The Exceptional Clockwork Journey of The Perpetually Alone Hugo Gerard (NaNoWriMo 2012)

Epilogue

READ THE AUTHOR'S NOTE AFTER THIS PLEASE! :)

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Epilogue

Three years later

“My king,” the man kneeled in front of Hugo, dirty locks of hair falling into his face.

“Tamaric,” Hugo snarled, standing up from his position on his throne and walking the three steps down to where the criminal kneeled. “Do you know where she is?”

“Tsk tsk tsk, Hugo. So harsh,” Tamaric chuckled half-heartedly, shaking his head as though the situation was not as dire as it really was.

“Where is she,” Hugo hissed, leveling his eyes with those of the man’s.

“You will never guess,” Tamaric taunted, switching from his calm and easygoing demeanor into the cold and hard criminal he truly was.

“Tell. Me. Where. She. Is!” his voice echoed against the stonewalls of Clockrete Manor, effectively making the criminal shrink back from his king’s anger, quite obviously terrified.

“I do not know, sir,” Tamaric shuffled back away from his stalking King, walking towards him the way a lion would to its prey, slowly, letting the deer in question realize it was going to die and there was nothing it could do about it.

“You organized it, all of it, of course you know!” Hugo was getting angry now, seething from the lies that still continued to spill from the Vermin’s mouth.

Vermin were a new species that had just been discovered the year prior. Hugo had only been getting accustomed to running a kingdom, nevertheless two completely different species, and the fact that a new species was terrorizing his people just made his job even the more complicated.

Vermin had the ability to take time away, just minutes or seconds at a time (the effort was extremely tiring) but groups of them together could take away hours, even days, causing the balance to once again, the same as the three years prior, to spin out of time.

They were ugly things, all skin and bones and short heights, but the only way you could tell the difference between a Vermin and a human was their eye color, an inhuman ebony, so close to the color of their pupils that it resulted in a pupil less eye, or their forms where they took away time, an action which caused their spinal cords to rise into a hunched back and their fingernails to lengthen, resulting in a demon-like creature that could take the places of a children’s nightmare.

They weren’t practically nice beings to deal with.

Their weakness was actually wood. Since they were not in tune with nature disrupting the balance all the time, it was almost poisonous to them, life was.

“I did not organize it,” the Vermin defended, hissing at his king, showing off fangs that touched his bottom lip, dripping with black venom.

“Then who did?”

“I cannot tell you, I cannot tell you,” he muttered to himself, finally meeting Hugo’s eyes, the pools of black almost seeming to look through his soul, causing him to involuntarily shiver.

“Guards!” Hugo called, and with seconds a guard and Gear’s son, Benjamin, traveled in front of him, backs straight and chin up. “Take him away, he is not worthy to me.”

The guards began to pick up the Vermin’s arms, beginning to drag him away to the dungeon, when Tamaric began to thrash, kicking and screaming.

“Let. Me. Go!” Tamaric jerked his hands out of the guards’ hands, dragging himself up to Hugo. “I’ll tell, I’ll tell…”

“Let him go,” Hugo sighed, the guards immediately dropping the Vermin’s arms. “Come out with it, then.”

“It was Aberdeen, Queen Aberdeen,” he sighed, raising his arms for the guards. They looked to Hugo to see if they should continue taking him to the dungeon.

“I should have known,” he whispered to himself, nodding for the guards to continue dragging Tamaric to the cell prepared especially for him.

Finally. After months of searching, Hugo finally had a lead. Soon his mother would come home.