The Shards of My Soul

Two Kings Must Die

Iselvheim, 29th of Góa, 804 A.C.

I'm home.

It was a strange thing.

Coming back.

Nothing had changed. Everything was the same. Felt the same. Smelled the same.

The only thing that'd changed had been him.

Radically so.

Raiden raised his chin as he kept the horse cantering forward, ignoring the sounds of the guards mounted around him speaking between them, watching the castle rising on the horizon ahead of him as his beacon of home.

Or rather, a sign.

Of his next doom.

He'd dreamed of the day he'd come back to this place for many days and nights. He'd wished to come back every day, at first. At the time, scared, alone, hungry, cold, bloodied, sore, and torn apart, lying awake dreaming of the place he'd once called home had felt like a salvation of some kind. A true beacon of home. Of rescue. But as the days turned into weeks and the weeks summed into months, he knew no one was coming for him, and, more importantly, he learned that no amount of wishing — or begging, even —, would give him what he wanted. It wouldn't change his situation or bring him the future he yearned so fervently for. It also wouldn't change the past and everything he'd felt the day he'd been shipped off from the very same castle he now saw before him.

Still, gazing up at the castle, now, he wondered if returning had ever actually been what he'd wanted, back then. Or if he'd deluded himself into thinking he wanted to return simply because life had been, in some ways, easier, here. Or maybe, simply, more constant. Consistent. But after having been through all he'd survived the past nine winters, he understood the path he'd taken to get here, today, had changed him far too much for him to ever see this castle or that life the same way.

Far, far, far too much.

His hands constricted around the reigns of the horse with too much force, turning his knuckles as white as the animal's fur, though little of his attention was given to the fact. Instead, his chest rose in an unsteady breath as his mind focused all efforts on imagining what would be waiting for him on the other side of those walls — the very same he now knew he had no right to live within of.

To King Demir Thorden's chagrin.

If it had been up to him, Raiden wouldn't have lived past his birth. Or perhaps, more accurately, he wouldn't have lived past his second day of life.

Winters had gone by and the pain he'd felt that day from the brutality that'd been committed against him had turned into nothing if not sour, bitter, corroding, resented fury in all the winters he'd spent in exile.

The worst part of it was he'd spent so long keeping the anger bottled in, he wasn't sure he'd know what to do with it when the time came to let it go.

Probably explode.

Nine winters had gone by.

Nine lonely, harsh, disheartening, and hellish fucking winters.

Nine winters.

He'd expected some form of relief at being back. Maybe some comfort that his torture had finally ended. Yet, all he felt was a big void of nothing in his chest as he approached the place where what little he'd once had, had been taken away from him.

He wondered if the winters had done that. Or rather the suffering. Or maybe survival itself.

Did it matter, even, he wondered?