The Infernal King | 1 ✓

CHAPTER II | VISIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

THE WEIGHTY TOME that contained all of the prophecies and visions that she had ever foreseen was held sacred by Maarit. Subsequent to each enlightening vision, she meticulously inscribed the lavish words that had been involuntarily uttered from her delicate, roseate lips into this tome. Its pages, which were composed of yellowing parchment, were nearly crumbling with age.

This heavy book lay open on a wooden table in front of her. The page on the left side was crammed with black ink, while the one on the right side was completely blank. To the left of the book was a black bowl that was made of ceramic. It was filled to the brim with clear water—though through the obscurity, it appeared to be the same colour as the bowl.

The room was tenebrous, lit solely by the very faint light being emitted from three wax candles. They were just enough to allow Maarit to have a proper view of the tome. Occasionally, the candlelight would flicker due to the presence of magical energy in the room, or the wax would drip from the hot flame that melted it; but she paid it no mind at all.

Through the windows, it was apparent that it was nighttime—sometime after dawn, but before midnight. The stars—those that were not veiled by thick grey tufts of cloud—blinked down at the village. They pulsated with a certain mystique, mirroring the clairvoyant atmosphere within the candlelit cottage.

In addition to being a witch, Maarit was also a soothsayer. Though ordinary sorcery could be tolerated somewhat, soothsaying was considered absolute taboo amongst every villager—and even by other witches and warlocks. The foreseeing of the future was not an ability that many sorcerers possessed, and was seldom considered more of a gift than a curse.

Soothsaying was feared and regarded as both evil and unnatural. Maarit had noticed that people felt threatened by the powers that her kind were endowed with. She had not informed many that she herself was a soothsayer. The few that she had told were trusted acquaintances and friends. Her parents, of course, knew as well—but heredity did not come into play when it came to soothsaying, and therefore neither of them had the ability.

Similarly to most others, Maarit's mother and father did not have a very positive outlook on soothsayers. A mere three years before, when Maarit had been sixteen years of age, their discovery of her powers had been the cause of their abandonment of their daughter. Said daughter had lived alone in the house ever since, making use of her powers brazenly by continuously exercising them.

Dark hair cascading around her, Maarit idly reached for a much smaller bowl that contained powdered nutmeg. As she did so, the sleeve of her robes slipped off of her arm. The cottage was chilly, causing goosebumps to erupt on the exposed skin of her arm. Her skin tone was somewhere in between porcelain and obsidian—more of a sun-kissed bronze than anything else.

Licking her lips, she poured the contents of the small bowl into the larger one. The little orange flicker reflected upon the surface of the water. She watched as the nutmeg powder dispersed into the clear liquid. Then, she raised both of her hands to the bowl, so that they hovered just over the water. Shutting her eyes tightly, she cleared her head of all unrelated thoughts and allowed her mind to go into a meditative state.

She knew that she was ready from the feeling in her hands, which felt like they were being pulled towards the water magnetically. The woman's right eyebrow quirked imperceptibly as she rested her hands on either side of the bowl. Finally, her eyes flew open. Her gaze was fixated on the water until ripples appeared across its undisturbed surface.

She began to see images forming. She took a sharp breath, her dark brown eyes imperceptibly flitting from side to side, greedily taking everything in.

Suddenly, she was no longer seeing the images on the water's surface—she was seeing them in her mind. The phantasmagorias displayed before her mind's eye caused her to grip the sides of the ceramic bowl tighter. She saw a crowned man foaming at the mouth, a gold chalice in hand. She saw a handsome young man, much younger than the first one, picking up a crown and placing it on his own head. She saw the head of a teenage boy—severed from his body—hit the ground, while spectators cheered. She saw a sword, the blade made of platinum and the hilt of diamond.

And she saw red—red jewels on crowns, red thrones, red gowns, red rubies on sword pommels, red blood. Red was everywhere.

Her eyes had gone black, as though each pupil had expanded far past its normal size. Then, with the colour red still displayed in her mind, words bubbled up in her throat and she experienced the overwhelming urge to speak them. They had arrived out of nowhere, as she was barely conscious of what she was saying; but they seared the back of her tongue, yearning for release.

At last, she conceded: syllables strung together as beautifully as poetry tumbled out of her mouth, and Maarit recited the prophecy in a raspy voice that just barely sounded like her own.

"By the dawn of the spring equinox, sudden death will have befallen King Tevenot II—a death begotten by a golden chalice envenomed. Fallacious surmises shall prompt the unjust execution of a sinless servant boy. The fallen crown will be taken into bloodied hands, which will only be washed and bloodied many more times. The Infernal Prince shall reign over Bonvalet, and the country shall plunge into a desolate peril."

Blood ran cold in gibbous blue veins; black eyes returned to their usual brown colour; water ceased its rippling. A single candle was snuffed out, leaving behind a terrible apprehension. Maarit sat still in tranquility for a moment, before taking the two candles that were still lit and placing them closer to her tome of prophecies.

Ofttimes, when Maarit received a prophetic vision and the words of the prophecy spilled from her lips, she did not quite know what they meant until she had written them down and thoroughly analyzed them. She sometimes even rewrote them in more comprehensible everyday jargon—her book was filled with annotations of that nature.

Nonetheless, even then, most of them made little to no sense considering the context. There was always a very good chance that some of what Maarit predicted would not happen for many, many decades—or even centuries. There were only a handful that had come true over the course of the three years that Maarit had been exercising her clairvoyant abilities—the rest had yet to do so.

This particular prophecy, however, with its prose-like form and tone of devastation, caused her skin to crawl and her hands to tremble ever so slightly.

She dipped her quill into a bottle of stygian ink and lowered it to the blank parchment page, taking care to write each individual word of the prophecy exactly as she had recited it—it burned still in her mind, as though it had been branded there. The words resounded in her brain like horrifying echoed whispers. Due to the slight tremor in her limbs, her calligraphic handwriting was not as adroit as it generally was.

It was in a cottage that quivered beneath the enormity of the castle, in a village that fell to its knees before the king, that trepidation engulfed Maarit.