Alternate Realities

Murderer's Prince

An alternate perspective.

Warning: death, murder, a bit of gore written out.

Hilt in hands that belonged to his body like a memory belongs to a mind: distant and faded. He saw them flex. He watched them steadily lift up. But he didn't feel the grip as crisply as he knew he should. The supple leather was cushioned by a layer of wool between the spiral binding and the metal. Each spiral an edge his palms could no longer discern.

The hilt and the blade belonged to his family for generations. Every Calore of note had held it. Every Calore had contributed to the notch on the inside of the handle where armor rubbed away steel. With it out in front of him, he could not make out the notch. The only factor that made the dream-sword real was the weight. The weight of the sword made worse by gravity: severe and pulling hard towards the ground.

Elara called on memories, snaking through his brain for the controls she needed. She found them in the years of instruction and practice. First, in the pumpkin patch on a cold autumn morning. The skin of the gourd strained and snapped with a hallow thunk, thunk, thunk. One orange ball burst after the other cleaved by the mighty sword in shaky hands. And then again, fifteen years old and graduated from vegetables to blood. The pigs... the skin of a pig didn't resist. The bone of the neck and the rigored flesh protested like clay. Each pass through the carcass clung to the metal and sucked it into the soul of the felled animal. He could feel Elara searching for his first human kill. But Cal had never been so close as to require a sword on an actual battlefield. Guns and bombs and his own flames served him better at the front, in the courtyard, in the sewers.

She wove her way back to the pigs. She animated them. She made their skin crawl and shimmer. She raised his hands above his head, the protests of gravity drawing sweat to the nape of his neck. He saw pink flesh and red, gaping wounds. And then, he saw his father.

He saw a man angry, but not at him. Afraid, but not of him. Dejected, betrayed, but not by him. And she gave him every detail back in that final second. The sticky grip of the leather. The layered edges of the binding. The notch on the hilt. The heat of his hands and the burn of his muscles holding the weight against gravity.

Crueler things, too. The prickle of a missed beard-hair below the king's side burn. The silver blush of exhaustion and fury. The sweat pooled like tears below his father's pleading eyes. Eyes pleading with him not to look, not to remember, not to know what he was about to do. But Cal knew. He knew when she forced his hands down that he would never forget and she would never let him look way. He knew and he prepared as best as a boy can when faced with killing his first hero.

Nothing, not pumpkins, not pigs, could prepare for the feel of it. The sound of it. His father's neck bones, closer to the surface than the awkwardly angled carcasses, jarred his hands. The sword more like a cleaver, a butcher's tool than elegant weapon, despite it's decorations. His elbows held strong. His arms like stone crushing down and through. His anatomy lessons blurred through his mind but he was unsure if it was his doing or hers. The spine was penetrated. The cord severed. The bones spliced. The blade barreled through the rest as if they were one piece of softened butter, or cream on top of milk: the esophagus, the thyroid, the trachea and out.

Ka-Thunk. The "Ka!" was a snap of the solid bone forced to yield. The "thunk" less the landing of a head on the floor than the thud of his heart stopping momentarily, honoring the horror before it, before resuming the pounding fury that kept Cal mercilessly live. Cal didn't register the splatter of blood over the rush in his own ears.