Knights of the Platinum Dragon: A D&D Story

Chapter 34: Familial Strife

(Trigger Warning: This chapter contains moderate depictions of physical, emotional and domestic abuse.)

Frostpeak had been built with a commanding view over the Storm Horn mountains and the lands beyond, so that the Marchions of Frostpeak, as the Galehauts were officially titled, would be able to face any threat posed to Cormyr. As such, the windows bathed the hall in the white light of a wintry day, the sun gleaming off the stone and snow of the mountainsides that spread out beneath the castle, growing lower and more modest with distance until they spilled out into the grimy green of the Farsea Swamp and the burnished gold of the Lightning Steppes.

The castle's great hall was a vast chamber of blue-grey mountain stone, ancient but strong, unyielding as the mountain which gave it its name. At one end of the hall, upon a raised dais, was the Throne of Byron, carved from the same stone as the rest of the castle, the arms shaped like the heads of howling griffins and the back depicting a pair of the beasts standing in profile, their wings appearing to crown the head of whoever sat upon the chair. The vaulted ceiling supported by masterfully-worked pillars that were thick as trees, spiralled with golden panelling and flanked by guards dressed in hauberks and wielding spears.

And standing amidst all of this was a single man, a young boy, and a harridan.

"How dare you disobey me, Logan!" Lady Margret of the Extaminos family yelled down at him, her long, bony fingers crushing his wrist like the coils of a constrictor snake before she threw him to the floor in front of his father, who was seated upon the Throne of Byron. The stone flags scraped the skin from Logan's palms as he landed, but when he looked up at Margret, the only response she got from him was a glare of defiance.

Even at eight years old, he had always been a wilful child, and his hatred for his stepmother made that will blaze brighter until it became an inferno of distaste and contempt.

Margret was not a hard woman to hate – there seemed to be no flesh, no blood, and no love in her for anything except herself. Every scrap of her body was gaunt as a rail and hard as granite, her skin dreadfully pale and eerily smooth, her lips chapped and thin as paper. Crows-feet patterned the sockets of her large black eyes, which were unblinking as a viper's, making her seem both older and younger than she really was in an unnerving blend of allure and experience. Her every other feature seemed to be chipped from flint, like imps had sharpened her narrow beak of a noise and torn any flesh that might have remained from her body from the inside out before sewing her skin back up. Even her hair was hard and wiry, like strands of solid metal that had been dragged through mud and stapled to the head of a scarecrow or a gargoyle. She loomed up over him as they met gazes, and from the sleeves of her black-and-white gown protruded the gnarled, bony branches that were her fingers.

As he pushed himself back to his feet, palms reddening with blood, Logan looked up towards the Throne of Byron. Silhouetted for a moment in the light was a figure, but as the seated man sat forward, the little boy's heart did not surge with joy or fear. It only rumbled in disappointment.

"W-what did he do?" his father asked in a stuttered whimper of a voice.

In contrast to his second wife, everything about Lord Josef Galehaut was soft and pathetic. His was not the face of a knight, nor was his body - pronounced jowls hung from his cheeks, his eyes droopy and sagging, his brow constantly twisted into a look of nervousness and fear, His black hair was thin and flaxen, draped back over his scalp and down his shoulders like strands of seaweed; despite only being in his thirties, half his hair had already gone to grey. His posture was stooped forward, his concave chest hunched over the little swollen belly that wobbled whenever he moved.

He wasn't fat, though – fat would have been something. Instead, he was just shapeless; the marcher lord of Frostpeak and head of the noble house Galehaut looked as if you could push him over just by walking near him.