The Infernal King | 1 ✓

CHAPTER XXXIV | CHILDREN TO WEAPONS, KINGS TO DUST

       HEART STUTTERING UNCONTROLLABLY, Maarit's lips parted in shock at the revelation. Her eyes searched his for truth, but she could rarely tell what he felt simply by looking into his eyes. Even when his expression was pained, he always seemed to be repressing something—a certain emotion, a certain scar from the past, a certain intolerable truth.

       "It was—King Tevenot?" Maarit gasped, disbelief colouring her face. Though the initial panic she had felt was gone, she pushed at Theodoracius's chest and took a step away from him, shaking her head vigorously. "But—why? No, that does not make sense. He was a good man. He was always a good man. Everyone in Bonvalet knew that. He saved Alexander's life; he had mercy on the criminals; he used to give out gold to beggars! The number of times he steered the country away from war, signed peace treaties—"

"A good man?" he scoffed in interruption before letting out one of his sadistic, booming laughs. The sound sent shuddering chills up Maarit's spine. "My father was many things, but a good man has never been one of them. No one knew him. I was the only one who ever did. If they had known him, they would never have revered him the way they did."

"Explain it to me, then," she said between gritted teeth. Her fists clenched at her sides, trembling with a painful longing to reach out to the king and shake him—agitate him—until she stirred up his sediment and brought the sunken veracity to the surface. "Make me understand you. I may be a soothsayer, but I cannot read minds. Prove that what you are saying is the undeniable truth, for God's sake. I cannot possibly believe you after everything else you've said and done."

       She paused, her tongue darting out to wet her lips. Her mouth was dry as the desert, and just as arid, for though she searched for more well-intentioned and meaningful words, none blossomed up from her throat.

       "There is something very wrong with me," she blurted out, "because I want to believe you. Make me believe you."

       Theodoracius appeared conflicted for a moment, as though his memories were grappling with one another from inside his mind. Sinking his teeth into his own bottom lip, he looked at the floor and uttered a single question, an undercurrent of melancholy laced between the words. "What did you see in your vision of the past?"

       "My vision?" she asked, taken aback. Her mind went back to the boy she'd seen, the pained expression on his face—and for a moment, she screwed her eyes shut as though it would block out the remembrance. With closed eyelids, it only grew clearer.

       She knew.

       She had known since the moment she had seen the beautiful boy with locks of silken hair and a face that had only just begun to harden into a mask. Then, the boy had been learning how to hide behind his own visage—but now he knew.

       "I'm aware that you failed to tell me the whole truth of your vision," Theodoracius said dolorously. "But I can surmise the nature of what you must have seen." He let out a sigh so heavy it must have removed the weight of the country from his shoulders. "I do not know much about fate. Whether it is truly inexorable or not is unknown to me, just as it is unknown to any other mortal being living on the soil of our world.

       "If there is one thing I do know, it is that the past does not lie. The future is not carved into the stars; the present may very well be a deception. But the past—it is the only unalterable part of our wretched, useless lives. Whatever you saw was not a falsification conjured by the gods. It was not a glimmer of what could be. You said there was evil in this castle—evil that probably lies in its very foundation—and I have lived it."