The Ghost of Adsophel

Four.

Zach was brilliant, and no one knew this quite as well as he did. He was the only son of the king, and the first prince in several generations to have the sight. Julia, his mother, had been the one to notice: when Zach was four or five years old, he'd wandered off, and she found him in the garden chattering at an invisible old woman. Zach could still recall the incident years later. "She wanted me to tell her my name. Fae of some kind, certainly. It's a good thing I played coy and refused to tell her, or I might be without a soul," he would laugh.

As soon as he learned to read, Zach spent hours buried in the palace libraries, devouring old myths, scribbling cramped notes into the margins. When he was eight, he began dressing up and sneaking out into the city. He collected all the strangest objects he could find, and would spend hours sifting through his books, seeking the properties of each stone or pendant or potion.

When he was eleven, his father gave him access to the palace vaults. A dozen spirits lurked around the piles of old armor or cracked statues of dragons. Zach found long-forgotten potions, ritual daggers, bundles of herbs brought from across the ocean, and best of all, heaps of yellowed scrolls. These scrolls contained secrets Zach had only dreamt of, like how to astral project, how to hunt and kill a blood wolf, and even the speculative layout of the sky palace. According to one scholar, name long obscured by time, the palace ruins were lost deep in the forest. They were hiding somewhere along the base of the Black Jaggeds. Unimaginable treasures lay behind those ruined walls. Maybe even the knowledge, forgotten and forbidden, on how to find the dragons.

It had been a thousand years since the palace fell and the dragons went to sleep. This Zach knew with certainty through his studies - studies everyone else had long abandoned. People no longer cared about divination or protection circles. They were unaware of the monsters and spirits that still stalked them, feeding off of their energy or wreaking unexplainable havoc. They didn't realize that their homes were teeming with artifacts. They had all forgotten. But Zach read, looked, knew.

When Zach was twelve, his mother went to sleep and never woke up again. A fever took her. Zach had been away in the countryside, taking sword lessons from an old nobleman. When he came home and found the news, he wept. He wept with grief, but also fury that no one had told him she was ill. He could have saved her. In his room was a velvet pouch of crismon lavender, a potent herb that could cure any fever. A dozen times more powerful than the modern medicine that failed her. He could have kept her alive. He should've been there.

In the months after Julia's death, Zach threw himself into aura reading. He meditated and drank vile potions and stuck his head into buckets of moon-cleansed saltwater until, skinny and wild eyed, he was able to judge someone's general health just by observing them. No one would ever be sick without him knowing. Not again.

He made another, very different promise around the same time, but this one was a secret. I was the first one he told, a few months after The and I came to the palace.

We were sprawled on a thick rug in front of a gargantuan fireplace. It crackled with golden warmth and sent bizarre shadows dancing across the glass walls. We watched fat snowflakes pile in the gardens, hushing the world. Zach's raven Dionysus pecked at loose threads of the rug.

Zach had just spent hours asking me about my experiences with old-world creatures: how old was I when I first encountered one? (Too young.) Which creatures followed me the most? (Spiders, wolves, ghosts.) Did I fear them? (No.) Could I speak to them? (Yes.) Had I ever attempted magic or spiritualism? (No.) Why? (Because my family already thought I was insane.) Have you heard the stories of the dragons? (Yes.) Which was my favorite? (The sky palace.)

"I've found charts of the palace's layout, you know," he told me, wearing a satisfied smile. "Speculative, of course. It was invisible to humans, so it's based off hearsay, people who claimed they spoke to the dragons. The scholar who made the chart referenced other contemporary works, but I've yet to find them in any of our vaults or libraries. I've even sorted through the state archives, but no luck there, either. If that documentation exists, it exists somewhere else."