THE SUNDERING

TIRAN

His mother was insane. Not that the entire kingdom didn't know it. He was the one she hated most, and yet Tiran wanted her loathing, craving it like purloined sustenance. He starved, he denied, all to find that masked elusiveness never revealed. Like water or the bounty of food, he needed to feel the snide disapproval he received every time he looked her in the face, to feel the wrath within her eyes, and to be soothed with the absolute disgust of her attentions. At least having those meant she hadn't completely forgotten him or the hold he held over her.

He was king, and she merely his Regent. Justice wouldn't be long in coming. Neither would vengeance, the same declaration of retribution she'd made against him from the time he was a young boy.

He lived, thanks to the nursemaid his father put in charge of him. Not that it did Helen any good. Her death still haunted him, the vision of seeing the only woman he ever cared for hanging for the birds and beasts to devour.

He hated his mother. But he wanted her approval more.

Tiran wished for any bit of indulgence coming from her foul-tinged lips. His mother was correct in her estimation of him, that he was a terrible, insufficient leader, one who ridiculously held out for his mother's love. A love he'd never gain, no matter what he said or how callous he acted.

She made him feel six years old again, tiptoeing into the throne room she shared with his father, holding out to them his greatest treasure. Maybe this time she would smile. Maybe this time she'd give him audience. But the book was the last thing she wanted to see cradled in his fingers. Her sneer stuck in his mind even now, the accusations she made reverberating in his head like yesterday.

"Oren." She turned to his hollow-eyed father. "Do you see our son? Look at what he holds in his fingers, as if reading stories were a suitable past-time for a future king. It's weak, infantile. See what we raise? A boy without a future." She scoffed, while his father stared blank-eyed with a hint of confusion crossing his face.

He clutched the book to his chest, stammering his reply. "This is my favorite one, Mother. Don't you like it?"

He knew he wouldn't find an answer.

"He's always in a book." She pressed a response from his father, who Tiran wished would refute her and give up his silence. Oren didn't speak, and he certainly didn't speak up for him. The queen sat stiff and straight in her chair, scorn in each word.

"Ridiculous nonsense. It's certainly not fitting for a royal son." She sighed dramatically, taking his father's fingers in her slender ones. "Where did we go wrong? As a mother, what could I have done differently?"

Tiran froze in place, standing awkwardly before their thrones, fidgeting from foot to foot. Her cruelty made tears come to his eyes and his fingers clamp the book's spine until it cracked. It was trash now, garbage.
Unwanted, just like him.

Saying it before his peers and the rest of the royal court, she claimed it loudly and with the authority of a woman who ruled in her husband's stead. She said it as one who had the right to rule him, too. Her words stung, they burned, they singed every part of him that felt love for her.

She continued, her eyes wandering over him with darkness and cool dismissal. "Do you see him? I can barely stand to look upon him. He's our son, yet I fear also he is my greatest failure."

His father said nothing. Not that anyone expected him to. He hadn't spoken in all the years Tiran knew him.
Some said he'd been permanently muted, his tongue removed, his mind ciphered of all thought, his rationality gone.

His mother paraded his father by her side, as though she were proud of Oren's insufficiency. But him? Tiran, she ignored, dismissing him, calling him useless and unwanted.