In Huck's Hands

Chapter 19: Who Annihilated My Brood

Tella, if not for his white-snow epidermis, reminded me much of myself as a child...Naive and waiting for the next thing to be tossed my way to rid myself of the constant and mind-numbing boredom. I could admit that even with all the summit flare--It still brought me that same sense of all-encompassing pang of tedium. "Tella, would you like to hear a story?"

He seemed confused, either at why I still chose to let my country still look as if it was ruled by proxy...Or possibly the true reason I freed him from his duties here. "Don't you need to get down there?" Tella flicked his eyes down towards the many astutely dressed men and women, nearly flinching from dodged recognition of his view. "It's simple...You see the Svet tyrant--He has not been able to retract his 'menacing' stare from our lofty position."

Even without looking, I could feel the cold vision from the Ice golem of a man burrowing into my psyche like a hammered nail. His Atlantian lackey surely would be using the fact that I have superseded my father's place in their once-cowed nation of oil and gold during their next election cycle, Pathetic...There was no moral in how they mocked my fatherland's rules of authority while he cuddled himself with his nation's parent monarchy's most vile king to date.

"I don't like how they look at us...Like they're--" Tella caught himself raising his voice a little too loud for his own ease, eyes cringing at the sound of his own voice echoing down the vaulted walls of the glass semi-dome. "They have been conned by years of forced caste systems and embargo into wholeheartedly believing they are better than us--Hating us for our melanated skin tones and 'Lack of civility'...I wonder how civil they will be when I crush their cities and sack their fortification."

Though I gripped the smooth railings for intensity, I did not care for civility nor any goal I had stated to anyone till this point. Tella would be privy to not only a putrid hook of trauma in my buried memories but also become my sole confidant in knowing what truly lurked beyond the surface of mortality. "I ask you again, do you want to hear a story?"

"Y-yes, it's not what happened to Dennis again, right? I don't do good with gore..." He flinched slightly, making himself smaller while silencing himself for what I had to say...

The flickering torchlight cast macabre shadows dancing across the ravaged throne room. I stood amidst the visceral carnage in a fit of catatonic dread, chest heaving, as tendrils of choking smoke wormed into my tiny lungs. My booted feet sloshed through pools of still-warm crimson juices, the once-sumptuous tapestries smoldering into ash around me in a blazing halo of searing blue flames.

Disbelieving red eyes raked over the broken forms strewn carelessly - palace guards with sightless eyes frozen in rictuses of pure agony, their ornate viper-scaled armor cleft and carcasses left like Blood-eagled sacrifices to the devil. Loyal retainers and maids I'd known since childhood, throats rudely yawning from severed jugulars with no one left to even give witness.

It was the contorted statuette nailed to the bloodied throne itself that unraveled the final cables of my virginal sanity. "M-mother..." The anguished rasp barely carried over the crackle of the encroaching inferno that whipped my eyes shut with each current sent my way. I staggered forward, boots squelching the innards around me until I stood mere inches from the grotesque mirror image of my once-living mother.

My bitter mother, the graceful Marna Vasca--regally garbed in mauve ceremonial robes now tattered and soaked through with her life's essence. Four jagged obsidian blades pinned her decapitated body to the ancient throne, her proud head slumped and lolling at an unnatural angle from her jeweled wrist.

I had never seen such absolute horror in my life, even with all the public executions and torture of rebels that had taken place mere inches from my face in an attempt to harden me for rule. "No..." The hoarse denial ripped from my throat like a feral animal. "No! Mom?" My hands scrabbled at her mutilated form, grasping, shaking, pleading for any sign of life to reanimate her broken husk with some sort of love-bond mysticism.