The Will [on hold]

5000s - Episode 1

5000

“Eldor.”

The heir to the world’s throne did not so much as blink at the utterance of his name. He detested the voice that had spoken it.

“Eldor, you really ought to smile. It’s the turn of the millennium, and we’ve a crowd to please. Come, smile for your people. Smile for your father.”

Eldor did not smile. This king was no father of his.

Xor looked intently at the son who would not meet his gaze. “Would you have me proclaim your glorious voyage, then present the cheering throngs with a pouting prince?”

“I would not go on this voyage.”

“Don’t be difficult.”

“Send my brother. He is the one who wants to lead it, the one who lives to serve the empire. He would do you proud, and he would be proud of himself for the conquest.”

Xor flattened his lower lip into a grimace of distaste, creasing his dark brows. “I have never been proud of Garendor. I have always been proud of you, even when you are pouty and difficult.”

Garendor sat to the left of the king, mayhap out of earshot, mayhap not.

“You have never been fair to him,” Eldor reproached.

Xor ignored the complaint. He did not even look to his left to acknowledge the underling prince. “Look,” he leant closer toward his favored son, sweeping his arm in a gesture from the royal terrace to the multitudes below. “The people of Zoll Zora are all clamoring for their high prince. I will have you go on this voyage, Eldor. I will have you lead this voyage.”

“If anything does lie across the sea, I will not conquer and destroy it.”

“But you will go, at least? You will at least find it, explore it?”

Eldor tensed his jaw. Part of him was dying to go across the sea, if only to be that much farther away from the king and the city of darkness.

“Good,” Xor concluded, well accustomed—as a king—to taking silence as assent. “That is well that you would go across the sea. I would not force you; I love you too much to do that. But if you were to refuse and so displease me, I would of course take it out on your mother.”

The mere mention of his mother, by that vile mouth, evoked in Eldor a rush of vicarious pain. His ebon eyes darted up to the queen at her nearby balcony, as if in hopes that his watchful gaze might be enough to protect her. Their gazes met. Queen Vana braved a smile, as demure and impossibly graceful as ever, reassuring her son that she was well. Beneath the swaths of mauve silk draped across her slender frame, the marks upon her skin attested otherwise.

“She is beautiful, isn’t she. You have her eyes, you know, those eyes like pools of liquid onyx,” Xor remarked, following his son’s worried gaze and smiling at his queen, thereupon causing her own fainthearted smile to disappear. “Just like the day I first laid eyes on her. I have been careful not to lay a hand to that exquisite face. I must say, her wardrobe attendants do quite a fine job of hiding my handiwork everywhere else.”

“I will go,” Eldor declared. “I will go across the sea.”

“Of course you will.”

The king rose from his throne, stepping forward to approach the terrace balustrade, his dark robes trailing behind him like a solid, silken shadow. He raised his arms high, and the shadow of dark silk expanded as if threatening to engulf the world. As he indeed already had.

A reverent hush befell the crowds below.

“My people!” Xor called down to them, lowering his arms once he’d summoned their breathless attention. “Today we celebrate the turn of the millennium, the dawn of a new age. And the discovery of a new world.”