Dark Kingdom

Princess Aoife

Aoife stood at the enchanted tree that grew in the palace. It looked small and insignificant given the extravagance around it and the fact that it looked tiny compared to the high ceilings with sunlight breaching through the windows, drawing people's attention upward to it rather than the odd tree growing from nothing.

 Aoife supposed that was the point though. For it to be overlooked. Yet it was almost the most important thing in the castle. Only second to her father's crown. Spelled long ago to let its wearer see into the past and present to certain events. Not the future though. Never the future.

She was supposed to be gone already, with her brother, on their way to the Sarmatia. Most just referred to it as the dark kingdom, given the tragedy of the place but she was trying to get used to calling it by its proper name since she would be amongst them soon. Everyone had heard the heartbreaking tale of the queen now dead and the princess who still lived there, slowly dying. People say Princess Miriam might have gotten well, had her reason for living not died. It seemed it left the princess even more sickly looking then before. As if she was split in two.

 Soon Aoife would see the place for herself and the king that sat on the throne. The only thing he seemed to care about...but from what she heard he still treated his daughter a lot better than Aoife's own father did to her. Still she sneered at the thought of him. She had her own reasons for hating him. She hated him and her father equally but for different reasons.

Aoife looks down at the body at her feet that lay cold. She did not bother wondering what she would do with it. Soon she would be on her way out, and her father thought her too weak to do something such as this.

"You think I'm weak and I think you're wrong." Aoife whispers to herself as if her father was there.

          Taking her bloody hand and pressing it the tree as if somehow the sacrifice would somehow bestow her luck on her journey and plans. Though it had not been too much of a sacrifice to kill the guard. She had her him bragging about raping a local woman in a tavern and the choice had been easy. The luring him to this location was what was hard. Harder then she expected. It would take her a day's hard ride to catch up with her brother but in the end it was worth it.

 Aoife knew she had the guard right where she wanted him when she had gone to said tavern and heard the blissful noise of a deathwatch beetle chirping away near the man. They were said to warn the living when one was about to die. Clearly the guard knew nothing about it though because besides an annoying look around as if he may squash the thing, he had not been afraid. Even as Aoife gave him a predatory wolfish grin and told him to meet her at the giving tree.

       Called the giving tree for long ago people claimed it granted wishes. No one believed it anymore. Foolish of them. The villagers did but they were not allowed to see it except by special permission. The desperate would sometimes stand outside the gates pleading for entry to lay their hands on the trees.

It was wasted on the royal who did nothing but ignore the thing. Aoife was no such fool though. Aoife turns hearing a strange flutter. Like wings. She expected a sign from the tree but instead it seemed she was getting a sign from the dead guard's body as hundreds of moths' land on him. Where they came from Aoife doesn't know. Magic was strange that way. Yet she still didn't understand what this was supposed to mean.

Some people believed a dead moth was a sign of bad luck and the bad luck would follow the person who saw it, but these moths were alive. Was it a sign of spiritual pursuit like she hoped, or was it a symbol of shadows, confusion, and vulnerability? All things she was feeling at the moment. Aoife did not know. Still she has never let fear enable her, so instead she leans closer, scaring the moths as she does. They all as a unit lift and fly away revealing her father's crown.

Aoife blinks, almost reaching out. It could not be real. The crown only left her father's head when he slept, there was no possible way it could be laying on this dead man's corpse. It had to be an illusion or a premonition. Aoife grinned, taking it as a good sign. Soon it would be very real and sitting upon her head. Then there would be no one to rule over her anymore.