two weeks?

Divinities, three weeks?

Drugged with powders, fed and watered in his sleep, and tossed into a cell to rot in the land of his enemies… it was a wonder he wasn’t a dead King. Curse Boreas and Nyx—what if Per-Siana was already destroyed?

Xerxes rushed to the door again and shook the bars. “Alecsander!” he shouted down the hallway. “Alecsander!” He screamed his name, the name of the War King who had cheated in the fight and won the war after all, had stolen Xerxes from his home, had possibly… possibly finished the competition in the last weeks while Xerxes had been sleeping.

A servant in a bronze pectoral and white kilt moved past the end of the hallway with a large jug in his hands.

“You!” Xerxes shouted at him, and the servant turned his body, eyebrow raised. Apart from those brows, all the fellow’s hair had been shaved off, his smooth head glistening under natural sunlight ahead. “Bring me Alecsander, or I’ll become a beast you’ll wish you never laid eyes upon!” Xerxes threatened. “Bring me that savage King! I demand to know what he’s done to Per-Siana!”

Water sloshed over the edge of the jug as the servant rushed off, patching the floor with tiny puddles. Murmurs lifted a second later, a quiet shuffle of sandals over the floor.

Xerxes’s chest heaved and he leaned his forehead against the door. If Per-Siana was already gone, what reason did he still have to live? His fingers tightened around the spokes until they numbed. His people. His army. His kingdom.

“Eat.”