The Rat King

13

He is blind.

Sharp pain shifts around his hand and something thumps somewhere, a cackle rising in the air as an array of cold pressure slices across his arm. Feeling the fine-tipped edges, he wonders if it is his broken glass, if it is glass embedded in his skin that causes the burn in his arm. He screams.

He is blind.

The memories are clearer now, perfect in their beauty: he can see it visibly, as if it happened only days—minutes—before. Which it hasn't. Has it? The dirk—yes, the dirk. Shining in that feeble red-purple light, its tip stained in the liquid of life. He remembers the dirk. His own hand is clasped around it: small, feeble. Young. Almost too young. There was lightning—flashes of yellow and green, cackling like the broken glass across the earth, down a crackling table, hailing down its own broken glass. The Rat King can remember it just like yesterday.

And there is that figure. He cannot remember who, not yet. The figure was stooped, hunched over either in pain or age; memory fails in the specifics. Perhaps it was both. He leaned on one staff, a staff with a snake curling on the tip of it: a venomous snake. Yes, he knows that snake, where did he see that snake? With glowing red eyes... Did the man have red eyes? He was leaning on that staff, the one with that snake with the red, glowing eyes, he was leaning on that staff, and something was dripping on the ground next to him, yes it was, something important, something—

Then a spark flies in his head, an electric shock of knowing as that figure has a face, shriveled and shrunken in age, blazing white hair and bulging eyes, bulging, yellow eyes with red circling the white meat of them. His mouth was open—he can remember it now—a gaping hole of grasping death, sucking what life it could into those boiling lungs. The yellow-green teeth are now crumbling at the base of his throne, on the lonely ramparts of the mountain, in the shadow of the broken mirror.

He remembers. He remembers.

And suddenly the man is gone, the dirk vanishes too, and the burning in his arm dissipates, leaving nothing but the crusted scars. Light flutters outside his eyelids and a hand is smoothing the crinkles in his forehead, brushing the hair away. He will open them soon, soon enough. Just not yet. He first wants to feel her hand on his face, feel it drifting down the ridge of his nose, pressing out the smudges under his eyes. He wants to breathe in the soft scent, barely perceptible even when that wrist lingers by his nose. The bed dips by his thigh and the brush of tumbled hair slides across his skin.

There has to be more time. Just one more minute... he lets his hand drift up to skim the meat of that arm, in the soft place where the upper and lower arm meets. His fingers sink into the crease, sometimes brushing a mottled edge, which sends a knowing shudder down his spine, but knuckles brush his eyelids, taking the vestiges of that memory away.

You are here.

Yes.

I missed you.

His hand cups that face, the thumb sliding down across the creamy skin, to test if she is truly real. One can never be too sure.

Was it the dream again?

Her eyes are sad. Her big, luminous eyes with those shards of blue and green are sad. He doesn't deserve this.

It was nothing.

The fingertips touch the tip of his nose.

It frightens me.

She does not know fear—he made sure of that a long time ago—but he does not argue. The recollection of the last time is too close to forget. His hand curls around her knee and he stares up at those eyes.