The Goblin's Throne

Chapter Fifty Four: Heart to Heart

I stood on an island, my bare feet damp and cold in the sand. It was nighttime and a storm was starting to roll in. The thick clouds blotted out the stars and moon. The only light glowed from within Jasper's little cottage standing before me, its door painted red with lamb's blood. Behind it, looming over the small house was a tree that hadn't been there to my memory. A tree with black bark and twisted, crooked branches. A pungent odor wafted off of it. The smell so eerily like my father's corpse after he'd been left on the gallows for a week. Dead and rotting. Five ropes dangled from one lower branch,  from four of them shadowy bodies hung, swinging from side to side in the wind, while the last one's end had been cut raggedly as if the body it had once held has already been taken down. It swayed in the storm's strong winds, the rope weathered and blackened with age and the stains of old blood. 

As I stood there, crooked, frightening shadows crept along the side of the house and slipped one by one through the window. A shout suddenly came from inside and I jumped in fright with a cry of my own. I froze there, clamping my hands over my ears. The voice screaming inside the house was my own. The one that had come up my throat was that of a child's. A little girl's. My hands shook as I lifted them up to the bonnet covering my hair. I pulled it away and black curls came tumbling out. I screamed.

Another shout overcame my frightened screaming. "See me!" My disembodied voice screamed, full of hurt, full of denial, an echo of a night I'd tried very hard to forget. I'd just wanted Jasper to see me, to see what I'd become because of and in spite of him. Look at me. Look at my pretty dress. Look at the jewels on my fingers, the fine slippers on my feet, my chest rising and falling with steady breaths. I got it all without you, everything you promised me, everything you tried to rob me of! Look at me and know that you didn't get to ruin me!

Hesitantly, I moved forward, towards that hate and hurt filled house and the dead tree. My small hands, Cat's hands, pressed against the bloody door and pushed it open. It swung inward, revealing a familiar scene. I saw myself, dressed in a green gown standing over my brother's crumpled form. Her fist came down again and again into Jasper's face and each time her arm went back to ready another hard hit, it sent an arc of blood spraying across the room. The look on her face, her eyes wide and rimmed red, filling with tears she was too proud to shed, her lips peeled back so far from her bared teeth that it wrinkled her nose in an animal-like snarl. My ghost was as hideous and frightening as any goblin could ever hope to be. As her fist came down again, I followed it's movement, watched it knock teeth from Jasper's bloody face and for a moment, just that small moment, I saw my own father there instead. My heart ached with the pain of loss once again. Not just my own grief over everyone I'd lost, but Cat's as well.

Was this what real empathy was supposed to feel like?

I didn't jump awake as I had from the last nightmare I'd had. My eyes just popped open and the breath I was holding escaped my lungs. I blinked up at the ceiling. It wasn't morning yet. Everyone was still dead asleep and the room was nearly black even with my enhanced eyesight. 

"Are you really going to do it?"  I asked myself. "You might just make it all worse."  I mulled it over, arguing with myself for about twenty minutes or so, alone with my thoughts as much as Jasper now was. I couldn't fool myself into believing that Cat could ever forgive me or that she'd even stop hating me the tiniest bit, but maybe she wouldn't spit on my grave after I died or kill me herself eventually...maybe. Finally, I smiled sadly into the dark. "At least it'll be behind me."

Carefully, I disentangled myself from the sleeping boys, moving Floki's leg off my hip and rolling him onto his side enough to slip my arm from beneath his head. I tiptoed to my wardrobe and quickly grabbed some old sparring clothes. A pair of worn leather breaches and a soft almost threadbare white shirt. I dressed behind my changing screen and sat at my vanity to slip some boots onto my feet.