Royal Responsibilities, a Prinxiety ghost story

Part Four

The nurses at the emergency room weren't pleased that Virgil wouldn't tell them how he managed to get such a lengthy cut down the back of his arm.

He didn't see it as any of their business, and they would have to patch him up regardless, while he trembled in the triage chair and struggled to keep still enough for the stitches to be threaded into him.

His body only recently had begun to allow him to register the pain of his wound as his heart rate gradually slowed. Thankfully, local anesthetic made the suturing process tolerable enough, if he didn't watch.

The voice was back in the castle. He'd gotten away in, more or less, one piece. The threat had passed, but his adrenaline lingered, along with a deep regret.

As terrifying as the experience had been, Virgil had found exactly what he was seeking and if he'd kept his camera rolling he would have the moment saved in a beautiful digital file.

Instead, he was getting over a dozen stitches, and he'd lost his favorite flashlight.

An overworked nurse handed him his discharge papers and a prescription for pain medicine, neither of which he cared about or kept track of after that moment.

Sore and still shell shocked, Virgil drove to his apartment and sat in his car for nearly an hour to stare blankly out at the street in front of him. The sun was rising.

Time for bed then.

He slunk into the room and curled up on his floorbound mattress, hugging stray pillows to himself. Adrenaline waning, he was soon overtaken by exhaustion.

–

It was daylight.

Hundreds of people were moving around him, past him, through him. He floated, disembodied, through the main walkway from the entrance of Starlight Kingdom.

In front of him was the courtyard, and beyond that, the bridge leading to the Magic Castle in its original, whole and flawless condition.

The park operated around him in full swing. The scent of popcorn and roasted almonds washed over Virgil as he formlessly moved through the courtyard and towards the bridge. Voices, giddy and exhausted, filled his ears until they were suddenly silenced by shock.

The explosion sent a deafening blast of sound and heat through the courtyard and Virgil, who had no ears to cover or hands with which to cover them.

Still, he continued to hover towards the castle at a slow and steady drift. He'd reached the bridge when two painfully loud cracks signaled the destruction of a pair of towers, which fell down onto the palace interior, one after the other.

The voices around him were active again, screaming now in horror and panic. He couldn't blame them.

Soon he was across the bridge and being drawn towards the floor level of the castle, beneath the spreading fire and toppling debris.

He reached the exterior wall and slid through it, the sounds from outside becoming muted as he entered the wall.

The fire and destruction vibrated through the walls and through him as a new set of screaming voices became slowly more audible.

Then, another massive cracking sound, followed by an earth-shattering boom which seemed to quake the entirety of his being, somehow intensifying and lingering far longer than it should have.

It's too much! he heard himself thinking. Too–TOO MUCH, I CAN'T–!!

Virgil jerked awake in bed, already yelping, then crying out again in pain when the movement agitated the wound in his arm.

He hugged his arm and curled over himself, shocks of purple hair falling over his tearing eyes. His breath came quickly, inhaled in quick gasps and exhaled with soft vocalizations. He struggled to slow it and sank over himself further as he did so.

It was a dream. Virgil was exhausted, his arm looked like something from The Nightmare Before Christmas, but that was the worst of it.

"I'm okay," he told himself tiredly. "I'm okay.."

But was he?

As the shock of the nightmare ebbed, Virgil detected other intense emotions: shame, and deep sadness. A wetness on his cheeks alerted him he was crying.

"Ugh, why?" he now asked himself and rubbed his sleeve across his eyes.

Sure, he was upset by the dream, and pretty bothered that he hadn't gotten the earlier incident on camera, but this level of shame and depression felt entirely overblown to the point of seeming foreign.

He heard the voice in his head at that moment.

"LEAVE! RIGHT NOW!!"

It had sounded so angry and threatening to him at the time.

"STAY AWAY FROM HERE!!"

Replaying the sound in his head he realized what he had been hearing could also, and very easily, have been pure desperation.

A heightened desperation which might match up with the intense, painful feelings he was now feeling slowly fade from him along with the terror the dream had brought him.

The realization hit him and he sank to lie on his side with a long moan.

He was going back to the Magic Castle.