Till the End of Time

Chapter 6 - A Gilded Palace & Connections

From the darkness, the skin of the first actor was shed, there was no captain or privateer, instead only a prince with a foolish mind and a longing to escape a family he had been born into. He had taken to the bubbly waves and sails that billowed with the wind. So, he whispered a few lies and tugged a few strings and faked leaving for higher studies so he could traverse the seas.

The summoner of sun's light had taken issue with all the lies he had uttered to her, yet he only said that he had never denied the claims. Claiming instead her mind was the only deceiver in this little trick of deceit he had so cleverly made. The witch of the current only sharply glared, declaring he could have helped them all those years instead of cowering and fleeing. However, she remembers instead what she had done over the years, and how she too had cowered when the prince had fled.

The prince now stood tall with a little army of his own and pledged to the sister witches that he would start to fix the wrongs made by the country. The start being the army comprised of all he could save from all the hunters who wished to burn them on a pyre or drag them to a fight they did not belong in. He gathered his men and sent them ahead as they sat in a comfy carriage with gilded tiles and glass domes their destination.

The only thing that awaited them at the palace was tired old souls and children who couldn't fight. The saint of the sun forced all the children to flee along with all the wounded who could no longer fight for their lives. While she dabbled in the court, her sister also dealt her hand in political matters with other strings and threads to pull.

She cracked swirling amber and black seals made of wax with concealed grace and secrecy, yet no matter how hard her sister tried to pry it away, there was simply nothing for her to know. For the witch of the current however, it spelt betrayal and destruction, screamed of the recurring nightmares that had yet to vanish. Smoky wisps and blood that ran like water and as plentiful as a lake. A never-ending frost that crept like ivy all over them. Glittering amber with strokes of a gentle plea that could never be fulfilled.

The Saint of the sun grew annoyed and increasingly began to misjudge her own sister's intentions and trustworthiness when she began to visit the storm witch with increasing frequency. Yet it was not purely the witch of the current's fault. It just so happened that while she had been exchanging notes with her friend, she and sister were played with as their hearts were strung along by a certain member of the saint of the sun's guard.

The growing crack between ranks grew apparent when the saint moved from just another Grisha to a saint of course. While her tracker only remained a guard as she was to marry the prince whose crown to inherit was laid with thorns. Instead of meeting for long overdue time and kisses, they drove knives into their skin, the bond no longer made of love but of duty and lies.

The Storm Witch herself did not have no part of the grand schemes, because with her soft and twisting words, she lured the tracker farther down the path from the saint. With her own string of silvery lies, he fell into her trap, hot-tempered and judgmental at the saint who had been trying the best for what she had known. Only the façade had been destroyed on a fateful winter night with the final strings cut. The storm witch at once took back all her lies and never once again returned to the tracker's side, having been heavily scolded by the witch of the currents.

The witch of the current simply looked on, a simple observer as she dealt with her own demons. Instead of a messy love situation with threads and lies that led nowhere, replaced by a demon's outstretched mouth that beckoned her to the golden spun fields, tainted by the blood of her former comrades. A smoky shape that always eluded her grasp or her swirling wind, its carnelian-stained claws always reaching for her precious sister that was cloaked in a fading amber light or her friend who stood with her back turned, failing to draw the shadows away from her again. Never again to fade as even the shadows the witch of dusk had wielded became too much as she succumbed to nightmares that seemed too dangerous to even utter aloud.