Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

C. He Who Lurks In The Dark

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Power.

It shaped the way Southerners looked at the dawn, an arduous form of commitment that was la guerre; a declaration of war, wrapped in seductive, binding wedding lace, until death did you part.

As the show shared its fury with the world, Sebastian looked away from the newly christened Vincinite snow and played a sordid piece of composer Vivaldiʼs tragically romantic work. The chords Sebastian struck were a mournful rapture as they flooded the room; the severing pain and agony that promised a reckoning bleeding from his fingers. Robin watched with bated breath, the ghosts of the past threatening to resurface. The ghastly noise of the emptiness was nothing but torture. And like all torturous endeavors, he just drowned in it; the palpable sadness, the heartache that seeped into his body.

  The grand piano was Sebastianʼs elegant beast, the ivory white and charcoal black foaming teeth, and she let it bite into her as she hid in the shadows. Soaking in the soft susurrations of his fingers as they sang their mournful melodies with a writerʼs touch, Sebastian played with sorrow, an incarnate piece of unadulterated dark beauty, ferocious as the Orderʼs medieval culture.

   "Lovely."

  Along the cracked mirrors, Robin listened to The Man, The Myth, The Mirror – old and rotten as the organ in a cathedral – Thatcher Prince, come towards his son. No one in the Order had ever seen Thatcher Prince: his face, his body, his deadly visage. But like the crows outside, his presence always lurked in the corner – perching their horned talons and cajoling to the sky, croaking at the dying day. Sebastian himself had never seen his fatherʼs face, just the ghosts that hid in the cracks and crevices, and it always made Robin wonder which was more terrifying.

  The dark...

  Or the man that hid behind it.

  "You know, youʼre not as quiet as you think you are," Sebastian told his father, piercing the room. "But when youʼre done hiding, you can come out. I brought you this imported red and an English cream."

He chuckled, on deathʼs door as he coughed.

"Sebastian, my boy, my welfare is hardly your concern. But donʼt worry, Iʼm not here to undermine your authority today."

"Then why are you here?" Sebastian asked.

"Then why am I here," He repeated.

He took a stroll around the bow, wordless and emotionless in his movements, and as he did – he began to speak with the organic flow of his vile, vicious tongue.

"From the serpentʼs tongue, I read: In a vote of deposition against your husband, Thatcher Henry Beauregard Prince the fifth, the Faith Bellicose, the Armeʼs Legion of Hunters, the Scholar Initiative, the Crownʼs Clergy, and the Dragon Bankʼs chief analysts deliberated earlier today October 31st, 2014 at approximately 8:45 am and have come to the consensus that he must be removed as the Orderʼs commanding Head with Sebastian Lorenzo Prince to succeed. You finally grew a spine."

Sebastian Prince was silent. Stonily so.

"Yes," he said in a red-hot whisper, masking his bloodthirsty anger. Violence was what clouded his thoughts: his desire to claw, hit, and bite as Robin would – and as she watched, she saw it. The beast within Sebastian. A bloodthirsty man, who would do anything what he wanted. Yet, little did he know, he had no idea of the game he was playing. She saw the twitch in Sebastianʼs eyes: he wanted to pummel his fatherʼs face and decorate his face with contusions of red and green and purple and black and wear his skin.