Inheritance

Chapter 5: Despair

Even though the king, Kori, and the rest of the usurpers deemed it too cruel to simply kill him when the kingdom was seized from his tyrannical parents, Eory wished they had. He had no friends, no family, and no one to love in his cell.

He thought Kori was someone to love at one time, but that, evidently, was untrue.

Eory chewed his arm and imagined he was chewing hers instead. When he recognized how evil and wrong that was with a flash of fear, he made his mind turn elsewhere—although the place it turned was no better.

Eory had considered ending his life many times before and he considered doing it now.

I could crush myself with furniture, I could stab myself with the pen... But he never found the courage to do it.

I'm wasting away. I wonder if they'll all cheer when I'm dead?

___

Drip, drip, drip...

He gritted his teeth.

Drip, drip, drip...

He clenched his fists.

Drip, drip, drip...

He threw his drawing at the wall and could taste something foul rising in his throat and sizzling in his stomach. He clenched his head in his hands and suddenly felt nothing but bitterness for his caretaker.

He kept thinking of it. The exact moment he found out that Kori would never barter with the king for his freedom.

The last time she had brought him a present, he, as usual, had been overly polite and kind in thanking her for it. Normally, she would have smiled at how well he received his presents and would have told him he did a good job.

Not that day.

He had done something wrong while he received that present. Perhaps he hadn't bowed low enough or long enough for her tastes; perhaps he forgot to say thank you, perhaps he had said thank you with the wrong tone of voice.

Or maybe he had simply made an expression that made her doubt he would ever be fit for society.

She had read him a story and when she thought he had fallen asleep, she had whispered ugly and malicious words in his ear. "I can't ever free you."

He must have done something to make her think that. But no matter how long he had combed over that day with her, he couldn't think of what it was.

Or maybe she's just a bitch. He thought to himself in anger. She's been with me all this time and she feels nothing toward me.

He lay his head down on his desk in frustration and tried to fight the contagious thoughts infecting his mind about just how easy it might be to escape if he could tap into the poisonous magic buried deep in his veins and blow a hole in the wall with it—but he needed the word and the perfect emotion to match it to express those powers.

He hated Kori so much for those evil words she whispered in his ear, and he loved her, too. And it all terrified him.

He stood up from his desk—hunched over and miserable—and then picked up the picture of Pollyanna he had thrown. He looked at it with a sick feeling in his rotten stomach as he was coming to terms with the fact that he would never meet her.

He bit into his arm and nearly tore some of the flesh off.

He tossed the picture aside and lay his head on the desk.