Monstrous Love Bites Back - Short Story Anthology

LUX AETERNA

written by SkylarkMelodyAuthor 

*****MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY*****

The Thaw.

The Melt.

The Great Awakening.

Pretty, grandiose names meant to hide the end of times.

I had waited for this day for centuries. Long life was exactly as such, long, in days spent lonely, ripped from the arms of whom I was not allowed to love.

The palace walls dripped and shrank. I ran, the sound of my panting did not echo, the ice too thin to bounce it back. I wielded my magic but my power could not coax the walls to freeze. The Earth was reclaiming what we'd stolen but The Kingdom had prepared for such a day. I did not know how small a window I had to find him.

But by the Gods I would. He couldn't be dead. They had tried. With fire. With saws as great as talons of winged creatures once called birds. I'd seen their pictures in old school books but he'd told me they were real. He'd seen them himself, back when his kind ruled. When the Earth still had life and abundance and color.

Before the Deep Ice of my Kingdom had settled into the furthest cracks of the world we knew. It had taken everything, including him. Those same school books told lies but he'd shown me the truth. We were a parasite, using up what the Earth gave freely, then moving on to purge warmer lands. Such was our way of life.

The pounding of my feet was masked by screams threatening to disintegrate the floundering walls of my home. The Kingdom was falling.

Ships were ready and waiting. The Thaw would free the waters to tide, and waves would carry us away.

A crash from above lifted my head to the ceiling and I leapt, throwing a jet of power over my shoulder. The dislodged ice missed me by a breath but I was thrown to the floor as it collided with my parents' thrones, destroying itself and the royal settees.

How poetic.

What did he always say when I let him feed upon my life force?

"Quod me nutrit, me destruit, my Lux."

It was a language out of a time long before mine. But it was beautiful. He said my name came from it. I'd learned some, he had promised to teach me the rest.

Maybe he still would, I thought, throwing myself outside into sleet and snow.

I had never seen the sun shine. I'd beheld only its silhouette, rising and setting, banished into the heavens by our clouds. The palace glittered beneath the rays, its pillars reduced to trickling icicles. The whole of it would be a lake by sundown.

I turned slowly to face this world I hadn't set foot upon since the culling.

The day where blood poured from trees, where the wind howled in pain, and the water froze in fear. The day his people were slaughtered by order of our king -my father. His Highness made his first of many mistakes that day, keeping the most able-bodied of the forest people as slaves. Working them until their spines bent and hollowed, unable to fight back against the frost that killed the life simmering in their lands, the same frost that nourished us, destroyed them.

His second mistake? Thinking his daughter was too cold to fall in love with the warmth.

My skin prickled, sizzling under the solar assault, and I ran, darting in between plots of shade. Each second I was exposed had me burning, and I regretted wearing such little clothing, I'd never had much use for garments in the past.