The God's Game

Valor Verlice

Both eyed Valor quizzingly.

"For getting Fuuko out of.. there."

Valor's hands raised to his face, wiping his eyes. Even without seeing his face, both knew he was crying once more. His voice quivered when he spoke again.

"You did what I miserably failed to do all my life" He sighed deeply, his shoulders slumping.

"I'll be damned if I let him suffer,ever again."

Without waiting for a response, he sped ahead, muttering a hasty excuse.

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River owned only very, pitifully small number of cherished memories from his childhood. Most of them were the months leading up to his confinement in East Wing.

Valor and him.

 Two brothers from the same father but different mothers.

Two children that were nothing alike.

 One, the pride and joy of the family, a god's favorite. A bubbly, polite child who was also a massive crybaby. The boy who would be the next king of North, hailed as the golden prince. 

The other, six years his junior, meek, and lifeless. The boy who was born a nobody, fated to die a nobody.

Their childhood was like broken mirror to him, where he could only recall incomplete fragments of their time spent together.

He remembers Val and him eating Frucois in the sunlight, under the shade of a towering tree. He could almost taste the sickly-sweet fruit on his tongue, feel how his fingers got all sticky from the bright purple juice. He remembers the crunch of its peel as Valor bit into it with abandon, stuffing his cheeks. They had talked and laughed, got belly aches from eating too much of the delicious round fruit.

But all that could be a dream he had in the East wing, that his mind mistook for a memory. He was not sure.

He couldn't remember what he looked or behaved like as a child. Even now, he couldn't fathom a clear image of himself. Yes, he had blue eyes, pale skin, and black hair. But he couldn't paste those features together to form a distinct human face he could call "River Verlice".

River was a deadname on memorial tablet, he had no right to the name Verlice. In his head, he was a blob of meat plastered on an awkward frame of bones, wrapped up in a bland sheet of skin. Mireya Huxley once told he had witchy blue eyes, so drew them on his face. Valor commented his hair was dark as coal in the fireplace, so he drew that on his head.

So that's what he looked like to himself, a deformed monstrosity crawling around, wearing a poorly painted face of a person.

Sometimes, in the darkness of the East wing, he would close his eyes and try hard to remember what he felt or what he did as a child.

One thing he clearly remembered was how afraid he was of darkness.

When sun set over the eaves of Arcton Palace, his caretaker would put him in his room, a closet sized chamber on the bell tower crawling with rats, where maids or guards seldom came simply because it was too high to climb. She would lock the doors, as per instructions by the king. He would not be let out until sunrise again, under no reason.

His mind started associating lack of light with isolation and it instilled a fear in him so deep that he wasted all his day dreading the night. A fear so visceral that he could tap into how he exactly felt as a four-year-old child.

Even when everything else of his life is a murky blur of a memory, the crippling horror he felt as sun sank over the horizon, bleeding day into night-was still tangible to him.