By Ayame Whitfield
The king sits on a throne of broken bones and watches the girl cross the desert, carrying his death with her.
The air burns Jana’s throat when she inhales, heat wicking the moisture from her mouth. She has walked for an hour, two hours—impossible to tell exactly—with the sun a white, unmoving eye in the bleached sky. The mountain looms over her now, a black mass blotting out the horizon.
Her foot hits obsidian gravel, slipping in the shards of volcanic glass. She stops, inhales slowly, then tells the mountain, “I am a child with only a name, and I have come to kill your king.”
They are the words that the mages fed her in place of memory, making a righteous warrior from a lost child. She does not remember who she was before, but she is grateful that they made her worth something.
The mountain hums like a struck bell in response, and a staircase rises before her, carved into the slick slope. She reflexively touches the dagger at her belt and begins to climb.
By the time she reaches the top, her breath is labored, her tongue dryer than the sands below. Before her is an archway. The chamber beyond is a perfect dome of black glass, walls featureless and gleaming in the harsh sunlight cast through the entrance. In the center is a throne made of twisted, broken bones. On the throne sits a dark and shriveled figure with one burning, red eye.
Jana darts forward, counting on the light behind her to blind him. A heartbeat, and she’s at his side, dagger drawn, striking toward his throat.
His hand, wizened and claw-like, shoots up, fingers clamping down around her wrist in an unnaturally strong grip. The blade stops a hairsbreadth from his throat. Jana tries to wrest free, but his hand tightens, the bones of her wrist grinding together. She winces but manages to swallow her cry of pain.
Slowly, the king lifts his face to look at her. “Good morning,” he says and smiles. His lips stretch thin over a face nearly as sunken as the skulls he sits on, his veins feathered beneath his paper-dry skin. “You’re here for your Trial?”
“To kill you,” she spits.
“To kill me,” the king agrees pleasantly. “Do you understand the weight?”
Again, she tries to pull free; again, his grip stops her. “I understand my task.”
His eye flickers to the side. The air around her goes solid as stone, and as Jana tries to draw the blade across his throat, she cannot move. “Janari,” he muses, and all she can do is hiss out a breath of surprise that he knows. “Child without history. You do not understand. Your trials lie before you, not here.”
She finds she can still speak through numb lips. “This is my Trial. To defeat you.”
He tilts his head to the side, a surprisingly childlike movement. “Why?”
Jana jerks away, and this time he lets her. She stumbles back, regains her footing. In the shadows of his form, the king’s red eye is a burning brand.
“Year after year, the mages in your city send child-weapons here to kill me,” he says in a voice like desert wind. “Year after year, they die because they do not understand. Will you be the one to understand?”
The king is strong, but he is also beguiling. The mages prepared her for this, told her to close her ears to his voice. Her mouth moves on its own. “Understand what?”
“Your task. This throne. This eye. I see everything, child. I see the fox run down by the hunter. I see the poor man choking to death on his last crust of bread. I see the slow, endless fossilization of the dead. I see them, and I am them.” His eye gleams, a madness crackling in his gaze like embers catching dry wood. “I see you. I am you.”
The blue-eyed mages, their bodies paled by draining their own life force for magic, who told her to forget everything but what they had ordered. She’d obeyed, siphoning out memory until there was nothing but white thread for them to weave into any tapestry they wished. They’d prepared her for this task, to become their weapon. Because—because—
(Distant, half-sundered, a recollection that no longer belongs to her appears. Ankle-deep in a pool of water, watching orange-spotted fish hide in the lily pads. Someone laughing).
Why?
Her tongue darts out to wet her cracked lips. “Can you tell me who I am?”
He stands, movement agonizingly slow, and steps away from the throne, his back bent but legs steady. “Now you understand.”
She doesn’t—none of it makes sense. But he’s smiling that horrifying, skeletal smile, lifting his chin to expose his throat.
“Kill me, child. Let me rest. The throne falls to you.”
“But I don’t want to kill you anymore,” she blurts out. “I want you to answer my question. I want to know who I am.”
He gestures to the throne behind him. “Here. Sit. You will see every answer, and you cannot look away. To know the truth—it is worth it. For a time.” His smile widens. “But someday, another child will come with their Trial, memory hollowed out by the mages, and they will understand.”
He touches her arm with unbearable gentleness. Almost instinctively, she slashes out, opening his throat. Instead of blood, sand pours forth, black as the walls around her. The king collapses forward, outline dissolving into dust in the still air.
Do you understand the weight?
She steps up onto the dais—his remains grinding under her feet—and touches the arm of the throne—a massive femur, surface pitted and splintered. Warm to the touch, like blood, or the desert sand.
Jana sits on the throne of broken bone and sees.
Can you guess which song from the 1980's inspired this story? Share in the comments!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
What a story. It drew me in to the very end.
Ahhh.. forgot!! The song it reminded me of is Dust in the Wind.
Good guess but try again!
Very intriguing story. You definitely kept me interested!
Most interesting! I love your prose!
Captivating! What does she see?
I absolutely adore this story – it’s so captivating.
I can’t guess the song, but the story was riveting.
Wow. This is some stellar writing!
Love this, the shift in the conflict and stakes is brilliant.
This was a fascinating story!
King of Pain by the Police! What a great take on the song. I love this story so much! Very well done.