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Shock ripples across my father’s hardened features, and for the first time in my life, I witness fear in his eyes.
Buzzing swarms my ears as my father’s knees buckle.
He hits the ground.
And then, in that moment of quiet, my father looks at me.
Our eyes lock; he tilts his chin downward, just slightly.
Then my father thrusts his sword upward at the same moment the wyvern’s jaws encompass him.
A horrible crunching sound pierces through the fog in my ears, followed shortly by a female’s screams.
My mother’s screams.
They snap me back to the present, out of that horrific moment where time itself hadn’t existed.
To my left, my mother cries out in anguish. She’s screaming my father’s name, clutching her stomach, even as swarms of vines burst out around her, strangling mere and wyverns in their fury, dashing their bodies against the stairs.
Then something replaces the rage on my mother’s delicate face. The flush of battle pales from her sinking cheeks. She retches, grasping her stomach. The vines around her fall limp, dropping the strangled carcasses of the mere, but one survivor wriggles free from their grasp. It stalks my mother from behind, but she doesn’t appear to notice.
It lunges, but not fast enough. Not before I send a vine shooting out of a crack in the ground, puncturing the mere’s throat until a cluster of thorns protrudes from its eye socket.
The creature falls limp behind my mother.
She doesn’t notice.
Murmurs echo through the crowd. The king is dead the king is dead the king is dead, they seem to say.
The king is dead.
My father is dead.
The words ring in my head as if in a language I don’t recognize. As if I don’t have the ability to process them.
My body goes still, the Others’ corpses littering the courtyard.
The murmuring in the crowd grows louder, but perhaps it’s just the buzzing in my own mind.
My father is dead, and I’m unsure what to do with that information.
“Evander.” Ellie comes running up, her gown splattered with ink. Or no, it’s not ink. It’s ichor, the spray of blood from an Other she slaughtered with her still-dripping sword.
“Evander.” Her hands find my jaw, gently nudging my face to look at her.
I’m not sure what she finds in my eyes, but hers water. She blinks the tears away, setting her jaw.
The mutterings in the crowd grow louder, but I can’t hear them over the buzzing. Over the crunching that resonates through my mind, over and over.
I wish for another mere, another wyvern to fight, to strangle and bleed and slaughter, because then at least the noise of battle would drown out that awful sound.
Ellie turns to face the crowd, something like disgust and dread mingled on her face, but I can’t hear what’s causing her reaction.
She glances back at me, then my mother. My wife draws up her skirts with one hand, sword still dragging the ground with the other, and marches toward the place my father was slaughtered.
A hush goes over the crowd as she steps over the corpses of the fallen, as she grips her sword with both hands.
And separates the wyvern’s head from its body, one hack at a time.
