HOLLOW

AGÁPE, KALOPSIA, Winter, 1654

"Just stop it!" her scream pierced her ears as she watched Hiraeth getting thrown against a wall for the third time. "Please, father!"

Her words were swallowed by the darkness of her father's character.

They were in one of the cells in the palace's catacombs, ones Reverie judged forgotten by her father if she was being honest. It was a claustrophobic space, with no windows and no decor save for the wooden torches illuminating the room. The light provided a yellowish tone, turning the place even grimmer. If there were other prisoners in the adjacent cells, she did not see or knew about them. Not that she cared. Not when she was watching the love of her life getting beaten to death.

Hiraeth was trying to fight back, getting up to his knees the second after two guards fell upon him, one punching his face, having him tumble backwards, only for another to grab him and kick his back, sending him crashing to the hard stone floor.

"Father," she cried, "please!"

The king was sitting on two bent guards as he watched his play develop. His eyes went from Hiraeth to Reverie, who was desperately trying to get free of the guards holding her. Her face was soaked in tears. She couldnt throat was raspy with all the screaming.

But Reverie could not hold the scream back when her father signalled to a guard by his left, and watched the man reveal a book she knew like night knew darkness and the day knew brightness.

Homer, The Iliad.

"No," the word came from Hiraeth, eyes on the book, while the guards held him against the stone wall and punched his gut multiple times. Still, his eyes fought to look at the book... and then at her.

Reverie shook her head. Her father smiled at them both.

But the king did not say a word as a guard by his right side reached back to grab a torch. Her father nodded, and Reverie felt the salty tears on her lips turn sour, venomous as she fought against the hold of the guards that did not ease. Reverie kept on struggling, useless, downright foolish, as she watched every second that the guards brought the book and torch together. The flames ran up to eat the pages, their hunger something feral.

The guard holding the book threw it to the ground at Hiraeth's feet. The silence filled with her love's screams continued as she could do nothing but watch as her book, their story got eaten up by the flames. Watch as he suffered, and she witnessed all of it through tears and the smell of burnt paper and ashes. Of flesh, as the king ordered the guards to get him closer to the burning book. She would forever remember the despair in his eyes, the unfortunate fate that had been bestowed upon them, as the flames ate at the flesh she had kissed so many times. He would survive this burn, but not unscarred. His neck would always carry the price of their ambition and soulless hearts. And yet she cared not once for the lives they would have taken, for their love was all that mattered. Now she paid by watching it be burnt, marred with scars and dreams lost, with the forbiddenness it shouldn't have passed from. She knew then they were doomed. Somehow it still did not matter, as the princess did nothing as she watched her lover through dark water and hungry flames on impenetrable stone.

"Reverie," Hiraeth said, finding her eyes through his pain. And though he spoke no more, she knew what he meant.

Reverie could read the unspoken words in his eyes, right before they fell closed as one of the guards finally crushed his head to the ground, and they fell shut.

And did not open.

~ H&R ~

That night Reverie foolishly went up the window at the sound of rocks against glass, excited at the prospect of seeing Hiraeth. She knew him like her own skin, and it wasn't foolish in her mind to think he found a way to escape. Only, when she opened the window, Hiraeth was not there. In fact, no one was. Reverie leaned further to check the bricks he used to climb, and that was her death sentence.

As immediately as she slanted, someone pushed her from behind, and Reverie had no time to even look behind as she lost balance and fell from the window.

The moment Reverie lost her footing was the moment she knew she was about to die.

The rose bushes seem to mock her. Roses were a symbol of love in Sígrun, Hiraeth's kingdom, but also of war, for both came with thorns as a price for the good that would follow. War and love felt the same to the cold Sígrun manner, who were too keen to sacrifice their own hearts and feelings for the good of all. It was the Sígrun curse. It seemed fitting, albeit cruel that she would die this way. A stranger to her people. Time seemed to slow down. Reverie felt a strange sense of peace, clouded by everything she still had to do in this life and the surest knowing she had always had-Reverie did not want to die. She would do and give anything to have more time.

But Reverie was falling, the autumn air chilling the hairs on her body as she fell.

The princess tried to look up at her window but saw no one there. Then the thorns were piercing her skin. Falling three palace levels had her crashing the branches, ripping skin, making it burn tortuously. Only a thin layer of leaves separated her from the grass. Reverie knew that because she did not hit the ground.

She was hurting terribly, though, her arms slashed up, her nightgown torn and stuck in places, her temples and face burning with the sting of the thorns, some of them ripped from the branches and clipped on her skin.

Fear and hope ran her blood, chilling her as the realization she was not dead hit. But Reverie could still kill herself if she did not get out of here, if she so much as mistook a step on getting out of these branches.

With a steadying breath, she pushed through the pain as she rose and walked out of the bush. Every second of it was like dying a different time, the stinging almost unbearable and the pain consuming.

But she needed to be alive.

Determination running in her blood, Reverie walked towards the contrary edge of the bush, coming out on the side of the waterfall in front of the palace. Whatever she did and wherever she went, whoever pushed her was still inside, which meant she had a better chance if she ran to the city. She could find help.

Her people loved her.

Reverie did not know where Hiraeth lived, so she could not reach him, and she could not wait on the possibility of him coming to see her tonight because she did not know if that was going to be minutes or hours from now. Not when she did not have that time.

She started walking towards the waterfall to make her way to the right side of it, where the hill descended towards the village. Only, she heard footsteps just when she was nearing the curve to the descent and turned to see her sister at the far end of the bushes. She had a strange glint in her eyes, and her expression looked sinister under the full moon.

"Keres," Reverie looked around as she kept on walking, "what are you doing here?"

"Wishing you goodbye, dear sister."

Before Reverie could do anything, she felt the ice feel of a blade on her neck and it ripping her skin apart, her lips opening in a silent scream. Her hands reached instinctively to her neck to try and hold back the blood that splashed to the dark grass in front of her and continued spilling like a river. Her vision started to turn blurry, but she still registered the smile on her sister's lips and the perfume of her mother's favourite collection.

But Reverie could do nothing. Nothing else to save herself. There was no way to stop the blood, and she knew that.

Though what they had just done did not seem enough because, as Reverie stumbled forward, dizziness making her lose her balance, she was pushed again, this time to meet the direction of the water falling.

Reverie knew it was over.

She did not close her eyes as, once more, time slowed down to envelop her in an hourglass of pain and despair. But it was the utter hopelessness as she crashed with the water that had her thinking about the key and the future they would not have.

They had been found. There was nothing else Reverie could do now.

Nothing as she broke the surface to immediately hit her head on a rock and the world went black. Nothing before Reverie saw everything from above and knew.

Something was wrong.

It should have been the end.

But it was not.