Broken

Prologue

Have in mind, your first real friendship, and at it's highest point... it's being struck by lightning.
Imagine, the one place where you're certain of your safety, no matter what... pulverised by one single fist.
Now, think of the only person you trust with every single word you ever said..
brutally forced into a never-ending sleep.

I felt worse than that, the moment I saw her there, in that specific place, sitting in that specific chair.
All possible vibes went through my head, and one by one they forced my heart to keep pounding.. All of them, all but one! Anger. There was no anger, not in a single molecule inside my body.. Well it was, I just had not realised it at the time being...

Back in the days, when I went to the new city for the first time in my life, I, of course, was terribly nervous.
I remember it very well. It was the first time I would ever meet a king, and not just some king. He was thé king.
Zeus himself in human form. I had been chosen, I had had a dream that night, in which he explained it to me. Why I got to be the one to know his secret. Why I was granted his trust. He explained all of it.

Apparently he was there when I was born. He sat in the window, disguised as a songbird, watching over my 'So very beautiful' mother, making sure she'd get to the other side safely.
Only seconds before my birth, she died, and so would I have, if it hadn't been for him.

Luckily my father would return from a 8-month-lasting journey, later that week. As though he knew something had happened, he decided to return home as soon as possible. My father and his men had set up the camp and were supposed to rest. But instead, father decided to leave early. So he rode more than 200 miles overnight, two nights in a row.

When the maiden, who had been taking care of me, told him that his wife had died three days before, while giving birth to a boy whom he was the father of... he had a nervous breakdown.
Excusing me of having my own mother's blood on my hands, he left me with the maid, the first weeks of my life. She fed and raised me, yet I could have been her younger brother. The poor girl was only 12 summers old, by the time I turned one. My father came to visit more and more often throughout the years, and when the former queen kicked her out of the palace for being inefficient in her cleaning, which of course was due to my existence, he took us in. Yes, "us". He adopted her. Her parents died too when she was very little.
This girl, Melody, now my older sister, takes care of me, for our father is depressed still.

Yet, the day that I kissed Zeus' ring and kneeled before him, he complimented my father for raising me well, even though he knew, my father taught me nothing.
He did thank Melody later, in person. Zeus explained to us that he had to praise our father, because that's what the traditional code said, that "his ancestors" once had written.

Of course, he did praise her, he even titled her a Noblewoman. Which meant we got to live in the castle, hence he made her head of the family also. Not our father, whose nobility died along with my mother. Nor Melody's husband, who, surprisingly, let her keep her family name and seeked no part of our fortune. No, he, The great Father of Olympus, named her, Melody mcBane, Noblewoman of Northcourliss, head of the mcBane family. Our family.

This single night, in the Ides of March,1586 years after the death of Caesar, had changed my life forever. He had arranged a royal dinner followed by a ball, to celebrate my 16th birthday. Which I had forgotten all about by now. Since I had been knighted only hours before and it was my first day as an accepted adult, everybody expected me to choose a bride. A lady, a peeress or maybe even a princess. Ladies of royalty had come from all twelve kingdoms, but of course my closests hoped I would marry someone from a royal family nearby. So, naturally, as I always do, I manage to ruin the evening. This time by falling madly in love with Diana Johansson, an adventurous maiden without any titles. This young woman, of about the same age as I, is "just" one of the confidants of King Griff of Lorath, but at least she is not fake, like the others. She is not trying to look like death itself, by hiding her face behind solid white powder or lips as red as blood. In combination with the limited use of dark makeup, which gives her unemotional face a rather sad, yet beautiful appearance, makes that she herself looks like death without trying, or well... the beauty of death. She is something else. Something utterly... mysterious...

That's correct! The encounter with Diana was rather important to me, even though no emotions were to be read of her face. I knew she felt it too, if not the spark, then at least the friendship that grew from that encounter, and that encounter alone.

Those two nights, the night my mother died and the night I turned 16, seem to be linked somehow, somewhere deep inside of me.
Yet, at this very moment it feels like it is about to snap. As if that link is breaking, along with my heart, my trust, my code, and any other promise I have ever made...