Thank you all for your steadfast support and patience. I have matured significantly as a person these past few months, and I hope my writing reflects that. The DSMP fandom will remain as a fond memory for me, but it seems like it has come to an end. This is, as it seems, for the best: with Techno gone and everybody going back to their more active lifestyles after the Pandemic, it seems that most of the creators have moved on to doing more IRL content. (Which is wonderful to watch!)
Warning: this story does have mentions of rape. Despite this not involving the reader, please proceed with caution. This is used in no way to excuse any actions of the effected character. A reminder that this is fiction, and no despicable actions in yandere stories should be considered "romantic." In reality, I'm sure everyone understands how devastating these types of relationships can be.
TW: implied rape (not involving reader), mentions of cannibalism, manipulation, toxic relationships, cheating, homophobia, internalized homophobia, biphobia, non-consensual kissing (not involving reader), drugging, use of belittling/sexist language (involving reader), major character death, and gaslighting.
Artist: @Shmeckdoesstuff on Twitter
Another quick note: I'm not too familiar with George's lore, so his relationships are most likely inaccurate. This goes for Mumza, too, as she isn't portrayed as the goddess of death in this story, but as the goddess of nature.
Alright, with all of that information out of the way, let's get to the story!
To His Majesty Wilbur Soot:
I am writing on behalf of Prince George of the Dream Kingdom to query you on certain aspects of L'Manberg. His majesty wonders about the accommodations we might expect once escorted to our chambers. The prince requests for his room to be a reasonable seventy-eight degrees during the daytime and cooled off to sixty-three degrees at nightfall. (It is out of respect for the foliage that colonizes any quarters he inhabits.) His grace also requests a meatless menu for the sake of his food palette.
These requests may seem meticulous, but it seems that meeting these standards are in your best interest. The opinion I have heard of you from my fiancé and courtiers hesitates my pen to ink any words of solicitude towards you, but their advice against empathy towards your cause holds an obvious bias. I hope we can communicate without any ill sentiments and regard each other with pronounced reverence.
Warm regards,
Y/n L/n
Dear Lady Y/n,
Despite the eccentricity of the prince's fiancée drafting letters on such intimate matters, it gratifies me to see your views of my character have not been skewed despite the unscrupulous rumors you must hear about L'Manberg and myself. I will see to supplying Prince George with his requests.
I have not an idea of your background with politics within court, but I believe it would benefit us both to establish an acquaintance. Please do not take my offer with a motive to persuade you of different opinions of the Dream Kingdom or its nobility; I only wish to befriend you in the pursuit of meeting your ideals of "reverence."
Cordially,
King Wilbur Soot of L'Manberg
Dear King Wilbur,
After considering your proposition with much musing, I have concluded your intentions are driven by unfeigned inquisitiveness. This seek of friendship is mutual, and I find myself inquiring about your own character, as the consideration you have shown to myself has been admirable.
Before my engagement, I had been attending an esteemed writing academy in the Dream Kingdom. I had enrolled with the aspiration of meeting figures of significance in the publishing industry who may have an interest in young upstarts in the foreboding industry of authorship. Coming from a background of hardships, my only comfort has been my pen and the words it inscribes.
With peaked curiosity,
Y/n L/n
Dear Lady Y/n,
Your mentioning of your passion for writing does not bewilder me, as it seems from your letter alone you are an erudite woman of wit and urbanity. It would give me great delectation to have a sample of your works, as I have no uncertainties concerning your prowess.
When I steal rare moments away from my throne, I enjoy partaking in poetry myself. Despite my translation of these poems into music I compose, it always seems to lack a motive behind the lyrics. As an author, I am certain you relate to this situation that has plagued my works. All I need is a subject for my works–an inspiration.
Earnestly awaiting your next letter,
King Wilbur Soot of L'Manberg
Dear King Wilbur,
Enclosed, I have included a drabble I have recently inscribed in my ample free time. I have faith that it shall entertain you. That being said, however, I must mention the protagonist has a similar background to my upbringing, and attributes borrowed from myself and the closest individuals I have managed to befriend. Please heed my disclaimer of the sinister elements of the plot.
It is lovely to acquaint another aspiring writer! I would be honored to read a king's poem, as the nobility surrounding me is--to be put bluntly--drab. You would believe each royal hall would flush with heavenizing light, and each gown or suit would coruscate in rich, corresponding colors that respected his majesty's favor of green, but it seems that whoever penned those grand novels that romanticized royalty was severely misinformed of the regal life. Prince George is handsome in looks, but not in love. Not only has he halted my studies in favor of keeping me caged in a congested study in the palace with the intention of "keeping me out of the arms of any smitten student who thought only of the frivolities of the present," (His words) but has neglected to show me the affection one might expect from their future husband.
With anticipation of your own poetry,
Y/n L/n
To my talented lady,
It would be blasphemous to not mention my doting of the story you have sent me. I enjoyed the realism to the protagonist's situation, and the ambrosian imagery stole me away from the stale, sultry evenings that have lingered in L'Manberg. On the contrary, there are some critiques I would be delighted to share, if it pleases my lady; from one respectable poet to another. I pray you do not take my appraisal in a decorous tone. These matters are much better discussed in person, as you understand, so I shall not reveal my assessment until I can physically utter it to you.
Moving away from such slanderous manners a woman with true nobility and self-respect must recoil at, I must beg a favor from you. Although I am certain the dramatized accounts of his capture have been traded among the staff and monarchy alike in your presence, my younge̶s̶t̶ brother, Tommy, is being held by King Dream's men. I understand it may compromise your already, as it seems, wavering position in the palace, but my eves have been sleepless and delirious as I grieve what has become of my beloved compeer. You owe me naught for the strenuous trip I have placed in your responsibilities, but I must know if he is still breathing. You will hear him before you see him, if he is in high spirits. Despite his atypical, spindly body, his speech reveals he is no older than ten. If you manage to find him and report his condition, I shall owe you my dying breath.
May my mission be not a burden,
King Wilbur Soot of L'Manberg
Dear King Wilbur,
It encumbrances me to inform you of your sibling's withering condition. When I snuck down to his holding chambers, I struggled to see humanity beyond his swollen eyes and enfeeble limbs once I removed his blindfold. He was strapped to an obsidian table; his ligaments taut against chains that kept his convulsing body unmovable, and his joints must have been bruised from suffocation. He could barely talk once I bribed the guard out of the room, only panting out pleas for your return and strings of maunder. Despite the abuse inflicted upon his limbs, I believe the real insanity is the method of torture his majesty has confined the adolescent soul to: a bucket filled with hypothermic water is strung a few grasps above his forehead with a microscale hole puncturing the bottom. As a result, globules of frigid water struck his scalp at spasmed intervals. There is a rope that is connected to the pail of water, which I must assume is used to move the bucket in unpredictable patterns so the water would never drip in the same area; therefore, leaving the victim in ceaseless disquietude and fright.
He only managed a few sips of hot broth I had brought down for him before he started to wail broken curses that blubbered into sobs. His contentiousness towards me, if I heard the words correctly through his tirade, was due to his belief that I would "poison him like that damn prince in blue did." I tried to pacify him with hushed, comforting words, but his screams were booming enough to send guards rushing into the cell and drag me out. My fiancé's brother found my visit an act of treason, but Prince George saved me from the gallows by claiming I was "being manipulated and bewitched by L'Manberg's king, whose words have gathered more control over her (me) with each letter he sends." My Prince has saved me, yes, but I am to cease contact with you until we arrive at L'Manberg, where my fiancé shall restrain me from any private consultation with you. (Which is quite a shame, as I was dearly looking forward to your feedback on my work and overviewing your own poems.)
My sincerest apologies,
Y/n L/n
My dearest, Lady Y/n,
I have not slept well since your final letter. To know of Tommy's futile conditions has made me as sick as him–knowing I may be too late to save him from the King's anticipated fate if he is as deranged as you have described. Your companionship through these letters have been my only serenity in these weeks of quandary in L'Manberg.
Prince George, as respectable as the gentleman is, is gravely erroneous to believe he can cease our friendship outside of this series of letters. There is much still to discuss between us, and plentiful things I need to share with you. It is like you have mentioned previously: it is lovely to acquaint an aspiring writer. When you arrive, I swear to find us a secluded area away from the eyes of your fiance to discuss our penship further.
I pray you do not take my proposal as anything scandalous, as I only wish to befriend you and confide in our passion for writing.
With wishes for safe travels and anticipation for your arrival,
King Wilbur Soot of L'Manberg
~Y/n's POV~
"He called you dearest?"
My chambers, which had already suffered from the lack of air circulation, had become sweltering with tension. If I was able to drift my glare away unnoticeably from the fuming prince who had been retracing the same pacing pattern for the last intolerable few minutes, perhaps I could have seen the wilting and peeling of the outdated wallpaper that garroted the room in a repulsive butterscotch.
Instead, I humbly downcasted my eyes and murmured, "He was only being cordial."
George's eyes, having lost their usual lethargic droop, had calloused in his unusual display of emotion as he pulled his glasses down for effect. "He put a comma after dearest, Y/n!" he seethed, pointing to the letter he had retrieved and opened in heightened inquisitiveness when he saw the sender's name.
"I assure you there are no unspoken feelings--"
"Do you know what a comma after dearest means?" he barked, startling me with the sharpness in his tone.
Keeping my voice level and eye contact placid, I responded steadily, "I am aware of the meaning of the comma, yes, but--"
"After I protected you from His Majesty's wrath for visiting Wilbur's rat-of-a-brother, this is how you repay me?" he cried, his voice cracking in sorrow, "You plan a rendezvous with an egocentric man who dares to label himself a leader when he can't debate the release of his own brother without the risk of losing his tatters of land he calls a country?"
"And you can run one?" I queried, trying to quell my voice from too much hostility. "You can't even tame a dame: let alone an entire kingdom that's diverse in opinions and starving from anticipation of the coming days."
Behind the opaque lenses of his oversized glasses, I knew his eyes were darting for an escape. This part of our "love story" was unspoken to the point the prince himself had forgotten how he managed to slip an engagement ring on my finger.
Sometimes, we leave the tragic circumstances of stories out of history, as those who may read and reflect on them later may start to dote--or even romanticize them--later. If the truth about how the ring that asphyxiated my finger with its weighted jewel and band that confined me to the laws of marriage that fiction never addressed ever was disentangled to the Dream Kingdom and its subjects, would my suffering--my capture--become the aspiration for romance?
The doorknob had been swathed with brittle thorns that George had willed from his juddering palm. Speaking with authority that deepened his voice, he demanded, "You will be ready for departure tomorrow at the sun's dawning. As I have ordered, you are not to depart from my side the entirety we are there." He tipped his glasses down, as to make his point with his golden-rimmed, soulful eyes that so many have never viewed. "If I catch you conversing even a word with him, I'll stuff both of your throats with poison ivy whilst you sleep. Understood?"
He didn't wait for me to compute as he ripped the door open with his pricked fingers and slammed it behind him with the never ceasing bristled vines that had effulged the door and its frame.
How could he hold me to consequences if I never agreed to his terms verbally?
~George's POV~
"You wanted to see me?"
Remaining curled over his trim desk that was strikingly bare for a king's bureau, my attentive caller waved my presence in without a verbal greeting. Vigilantly, I curled on to the cushioned sofa that had become rigid and untarnished from lack of use. Slouched over the faded accent pillows that arched my lumbar from congealment, I conjectured how many hours it would take for Dream to acknowledge my presence. The last periodic meeting I had been invited to in this office wasn't adjourned until suppertime. Our discussion hardly ticked past thirty minutes--contrasting its eight-hour waiting time.
To my astonishment, however, Dream dipped his feathered pen into his scarcely filled jar of ink and pushed his drying document he was drafting to the head of his desk. Then, with a sharp swivel of his cush desk chair, his sage-rimmed eyes gleamed with unusual gusto as he observed my enervated loll that became taut with apprehension of his coming words.
"Dearest brother of mine, tell me: are you prepared for your upcoming travels?" asked the olive-freckled king with derision.
I responded with a glint of crossness at the byname as I rolled my eyes and pleaded, "For the love of XD: please do not refer to me as your brother when an audience isn't present. There's no use in lying to each other in these secluded conditions. In fact," my cheeks became florid at the thought of what I might mention next before I continued, "It makes what we do in private much more unorthodox than it already is."
His steps light with certitude that only came with unabating power and a locked door, the king sauntered to the antiquated green canapé where I correspondingly swung my legs from the cushions to the cool hardwood floor. With its glacier touch came ignominious relief from the heat that made my skin roseate as Dream's arm wreathed around my shoulders. With lithe fingers that were blotted with ink that stained the clear flesh of my neck, he began to trace twisted shapes with intentions of sinking his fingertips deeper into the collar of my leaf-encased cape.
Smacking his traveling fingers away with a mild look of distaste, I grumbled, "You can at least start with telling me why you truly called me into your chambers."
"So eager to get business out of the way," chuckled the king, his lips dragging away from my temple that had become encrusted with thornless rose vines that blossomed with each silent prayer for an excuse to touch his butter-bronzed skin. "Fine: I wanted to discuss my arrangement I've made recently."
"And how does this concern me?" I yawned, the next daunting statement to depart from my tongue escaping before I could contain it to my thoughts. "If you're looking for an excuse to call a meeting just to kiss me, I'd rather we not bother with formalities."
Again, he chortled, but with less dotation and a new masochism that dulled his gaze into the baleful glower that I had seen him reserve only for court. "Did your fiancée know about your bluntness when she entered a courtship with you?"
"Don't even mention her. she doesn't deserve to be a part of this," I beseeched, the qualm of guilt that twitched internally every time Dream caressed my skin or called me 'his' stopping the bloom of roses that crowned my temples.
Behind these bolted doors, I was able to pretend these feelings--this life I had molded from Dream's hapless whispers of tender words that were reserved for only me--were normal. On this unalloyed couch, I was King Dream's undisclosed lover of two years. I knew the mystery and marvel of his face, and he knew the secrets I harbored from my origins of my coming from the Heavens as a gift from the Gods themselves. When I stepped out of his office, I was Prince George: His Majesty's brother and engaged to Y/n Quackity; sold to me for a dowry offered by her own brother.
She came from unprecedented conditions: I knew she was secure within these walls. Why would she long to go back to the life of a destitute pauper? Could she see that the engagement ring on her finger demeans her to a political bargaining pawn between the Badlands and Dream Kingdom?
"Aw, are you trying to protect that restless wench? The one who seems to be interested in conversing with anyone but her fiancé?" Dream mocked; his head lifted to an innocent tilt.
When he perceived the phlegmatic nod I responded with, his leer dissipated as he queried me with precipitous callousness, "Tell me: why did you stop me from executing her when she was found prying around that impish boy's cage?"
"Perhaps I'm growing fond of her."
My tongue felt arid from the candor words I had dauntingly uttered to the man I had eyed with intentions that extended past platonic in the passing months. Dream's posture became rigid, and his breath quickened as the silence prolonged and plagued the room.
"Oh, so you're in love with her now?" asked the king bitterly, his exhale stuttering in virtually dubiety.
I pushed myself off the sofa incredulously. "I never said that!" I cried, the skin that had cooled beforehand becoming inflamed once more from discomfiture. Once I found Dream's glower of deterrent, my tone hushed as I huffed, "Great Gods, I'm just starting to tolerate my fiancée--that's all. You've shamed my other-worldly feelings towards my own sex the moment I unveiled them to you, and now you're chastising me for developing feelings for my future bride!"
Again, hush afflicted the office as my compeer's face--muscles taut with spite--had wrinkled with apathy. His daunt pupils followed the squeeze of vines that pulled on my biceps with apprehension, and the dribble of sweat that matted the stray hairs of my neck.
Decisively, he stood. I flinched as he brushed past me, but he toed his way to his desk with phantom-like steps. Back turned, he sighed out, "Prince George: always trying to play both sides; in politics and feelings." If I hadn't kept my focal point on the hunched king, I would have missed his faint mumble of, "You can't have both, George; nor can you harbor feelings for both."
The roses that crowned my head had shriveled with each word, his tone as distant and bristly as the evening where I had indulged in several glasses of summer-fruit wine precariously and admitted my recent dilemma of feelings. In contrast to his synthetic smile that he wore when performing his royal duties, it was atypical for Dream to smile without wicked or snide intentions behind it. This eve, however, was temperate and potent with the fragrance of August florals that enwrapped my private gardens with pink-petaled poppies and looming sunflowers that had bowed their sunspot blooms from the rising moon. His hand never ceasing its possessive choke around the narrow neck of the wine bottle, my dour friend drank until the dismal that dampened the XD-blessed gold in his irises had caught aflame with indubitable merriment. After shooing the insisting servants and guards away, my own susceptibly heightened as I gargled the rest of my cordial down before bringing up my rising concern:
"Dream, I think-hic-I think I don't wanna' marry."
With a raucous laugh, he slurred back, "I don't blame ya': women are overrated."
"No, that's not what I'm sayyying," I yawned, my voice sobering, "I don't wanna' marry a princess."
Another cluster of chuckles that were a few sips more from becoming sobs. "I'll find ya' a queen, then." With a relaxed grin aimed at my distressed expression hidden by my hunched shoulders. "Oh, I can't marry you off to a woman who is too foreign. I need ya' arou-hic-around here, Gogy! You're the only one who can bless our harvest. You're Lady Nature's creation, after all; and she won't patron any of the Dream Kingdom's natural bounty. From what XD has hin-hic-hinted, it's some grudge about, I don't know, some land my father seized when I was a kid or somethin'--"
"I think I-I wanna marry, uhm, a prince."
The stream of wine that had been leisurely trickling into his parted lips spurted back into the tipped glass, causing him to hack on the droplets caught in his constricted windpipe. His lips were pulled steadfastly against his stained, clinched teeth. Cringing, I dared to rival his ruminative glower with an uncertain, staid study of his perpetual expression.
"You're not serious," he dismissed, lifting his glass again. Before he took another sip, he added bluntly, "You're a-hic- a God child: you cannot be cerebrally ill."
He had dispersed my feelings to insanity. I should have retreated back with a cumbrous chuckle, but the last gulp of alcohol had seized the good sense in me.
"I'm not jesting with you, Dream: I have no desire towards women, I believe."
With a weary sigh, he steadily lowered his glass. Then, with an irritated roar, he hurled the half-full glass to the marble patio beneath us. I wilted into my seat, dreading to make eye contact with the now-pacing king again. In response to my enhanced disquietude, the few blossoms that had become vibrant with my recent merriment curled inwards; tendrils of thorned roots attentively guarding my body from any harm. (Disregarding that they would stand no chance against a heavy hand.)
Incoherently, Dream muttered what sounded like what were cursed mixed with bursts of drunken sobs. I was poorly prepared for his pounce towards me: pinning me to the chair. The briary roots tried to thwart against his chest haplessly, but Dream hastily ripped them from its hosting flowers. Forcing my chin upwards to view his detached lower, I could now witness his examination of me: like I was his specimen being prepared for dissection.
"Prove it to me," he demanded, puffing his pale lips. "Kiss me."
I tried to shake my head, but he brutally struck my cheek. "Do not defy your king," he snarled, before ordering again, "Kiss me."
Fearing another excruciating smack, I forfeited my defenses and let his rapacious lips meet my tepid ones. He held the base of my head with a baleful clamp as he continued to ravish my lips for a scrap of some other emotion other than indifference and fear.
I had trusted Dream with my very soul: his family did welcome me into their castle and crowned me prince. Had I looked at him with peculiar feelings in the past years? Was the burn that accelerated my heartbeat survival instinct or romantic interest? When he heaved me to his private quarters every month, I became more accustomed to his raspy insults that followed every caress.
When he informed me of his arrangement with the Badlands and my imminent bride a few moons before where I stood, I mourned the security Dream had given me being so easily succumbed to the prospect of more power. Despite the despicable articulation that left his tongue so indubitably, there was a warmth behind those touches. He squeezed my jawline with intention.
What were his intentions?
"Perhaps I should enlighten you on my recent endeavors," sighed the king, hunched over his desk.
"I have struck a deal with XD: if I sacrifice that child to him, he'll send a powerful North wind to L'Manberg that will desecrate the remaining summer foliage in frost."
I gnawed the lining of my cheek in interest, wondering why XD would not grant him a more influential favor such as a plague to befall on L'Manberg, or striking down its king. (A prayer that appealed to me.) XD would surely grant it; Dream's lineage was rumored to be descendants of XD himself, after all.
"Why don't you seize the land, or ask for something more permanent than frostbite? You have the power and XD's blessing," I suggested.
Collapsing into his gilded desk chair, Dream explained with a boorish edge to his tone, "I would like to play fair; it's much more satisfying when I win. Or at least I wouldn't like too much of an advantage." His voice became sapped as he added, "Besides: I must prove myself trustworthy in the eyes of Prince Bad. If he broke off the deal, your engagement to Y/n would mean nothing."
"Are not those lands sacred; preserved by my own mum?" inquired I.
His lips curved with derision, the king answered, "That is where you come in, my dear godchild. XD raised the question, but not without a resolution. If you are able to convince your mother to forfeit that scrap of land, I may not have to immolate that miserable boy as consolation!"
"How will I do so? This kingdom is branded by XD; my prayers would not push past my lips before being smited from my tongue," I retorted, pursuing my only escape from this task as a counterargument.
Dream is not easily gainsaid, however, as he rebutted my concerns with his lips puckered into a moue. Voice assertive, he riposted, "Then you will call upon your mother when you arrive at L'Manberg; she patrons those grounds, as you speak of."
He picked up his pen with heavy fingers and started to scribble on a new piece of parchment, extending the dismissing silence. With an apprehensive cough, I declared, "I should go check on my gardens before I leave."
Pushing myself off the sofa with enervation, I made my dirge towards the exit. As my fingertips grazed the silver knob with yearn, Dream cleared his throat.
"Oh, before you go, I've been considering approving a proposed law after your upcoming marriage."
The dread of what he might have drafted agonized me, but I knew I had to attend to his ideas as the prince. I asked bristly, "What is it?"
"This new ordinance would outlaw same-sex romantic interactions. If a person is found displaying non-platonic affections towards their gender, they shall be executed promptly," he read off, his voice sickly with discomfiting euphoria.
Without remaining to give him an expected retort, I cracked open the door and pulled it shut whilst repeating a whispered plea with rheumy eyes, "No, no, no... please no."
He was punishing me for what I could not restrain, and he would now do the same to thousands of others.
Behind the closed door I was walking away from, he was writing the abrupt end to the lives of many. And it was all due to my failure to control my feelings:
These disgusting, inhumane feelings.
~Wilbur's POV~
There was no melody: only a few stray strands of fractured chords that led to nowhere.
'How is it plausible to be this incompetent when it comes to song writing?' I queried myself, wondering if I could label the question as rhetorical or not. 'I've done it so many times beforehand.'
The ruptured calluses that oozed inked beads of blood smeared across the drying lyrics on the ripped parchment--ruining the scribbled calligraphy. It didn't matter, however, as any descriptor I had written would never be good enough for Y/n.
My office had been permeated with poems that flowed like a river with stones and guitar strings I had wrenched in frustration for never creating a coherent melody. Was there a metaphor I could ever conceive that would do her just? Descriptions of her appearance weren't an alternative; after all, I hadn't witnessed her physical appearance, only her internal mien. Her external appearance could bother me the least: I was already smitten with her mind.
I crumpled the begrimed paper with a quick squeeze of my fingertips and discarded it to the floor of half-finished song and poem drafts that met the same fate. With each stumble towards the arched office's window, they deflated and crinkled beneath the pink of my heels. "Trash," I groused, kicking the fresh drafts that stuck to my soles with their drooling ink. "Trash, all of it!"
The only worthy words were armored under less important documents in the locked drawers of my study's desk: such as peace treaties and trade deals with the Badlands. Aptly organized were all of Y/n's letters and the short, hand-scribbled manuscript she had sent me. I had handled each indispensable page gloved, as to not ruin the unaltered words she had trusted me with by a cloddish rip or crinkle bore by my fingers. The onerous part of reading the story was not tracing each letter as I consumed sentence after sentence with enthrallment. As I had forecasted, the drabble was penned with trivial errors within the characters and plot, but that had reposed me. It showed that behind each beguiling word and flowery strip of prose was a human.
A human I needed to know desperately.
Leaning my forehead against the glass panels that were still warmed from the recently set summer sun, I melodically started to repeat the lyrics I had managed to form in the two weeks I had been writing them:
"Prince George, please wake up
There's a war going on
The gardens are burning
And your maiden is gone..."
Each laconic line brittlely choked off of my tongue as if the stanzas I had been chanting and contorting relentlessly like a parlous prayer would form the music themselves.
A subdued knock on my bolted door was followed by a reposeful masculine voice announcing, "King Wilbur, we have news that your anticipated guests have begun their descent into the L'Manberg border. We are sending our most optimal soldiers to escort them to the kingdom."
With a muted sigh, I dismissed the disclosed visitor with, "Thank you, Manifold: I shall start preparations for the couple immediately."
The couple.
Y/n and George.
Finishing the poem would require empyrean inspiration, and Y/n seemed to be my pen's only salvation.
Tromping through the shreds of unworthy words, I voicelessly vowed to myself that I would get her alone–no matter George's wishes or threats.
~Y/n's POV~
The carriage ride had been pleasant for both parties until our final descent into the L'Manberg gates. Until the vehement shake of the landau had jostled his majesty from one of his many periodic naps, I had watched his fingers twitch in correspondence to what I assumed to be his dreams; his body physically reacting and triggering the bloom of effulgent blossoms. At first, it had transfixed me; the petals starting off in soft, subdued shades of a watery dawn. They yawned open with the mollifying scent of Chamomile. As the hour passed, however, his fingertips started to clench into the crevices on his cushioned seat, and his tumid lips started to brittle and compress with newfound distress.
I outstretched a hand with limp fingertips, gingerly plucking a Chamomile blossom peering from its aggressive counterparts. Although I had been sleeping on my own for the entirety of my stay at Dream's palace, George dozed off habitually throughout his visits as he would sit with me, and his slumber would never lead to such vivid reactions. What could he be dreaming about to cause such vegetation?
My query would not be answered, however, as the halt of the carriage disrupted his nap. Pulling my hand away before his pellucid eyelids could flicker open to catch my caring action, my other fingers pulled the silken curtains of the carriage window open to welcome the lazy sunlight into our unlit coach. Squinting past the scorching glare of the natural light, I took note of the humble view of the distant cobblestone streets and unpresuming shops built with muted, splintering wood. Their keepers matched the indistinct color palette from what I could view.
A hushed grumble from my leaden-eyed travel mate brought my trekking attention back to my star-crossed reality:
"Dear XD; are we still pursuing that perpetual countryside?"
With a shake of my head, I responded reservedly, "It appears we are approaching the palace."
Lethargically, George craned his neck towards the carriage window to confirm my words. The view of the cluster of town homes was exchanged for sun-wilted topiaries as we drew closer to the gates of our destination. From my limited viewpoint, the château had the grandeur of a stately home; a residence for a lower ranking nobility. Aside from a small populace of parched vegetation planted precariously on the verdant front yard, there was no color to contrast the stark, alabaster walls that were already affected by its first summer's ferocity.
"How lush," my fiancé murmured sarcastically as the security stationed at the front gates interrogated our coachman. He then caught the eye of one of the angular guards, causing them to wave us on through the gates that squealed as they cranked them open wide enough for our entrance.
As we continued our plodding roll to the palace steps, I continued to hear to George's cavils.
"Why could they have not authorized our presence and parted the gates sooner? Surely we are the only ones reserving an audience with Wilbur, considering his rank among the other nobles."
"Do you expect those soldiers to grant entrance to an unidentified coach? There was no feasible way to identify us--it is not like we have the royal seal on the outside," I countered.
Flushing at the retort, George only repeated in a dampened tone, "They should have known."
With a sudden halt, our coachman scurried to our bolted door and, with a brisk slide of the brass latch by the prince's finger, we were at last introduced to the pollen-populated, summer stillness that drained the resuscitating oxygen with dizzying heat. George excused himself out of the compact car first, then bothered to offer a slack, gloved hand to aid my own departure after a civilly-disguised cough.
When my locked limbs stretched precariously in the foreign, expansive room they were granted, I caught sight of a sparse-haired gentleman trying to introduce himself to George, who did not hide his repulse of such an informal approach to his character.
"My lord, I am his majesty's most esteemed personnel and head of staff, Jack Manifold," introduced the two-toned glasses-adorned man, fastened in an austere bow. "The king has entrusted me with retrieving you and your lady." His blunt-nailed hand rose in a rehearsed arch to gesture to my onlooking presence.
Scoffing, George surly responded, "I do not acknowledge servants by their personal titles. If you have concluded your expositional blather, it would be much obliged if you could escort my fiancé and I inside before we both fatigue from this unabaiting heat."
"I--of course, my prince," answered Manifold, taken aback at the detestation in the prince's--who was seemingly only a few years his senior--voice. Waiting for me to twine the crevice of my elbow through George's, I swear to have caught him rolling his eyes when George's sights shifted to my arrival by his side.
We ascended up the few granite stairs that ended adjacent to the daunt pair of front doors. With a stiff nod to the two scrappy soldiers--who turned timorous when they caught sight of who trailed him--Manifold stood aside as the hefty doors were pulled open.
In contrast to Dream's palace, there was no stifling gallery to tread through to reach the grandiose great hall: past the doorway was a modest throne room that had the mosaic tiling of a ballroom. Pushed against the thickset velveteen drapes were a few armchairs with cushions colored a mellow white--assumingly for court. Standing in the center under the golden luminosity of the singular chandelier was the king who adorned a similar uniform to his staff: his only being distinguished by a sash ladened by engraved military medals.
Unable to concern himself with stifling an impassive yawn, George started to enter the unpretentious chamber; compelling me to match his swift pace.
As we approached his surveying majesty, Wilbur promptly bowed in a stiff salutation. "Ah, my esteemed prince and his lady! I hope your trip was pleasant?" he greeted, finding the speculation in my unabating stare directed at his character as we drew close enough for me to see the downturn of his drawn lips that parted with allure as we discreetly took in our first glimpse of each other in the flesh for the first time.
He stood to his impressive height that rivaled my fiancé's by several inches. Yet, the tremble in his grin was taken note of by George, as he hardly tilted his gaze up to find the king's. When he found Wilbur's behold had skipped him in favor of addressing me as the only other occupancy in the room, however, he cleared his throat and spoke:
"What would be pleasant is if you would keep your ogling of my fiancée to a minimum when you are addressing me."
Arcing a bristly eyebrow, Wilbur riposted, "My inquiry was for the both of you, Prince George." He paused, his voice souring as he continued, "And I would never appraise the lady like an object, as you make it sound."
I watched a sneer furl George's lip; the sprouts that sat attentively for his command on his cloaked shoulders inconspicuously inching further into lengthening stems. Still, my opposing friend did not yield.
Rescuing the situation before it could escalate further, I parted from my inane prince's grasp and, after lowering into a mannerly curtsy, cordially interjected, "We thank you for your gracious welcome into your palace, your majesty. I apologize for Prince George's behavior; the trip was quite strenuous, and we are famished."
Now behind me, I was assured George's glare was scathing beneath the crepuscular tint of his lenses. Only satisfaction hued the tender gaze of my ashen-eyed friend--the self-proclaimed poet in the garb of a king--as he spoke:
"Of course, m'lady. Mandolin will escort you two to your chambers."
Striding from the shadows of the closed doors near the entrance, Wilbur's assistant--whose lips twitched as if they wished to interject to the mispronunciation of his name--approached our scene and punctuated his returned presence with a bow that irradiated any trace of vexation that once creased his face.
On the contrary, George emitted a disgruntled sigh and remarked, "Is this not the fellow who escorted us in?" He stepped beside me and continued to mock, "Your populace of servants are inadequate for a castle with such dedicated subjects, as you proclaim in your interviews."
The taut skin of his cheekbones pallid from the prince's continuous disregard of reverence, Wilbur seethed, "I refuse to bind my staff to the grounds of the palace in unwavering servitude, unlike the slaves you and your brother--"
With another pressing clearing of my straitened throat, I pivoted to the taciturn butler and firmly interrupted, "If you would please, Mr. Manifold, escort George and I to our quarters; it would only fatigue us further to remain conversing in such...enervating conditions."
He turned to his king, agog for his permission. Not disinclined to my proposal, Wilbur waved his hand in a gestural dismissal before declaring, "I believe that would be for the best; after all, I would desire to have an early venture into the woods tomorrow morning before the scorch of midday."
I curtsied, whilst George remained inanimate with the set of his arms at his self-inflated chest.
After another humble bow, the docile Manifold instructed, "Follow me."
Taking my begrudging fiancé's arm, we trailed the butler up the intertwining stairs that haloed the modest throne that's cushions were faintly worn--as if King Wilbur's time was mostly spent outside of beguiling his court. We ambled through a constricting hallway with gauzy wallpaper that was hardly interrupted by doors.
After halting and thumbing through a few identically ridged keys on the chinking ring clasped to the loop near his left thigh's pocket, Manifold finally wedged his sought key into his chosen door's keyhole and unlocked the door. He held it open, allowing George and I to enter.
Aside from green wallpaper with the vibrancy of a pine tree in July, the room lacked impressive furniture aside from a bare vanity and its corresponding chair.
And the singular, lavish bed in the center.
If being confined with George was not damning enough, I would have to lie next to him? If his napping in the carriage was foreshadowing of what would happen in a deep slumber for him, it would confound me if I woke without a throat inflamed by pollen, or weeds bruising the fine skin.
"Your luggage should arrive momentarily," informed the butler. "As requested, dinner shall be brought and served before the coming hour. Is there anything else I can do for my prince and his lady--"
"You are dismissed," cut in George bluntly.
With another bow, Manifold departed from the room and benignly closed the door.
Eyeing a clock hung above the nearest bedside table, I noted the time: 4:19.
And, with a survey of the ireful flush to George's cheeks, and the analogous growth of his thorny, plant companions, it seemed the evening would be long.
"You treated me like a doltish child downstairs, Y/n. I will not tolerate that," he stated callously.
Disbelieving of his disregard for his exchange with Wilbur and his flippant tone, I retorted, "It was your snide remarks that caused you to bicker with King Wilbur."
The imperious prince stepped forward, his stationed weeds lunging with a viper's grace to the heat of my face. "I have worked perilously to defend your name in the presence of King Dream, yet you repay me with this ridicule? This disrespect?" he cried.
I turned, my tongue ignited with the inspiration of irate paragraphs brimming with vulgar insults of every language I could recall gnashed against the barrier of my steadfast, unabating teeth. How I ached to see tears soil his papery cheeks; tears brought forth from my words.
But I also desired to live, so silent I stayed.
The quietude prolonged through the next several minutes: when a staff member other than Manifold arrived with our luggage with tremulous apologies concerning the delay and the singular bed, when the door was slammed shut by an apathetic George, and through the moments spent unloading my garments and supplying the vanity and connecting bathroom with constrained steps past where the prince laid brooding on the ostentatious bed.
When I crossed by his disgruntled form to claps my vacant trunk shut after combing the passing minutes for any hindrance to speak to my fiancé again, he promptly rose his sunken head from his barrier constructed of pillows and asked with a forbearing lull to his tone:
"Does sharing a bed...bother you, Y/n?"
Reluctantly, I answered candidly, "It is not the worst burden, I suppose. Although, I had anticipated not having to adjust to another presence in the bed just yet."
Although his lips did not crease with any distinguishable emotion, his withholding of eye contact pled guilty to his concealed feelings:
Remorse. Shame.
Ambling over to my baffled figure with timid, dragging steps, George's circumspect tilt of his head revealed his glasses to have been discarded amidst the plethora of pillows that, having been graciously stripped from my side of the bed, engulfed his ruffled perch. Instinctively, I congealed in my awaiting stance: curious to what he wanted to speak that had lowered his pride.
He stood a few paces away from me; head lowering into a bow at my observation. "Lo--Y/n, I apologize for my treatment of you. Not just regarding this trip, but the entirety of your stay at the Dream Kingdom," began the prince with a sobered hush.
"Apologize," I echoed, my blunt dubiety causing George to wince.
"Yes," he confirmed, "You are to be my lifelong companion, and I have not bothered to show you common benevolence. This arrangement was not by your free will, I understand, but I am treating you as my...my brother would toy with one of his servants."
A loss of rehearsed breath that squeaked his ending words confirmed the authenticity of his apology. The indignation that had readied my retort with marring ammunition had liquified into smoldering saliva that parched the taut interior of my mouth.
Watching the rot of his plant companions, I finally spoke, "If you are so ashamed of your treatment of me, then expand that remorse towards the others you have spoken to with such detestation: prove to me that you desire to change for more than just my feelings, and I will consider forgiveness."
His lips parted, as if ready to counter my terms, but it promptly turned into a sigh once he found the scald of my vigilant glare. Touching two fingers his regenerating shoulder sprouts, I observed as the wispy stem strengthened, and its trivial bulb ruptured into tiers of petals that paralleled porcelain with their silken, delicate curl and crisp color. Its plentiful layers distinguished itself as a peony.
George plucked the blossom from its continuously growing stalk and drew close enough to tentatively tuck it behind my right ear. The idle fingertips remained grazing the length of my neck, his scrutiny that usually beheld me assuaging into an expression that held favor for his handiwork; perhaps, even the one wearing his handiwork.
"I promise to try," he vowed. "I want this, Y/n: this serenity. This mutual love so many people of the lower-class share."
"And I promise to try to love you," I returned, gingerly taking his lingering hand under mine.
There was not a moment to spare on the pinkening of George's cheeks or the earnestness of our promises before a knock on the door was heard.
"I'll get it," said the prince, who remained breathless as he crossed to the door.
The door opened, revealing Manifold balancing two domed platters and a folded, standing tray desperately clutched beneath his underarm. With a cloddish bend of his knees substituting for a formal bow, the butler announced, "Our sincerest apologies for the wait; the kitchen is unfamiliar with the proper preparation of, ah, plant-based meals."
George looked between us, apprehensive of whether he should help the struggling gentleman. His decision spanning far too many excruciating moments, I approached Manifold myself and asked, "Would you like me to perhaps hold the dishes for you, or set up the tray? It would be no burden--"
"No! No, m'lady, you should not have to suffer due to my incompetence. I have it..." his words faltered as I pried the flimsy table from his slackening grasp and hastily unfolded it. My fiancé had bit back his disparaging sneer as I reciprocated the butler's abashed grin with a more reassuring curl.
"I thank you for your kindness, my lady: truly," he expressed, scrutinizing the covered platters as he rested them on the table. "The left is for my prince, and the right is for m'lady."
Wary of this odd specification, George inquired, "Why does it matter: is it not the same dish? Perhaps you have spiked my food with poison?"
Reflecting on the lack of humor that doused the royal's morbid probe, Manifold's temple strained; a smear of sweat crusting where his hairline would be.
"Your, ah, your majesty, if it would solidify your safety, I would gladly sample the dish before you enjoy it if you fear the infusion of poison. On the crown I serve, I swear the ki-king nor his staff would ever--ever fathom to--"
"I have heard enough. Off with you," dismissed George with a controlled flick of his wrist in the direction of the door.
With two proper bows, Manifold did not linger to hear if the prince would alter his decision. And, with a concluding glance at the dishes again, he fled the room with a prompt shut of the door.
George sighed, "What an odd fellow."
My denouncement of his sudden snap at the butler was ceased by the hunger that I had disregarded for the gnawing hours. Ravenous, I unveiled the platter: a potent waft of rich herbs fragranced the room. Atop a buttery sauce was slices of in-season zucchini and sautéed mushrooms the color of early-summer apricots.
Picking up the tip fork that had not been completely encased by the dish, I slid the prongs into a sliver of the tender fungi and slid the morsel past my lips. Despite its lack of seasoning, I was grateful for a hot meal.
As I slid my fork through the lustrous sauce for another bite, I noticed foreign flash of white hidden beneath a cluster of the vegetables. Ensuring George was engrossed with his meal, I slid the object forward to reveal it was a folded piece of paper.
"I, uh, need to excuse myself to the washroom momentarily," I spoke, discreetly plucking the saturated note from the edge of my plate.
With a sharp swallow, my fiancé asked, "Are you feeling ill?"
I shook my head, which compelled him to sigh. "Alright, but please call out if you are feeling faint. I suspect these dishes tainted somehow."
Not combating his theory, I slipped into the connecting restroom with the message concealed between my fingers. Once alone, I avidly unwrinkled the note, the smudged, hasty pen strokes familiar:
My muse,
As soon as possible, meet me at the end of the wing you are staying in. We will not have long, as the apothecary mentioned the herbs I have dashed the good prince's meal with will not keep him asleep for long.
With posthaste,
Wilbur
'I suppose this note wasn't the only reason Manifold specified the plates,' I mused, a dribble of oil seeping from the paper and on to the tile of the floor.
But to meet secretly with Wilbur--a man whose identity has been pieced by tidbits of information in letters and court gossip--for an evening rendezvous? After swearing to my fiancé I would try to love him; to keep my attention from other young suitors?
I stumbled out of the bathroom, attempting to not fall into a fantasy where I could escape my confinement. However, as I looked to the bed, George was soundly asleep.
It seemed the choice had been made for me.
~~~~~~
My escape into the tapering hallways had felt more freeing than I had expected.
After choking on the perfume of roses that stole the untouched oxygen my lungs burned for, the timbered walls of the unlit hallways released a refreshing, woodsy scent that could have sent me to XD the first time I heaved.
Wilbur's note was dampened with sweat in my fingers. (Or was it the residue of the grease from the mushrooms?) It had been so long since I had felt free will. But my directions were explicit, and my time was limited:
The setting sun guiding my path through the foreign palace, I noted the simplicity of the decor: brass candle holders instead of ornate, silver, jewel-studded ones; sparse walls without marble carvings of mythos or ostentatious wallpaper; and curtains made of cotton instead of Cervelt.
As my path widened as I reached the end of the wing, the glint of a gold-gilded frame guided my attention to a picture grander than the throne room below:
an oil portrait of King Wilbur.
Dream's palace had several displays of himself and his forefathers, but not to this grandeur. Each detail was intricate: individual strands of hickory-shaded hair that trailed into a feathery stubble that sharpened his set jawline that was only noticeable within a breath of the portrait. The poppy-colored collar was crisp against the ivory opaqueness of his skin; almost shadowing his Adam's apple.
It truly was a gorgeous piece that spared no details: even the disquietude that widened his eyes, or the fingers that tugged at the buff of his uniform. These fractures of his stoic persona I first met startled me: if I noticed it, surely others have. Was this the weakness Dream and George were always seeking?
"A handsome portrait, innit?"
Alarmed by the sudden disturbance of my study, I pivoted around and bowed to the familiar voice.
His chuckle challenged me to look the king--my faceless companion for so long--in the eyes. There was a noticeable absence of pensiveness in his irises that was replaced by a sheen of something so distinguished, but bygone from my memory:
Ecstasy. Irrepressible, unbridled ecstasy.
I returned to my full height; my addled smile unable to reach the same enraptured curve of his. His navy-sleeved arms outstretched, as if they were expecting an embrace.
My next step forward was timorous. This reaction to me--the fiancée of his enemy and friend of hardly a month--had my muscles taut with dithering twitches. From observation, nobility remained stoic and apathetic in outward aesthetic and speech at all times in the nibbling fear of whose eyes were pursuing them. Wilbur's stature should have replicated his portraits.
His emotions were explosive; fracturing and dissolving the neutrality and discreteness I originally planned to uphold.
Fingers flexing desirously, the king--oblivious to my attentiveness--muttered, "Come on; what are you waiting for?"
I retreated a step backwards, a defiance to his eagerness.
Projecting his voice now, Wilbur cleared his throat and repeated his request with a balmy tone, "Don't you want to greet your dear friend with a hug? It's only customary." his grin faltered as he continued, "Besides; I do not want you thinking there are any formalities between us."
Regaining the valor that had so suddenly seeped out of me, my lips puckered in distaste as his statement. "Ah, but formalities are there to upkeep boundaries, and to keep people safe," I retorted.
The smile he had struggled to maintain through my actions finally fell to my final words. Alarmed, he replied, "Why would you feel--excuse me, this impairs me to say--unsafe around me?"
It was my turn to be alarmed at the hysteria that trailed his words.
"I swear on the L'Manberg flag I would not be anything but courteous and a gentleman towards you!" he continued. "Oh dear XD, you don't believe I asked you to meet me here so I could take advantage of our isolation--"
The continuation of the sentence disintegrated on his tongue–like the thought alone had him more distraught than I. He dipped his head to save his poorly pieced equanimity for a fleeting moment.
I watched his gilded coils shade his irises from view. 'How did he survive Dream's court with instability like this?' I couldn't help but question.
With a prolonged exhale, King Wilbur returned to his former posture that accompanied an infirm smile that strengthened when I returned a step closer to him.
"My apologies: the past couple of weeks have been harrowing," he admitted with a swallow before continuing, "Returning without Prince Tommy has the whole country disquieted, and your letters have--" he stopped again, his lips puckering with relief that he caught them.
"Your letters have kept me great company. Y/n, you have been my only authentic friendship that hasn't been due to political obligation." he paused to give an isolated chuckle. "The irony is rich in that statement, considering the prompt of your first letter, but when you inquired about my character personally--forgive me for my sudden disclosure, but I hadn't felt such elation from words alone since I found escapism in reading itself as a child."
I was so captured in his words; I didn't take notice of his steps forward towards the middle of the room where I stood.
"Y/n," his voice trembled with ardor as his eyes caught the illumination of the setting sunbeams; displaying paragraphs of emotion that I couldn't decipher. I wondered if he even knew what it was. "I would surrender my crown Dream before I'd consider harming you. Although I loathed the exchange of pleasantries with George, the thought of finally meeting and talking to you, my dearest friend, made--and will make--every word swallowable: no matter how insulting."
His knuckles flexed as he benignantly lifted his hand to ghostly trail the edge of my jawline, starting with my temple. His descent was interrupted by the flower tucked shyly behind my ear. Becoming abruptly aware of the sudden improperness of our situation, I allowed myself to retreat a few steps back.
The peony stem was squeezed between Wilbur's quivering index and middle finger; the rest of his body inert as he dedicated his pensive stare to the flower he was holding. My jaw was set in ungainliness from my jagged steps backward in a civil attempt to keep remembrance of who gifted me the withering blossom.
Wanting to be the first to speak, I cleared my throat to end the crawling seconds of strained silence to say, "I apologize for my abruptness, but I'd rather stay a certain distance. My fiancé is not ideal, as I've clarified in my letters, but I do not want to give myself the opportunity to break my adherence." His eyes remained downcast, so I clarified, "With George only a few bounding footsteps away--you understand the risk of us being seen conversing could call for possible traitorous accusations and an execution for not only me, but possibly Tommy, your kingdom and you, yes?"
There wasn't a beat of silence before Wilbur's head steadily rose, revealing a restrained grin; but his eyes revealed the fullness of his smile.
"I understand," he replied, the head of the peony snapped between his fingers. His smile was then unhampered when he zealously asked, "Referring to what you said previously: do you see me as a temptation?"
Despite the question being said earnestly, I tittered and replied, "Are you always this suave?"
"You inspire my words, my lady," replied the king with maintained candor, "Your speech--spoken and written--muses me. I am but your humble priest; praising and cantering your sanctified words."
Being concerned with the lack of sarcasm in his confession that was undeterminable as faux, I attempted to stray the conversation. "If I am your spur, then you are my poet," I bantered back before inquiring, "Is that what you would be if you weren't a King, Wilbur? A poet?"
His smile pacified into a more whimsical appearance; settling his dimples that had started to twitch from overuse. The return of silence proved how gravely he was considering my question.
His mouth opened with a sharp intake of air, hesitating, before snapping closed again for further consideration. I was not left yearning for his response much longer, however, as he finally answered:
"Poetry itself can become repetitive, from what I have experienced. If it was sustainable, I would be a musician: changing the meaning of said poetry into undiscovered interpretations with something as simple as a key change. Wouldn't it be enthralling to make people truly ponder like that, Y/n?" He took an unconscious step forward, his ardor on the topic abating my prior apprehension.
Becoming aware of his verve, his tone melted into dismissiveness as he continued, "But that lifestyle is as unattainable and unsustainable as it is foolish. I would need to enter into a field that would provide a reliable income for Tommy--" his next words rolled back on his tongue at the unwelcomed reminder of what was being kept from him. Swallowing, he continued with a new somberness, "Tommy and I. Perhaps a doctor?"
Surprised by his reply, I couldn't compress a snort. "My apologies, but a doctor?" I asked, incredulous.
His smile enriched again at my response. "Why yes, a doctor! Couldn't you see it? Doctor Soot!" he exclaimed with a trailing chortle; his voice slurred with sarcasm.
Is that what irony sounded like in his voice? Did he use the same resonance earlier?
"More like Doctor Malpractice," I retorted. My laugh had finally become unbridled.
His eye roll was jocular as he countered, "You will find I am exceptional at fixing things, my dear."
"Oh please: I wouldn't trust you to bandage my knee after a minor scrape."
Dauntlessness crackled in his eyes, overwhelming his irises with sudden confidence. "Okay, maybe fixing injuries aren't my forte, but other things!" he admitted, turning his back to me with a coruscate of a simper at his salmonberry lips.
I embowed a(n) (eb/c) eyebrow. "Like what?"
"Your stories."
He didn't laugh.
Neither did I.
Trying to recover from the blow that bruised me more than I'd be inclined to disclose, I kept the fractured humor in my voice as I retaliated, "Did you not describe my words and drabbles as sacred initially?" Wilbur turned, his lips parched and parted in mortification; pulling the rest of his facial features rigid with rue.
"Are my drabbles insufferable?" I inquired, meaning the question to be lighthearted instead of the hurt that blighted my words. Blenching, I tried to plead with the rotting pillars that were moldering what was left of my former smile that I could catch and piece onto my quavering lips. The distress that marbled his eyes with incandescence broke my faulty foundation into a guilty frown directed at my overreaction.
Swallowing, he frantically responded, "Of course not! I was just implying that your stories wouldn't suffer from a few corrections!" Fearing the response I had yet to construct to our misunderstanding, Wilbur averted his eyes to memorize the blemishes on the stainless floor beneath our feet.
"Would it make me a bad author to decline your critiques?" I jested, trying to alleviate the disquietude we created.
"My complaints aren't personal," my distressed friend murmured, not discerning the raillery in my previous statement until the words had pressed past his lips. Meeting my disquieted expression, his hand cracked against his left cheek--which was already roseate with discomfiture--in a self-inflicted punishment.
Voice hoarse, Wilbur started to stutter, "Y/-Y/n, I'm so sorry--"
"Wilbur, there's no need for such physical chastisement. Your words only initially stung, that's all," I gingerly explained, cutting him off. My voice catching an edge of bitterness that comes with resentment, I didn't hinder myself from adding a spiteful compromise:
"How about this: you can give me feedback when you show me your poetry."
The relief of the argument being resolved developed into a conflicted scowl on Wilbur's lips as he dryly countered, "How mature: will you reply like that to all of your future devotees who deliver well-intentioned feedback to your works?"
I scoffed, looking up to match the intensity of the king's stare; going as far to mimic the cross of his arms. Inwards, however, my throat smoldered and convulsed in a skirmish against my tear ducts. All I had ever wanted was for someone to value my words, my story. I had expected George's ignorance, but Wilbur's? A man who claims the title of poet and finds the substance that is confined in each letter of our language? Was this the same man I had been writing to?
"No one will ever read my works; excluding myself and what you have read of my drabbles. George would rather burn his gardens than let me draw attention to myself by publish a novel with my own coherent ideas and ideas," I informed him, remembering how George guffawed when I was brought to him by my own brother in his depraved plan to barter me into a marriage with the prince for the chance to esteem his political ranking. He sniggered at my hobby but was persuaded that I would prove myself useful not only as the sister of a "future" major political ranking of an official in the Badlands, but as his personal savvy secretary.
I was tricked. Because of my brother--because of Quackity--I followed him into his ornate trap disguised as Dream's palace in hope of becoming employed as a royal scribe, as he told me they were hosting open interviews in court.
Perhaps Wilbur would never know my anguish, but I had to recall he led his own revolution. How much of his family is fertilizing the soil the castle I stood in was constructed on? What sinister and cruel adjectives have been affixed to his name? Hell, had there been a night where he knew this land was secure in his name? Where it wasn't threatened by Dream's unsparing army of thousands? How much of a militia was left in L'Manberg?
Our friendship was already debarred by the power that kept us both caged. This was something dangerous, something defiant, and George and Dream knew it:
but my temper, it felt, had already doused what Wilbur was perilously trying to ignite.
The resistance in my throat had clawed upwards to the inflamed corners of my eyes. I caught a teardrop and pressed it into the white of my red-veined sclera; the sting distracting the scorch in vocal folds that allowed me to triumphantly swallow the remainder of my tears.
I hadn't noticed the benign digits spread over the chafing sleeves of my leaden shift dress. Wilbur's touch claimed hold of my shoulder; although I was certain its intention was to comfort me, the ambiguous curl of his fingertips could indisputably be a warning not to withdraw like last time.
"Y/n, to know I caused you this sorrow, these tears," Wilbur began to whisper, swiping his free thumb attentively across the febrile plains of my cheekbones in search of any tears that could have escaped his study of my fragmenting complexion. "It hurts more than the loss of L'Manberg could ever feel."
Erratically, he pressed his feverish forehead against my hairline. Against the sear of my skin, he croaked, "Please forgive me, my dear."
His lips were a moment away from my flesh. This had to stop.
The fingers he had sunk into my shoulder had loosened in his loss of defense. Wriggling my shoulder from his limpen grasp, I tenderly pressed my hands into the shape of his face and lifted him from the support of my body.
"There is nothing to forgive," I affirmed to him, balancing on my toes to come closer to his eye level. His gaze was matching mine to his eyes but aimed to an area below the slope of my nose.
With a blink, his irises were sharing their glisters of fervor he tried to hide from the rest of his stoic composure.
I let go.
Speaking suddenly, Wilbur queried with volatile breaths, "If you were free of that bloody ring on your finger, what would you do? In a different life."
This question was a biting pastime that I had mused with recently. Instantaneously becoming bashful of my fluctuating, classified daydream, I mustered out unassertively, "If I was in a different life, I...I wouldn't be here. My dreams used to be adorned in public adoration and acclaim for my stories, but now? I could not think of a safer refuge than solitude in no-man's land. A flower-embellished cottage inhabited by my pen and I."
Wilbur's acute expression vacillated near the end of my answer. "You wouldn't want to live in L'Manberg with--near me?" he asked, his words heightening to be more incredulous as he spoke.
My head dropped in correspondence with my voice as I confessed, "Perhaps I would live here? I am not persuaded in my answer, as this isn't a question I try to dwell on. I've determined it is not wise to ponder the 'what-ifs'; my future is too desolate, and my hope has been forsaken since George squeezed the engagement ring on my finger." As to prove my point, my ring finger wriggled in a futile attempt to alleviate the blistering pressure of the burnished band.
In the rare moment of breathy silence, the fall of supple feet in the sun-spared hallway pushed our distance further as I instinctively tottered away from my agitated friend whose fingers were grazing the glint of his nickel scabbard that I hadn't taken notice of until his fingertips made its presence so blatant.
The steps were presumably an echo, but by the perchance that XD--if he was not an egocentric mythos created by Dream's lineage to keep their feeble subjects submissive--had sent this as a forewarning to whose stirring we may overhear next, I had to take leave. The optimism and ambition to contend with my foredoomed future that spumed at Wilbur's touch had flattened just as suddenly.
My place was alongside my prince and my soon-to-be husband; my words scripted and edited of any complaints and opinions.
"I must go. That may be George," I whispered, wondering if my words were discernible alongside Wilbur's tumultuous breaths that reverberated off the walls in the quietude.
"To hell with him!" cried him, his voice raised with exasperation. "Besides: that could have been anyone. Perhaps one of the staff is upkeeping--"
I cut him off with a quiet hush. "We shouldn't take the chance. You would be foolish to deny your already negligible odds of this visit working in your favor," I explained, pausing to move forward and grace his left hand, which had remained wearily ghosting the handle of his sheathed blade, with a courteous squeeze. "Please: do not give him another reason to despise you."
Like a snare, his right hand encased mine in his easeful touch. "If you insist, my lady," he breathed with treacly inflection. Unveiling my hand, Wilbur ushered his zealous lips to my knuckles--pressing onto the taut skin with ardency.
He kept his lips puckered for a moment.
Then another.
Then his eyelashes undulated.
Clearing my throat to intervene, I interrupted politely, "Excuse me, Wilbur?"
Another strained inhale didn't pass before the king pried his lips from my hand with reluctance, his gaze corybantic as he released my hand.
"Right; my apologies," coughed Wilbur, moving aside to clear my path back into the dusky corridor. As I stumbled forward, he exhaled pointedly, "Wait!"
I halted, fleetly pivoting. "What?" I asked briskly.
He took a step forward, his face creased with exhortation. "I respect that you want to remain on spacious terms with me, but this may be the last evening we are able to talk like this.
"Please, meet me by the stables that you first saw when you arrived once the sun fully sets? It would be my honor to present to you my favorite spot in L'Manberg; where I used to unwind when I was vexed as a lad, and my family lived on this land."
With a sudden flush scathing his cheekbones, Wilbur solicitously clarified, "No-Not that I would take us somewhere secluded to take advantage of our vulnerability! I believe I have explained my intentions with you--our relationship beforehand, but I feel the need to reiterate it just in case you are apprehensive of my intentions."
Tracing the stitches that were hidden in the cuffs of my azure sleeves, I tried to stiffen my jaw in false consideration. My answer should have been immediate: no. There was no room for regarding or entertaining his offer.
George is a heavy sleeper...
"I'll...consider," I responded, praying my recoil at my words wasn't as noticeable as it felt. "It is not a matter of me enjoying your company or don't trust you. My trepidation is George waking and discovering my absence."
Wilbur snorted. "Yeah? He came across as a heavy sleeper in court."
My glare silenced him; although my nostrils flared in betrayal. I was not in the mood to jest about his and my faltering security.
I turned, preparing myself for my dash back to my chambers.
"No promises," I whispered before I began my remorseful descent away from his pleading, poignant behold.
~George's POV~
The sunlight was clement here; trying to divulge through the thick tapestries of summer foliage that curtained the throne room's arched windows. I had begun my prayers to her kneeled, and I had landed at the shadow of her seated figure opposing the vaulted plafond that fissured with drapes of potent herbage. Eons, it had seemed, since we had conversed palpably had eclipsed by, but the savor of rosemary and tickle of pollen offset memories of what would be appraised as close to a mortal childhood: hours spent capering in Mother's shadow and confiding to her in prayer, before all forms of worship to any other god or idol other than XD was expelled and punishable for all who reside in the Dream Kingdom.
That boyish ingenuousness had faltered as I resumed my kneeling position, waiting for my creator's grace to speak.
The simmer of her agog assessment of my presence hissed in the cool of her imposing, gelid silhouette. In her affectionate voice, she inquired, "My son, why have you asked for my audience?"
I allowed myself to release a deep exhale stripped of its original sweetness that honeyed my throat and warmed my larynx of its conditioned, banal tone. My conceitedness wanted to disconcert me from my position: begging for a favor from my mother--my maker--after abandoning any relations with her and ignoring her calls for furtive conversations at dusk.
Rebuffing her invitation to look into the security her veiled irises once held, I spoke quickly, "I require assistance."
In the lull of my words, I envisaged how she would smite me. The hush gave me ample time to settle on an execution: strangulation by the vinery that coiled warily close to the crown of my head.
But then, she laughed. A laugh that yawned the flamboyant blossoms beneath my palms open and flourished the grass underneath my knee.
My posture rigidified.
"With your plans to renounce my sacred lands to XD and his abominable son?" she asked, clenching the humor in her voice to disguise the repulse that stalked her words. "No; my only biological child is not obtuse enough to ask a question with such an obvious answer."
My eyes upheaved with false valor, following the drape of her boysenberry veil to her sunhat-shaded eyes. In her godly form, she matched my size tenfold: making the curve of her onyx lips reel between kindly and masochistic.
The amiableness of her voice clarified the difference as she said, "Now that we've clarified your intentions, I believe we have some catching up to do, yes?" As the words were uttered, the vegetation around her became alive with servitude: a sunflower reaching outside of the armrest of her flower-populated throne with a tray adorned with two minuscule teacups that were tucked from my view. As a vine unanchored from the ceiling steadily with an equally small teapot, Mother clapped her hands and exclaimed, "It has been far too long since I've seen you, my son! After these dragging couple of years of sporadic prayers and scarce offerings, I have grown meeker."
Wanting to adjourn the correction I had to make about her assumptions on my ambitions for a few more pleasant moments, I let her prattle continue.
"--and you haven't prayed in months! I understand you must get permission from that scoundrel boy-king of yours to speak to me, but I'm your mum! You aren't getting too old for visits with your mum, eh?"
"Of course not," I mumbled, following the rosebud that carried my perfumed cup of tea from its tray to my site.
"What was that?" asked Mother, elegantly plucking her corresponding cup that was the size of her finger from the retreating sunflower's platter. "Speak up, child!"
I grasped the teacup before uttering the news so that she could not throw the broiling contents on me in inevitable rage. After a contemplational sip, I rasped,
"In truth, I am here in search of your help with Dream and I's plan."
In disturbance, the dwarfed teacup slipped from her fingers and onto her starless skirts; the tea mapping itself into the layers of fabric numbing her skin of any scorch. Following her jolt, the greenery stood heedfully: waiting for a command from its gardener.
Finally, she spoke dubiously, "Pardon me? That is nonsense!" With a stomp of her foot, her faithful foliage enlarged with her staggering boils of fury. "What droll propaganda is that boy and his forefather sowing in your subconscious?"
"Mother, I beg of you for your aid!" I beseeched, the earthquake her choler caused knocked me to both of my knees. "We cannot just seize L'Manberg; too many of the subjects in the Dream Kingdom are anticipating one more action of violence without a justification from the crown to revolt!
"With an enhancement of my power from you, we'll be able to corrode L'Manberg's forest to not only have an excuse to break off our peace treaty with Wilbur, but also get rid of any valuable forgeables or ingredients that may be valuable in medicines or potions--"
"That plan is inoperative as it is absurd," the goddess cut me off bluntly, her tone grieving.
Each brittle curled blade of grass splintered as I rose to my feet, foolishly challenging my own mother. "It doesn't matter: it's a reason. That is all we need."
Mirroring my actions, Mum lifted herself off of her mossy throne. There were no exits. (Physical means of entrance such as doors were superfluous, as you could only enter a celestial throne room if summoned by the god who inhabited it. And, since only those with godly blood could enter, why bother accommodating for more than one?)
There was no eluding until she dismissed me.
"I won't hear of this!" bellowed the towering goddess, her entourage of flowers matching her height and outrage. "I blessed you at birth; you were--are my only son by blood! You should want to preserve and shield nature and its convivial inhabitants that do the same for you!"
Her voice cracked into a hiccup; a torrent of tears that succeeded her initial wrath.
White hibiscuses and yellow chrysanthemums that had been lazily inhabiting the insider of Mother's crowning sunhat had elongated their stems and opened their petals to kiss her tear-blemished cheeks.
Raising my voice, I countered, "You gave me to XD willingly! The idea of a domestic mortal life charmed you, and responsibility on behalf of your own mistakes frightened you: admit it!"
"Your presence was not a mistake! I always have, and always will, love you, George! I was not given a choice: it was either forfeit you as an offer of peace, or XD and I would have gradually moldered the earth with our quarrel."
"Did you abandon those boys you were raising, too? And their--our father? Two gods who played house and forgoed when you both lost interest?" I continued to press, approaching my weeping mother.
"Did they at least get to meet him?" I queried, my tone shaded in my own grief I had been withholding and repudiated since my first conscious days in Dream's palace.
Mother could not hear my question, however, as her sobs had deafened my seethes.
And we stood among the wilted foliage as I loitered for the rainstorm to cease and the scenery to resurrect. But she had drowned her companions in errant teardrops; wading my ankles in shame that I did not share.
"George," she croaked, collapsing back into her withered throne. "I harrow over what we could have been as a family, and I'd give up my position among my fellow gods to reinforce that to you."
I stepped forward, biding back the anguish that portended to boyishly escape my tear ducts. "Here is your chance to apologize: forfeit the L'Manberg thicket to me. Give me the power to control the foliage, as only you have the ascendancy to maintain whatever is beheld in those woods."
The sorrow that disheartened her expression curled into disdain. "I will never relinquish those woods to that reprehensible king and his divine patron," she stated defiantly. "If you follow through with your plan, George, I shall no longer honor you with the claim of being my son."
I bowed, exhorting the goddess to release me from her languished throne room that browned and decayed with her fermenting anger. "Good evening, Mother," I chafed.
Her glare assuaged into an expression of despondency as she uttered her departing words with the motherly coo that was withheld from me for an unjust number of years, "Please, George; do not let that boy manipulate you further."
Listing over her lap to fill the margin I had purposefully left, she spoke full of woe, "I love you, son; please, come back to me. Home."
And, with the imprints of grass blades that patterned my down-splayed palms as my only evidence I had been anywhere but the mortal realm, I lolled myself against the recently sun-warmed woods planks that pieced together the splintered floor. A moment of serenity that I did not deserve: as I lounged and metaphorically tended to my conceptual wounds from my ineffectual meeting with my mother, a pauperized, sallow boy was being escorted to an alter in the king's private temple dedicated to his forefather due to my incompetence.
I could only pray--if any god or goddess would let my damned words fall upon their ears--that the water torture had worked as intended, and Tommy was braindead. Would his pain receptors be dull, or would he thrash against the seer of the blade against the oiled skin of his chest as Dream's dagger drew the first incision? Gods, didn't they stop nourishing him after Y/n's visit to his chambers?
Y/n, who should detest a coward--a murderer like me. My affections towards her would be better off discarded, for I was not worthy of such ambrosia my parched and ashen lips yearned for. No, the poison I had been consuming all along--Dream--is what I should continue to guzzle until I was as pallid and sapped as that boy I had just sentenced to his demise.
Gasping from foreign tears that brought me back to the waning warmth of the floor and creaking of a draft that served as an injunction of what was to come, I heaved myself off the floor to the ache of my heels. I looked to the bed, my hushed hopes being that my fiancée had retired to bed in spite of my sudden nap turned subconsciously into a bedtime prayer.
No one warmed either side of the bed.
Abstaining from another second confined with my sins that gnawed away at the invisible twine that kept me tethered to what scraps of sanity that locked my feet to the floor, I pushed open the door to the corridor open hectically. The flare of candlelight confirmed that no others shared the oxygen with the flames except me. Although the attempt was forlorn, I bounded a few steps into the cascade of starless shadows interrupted by feeble coruscates of lambency. I was stumbling from the actuality of Y/n's location: she had run, yes, but into his arms.
The litharge of my eyes disguised my awareness of Wilbur's mannerisms around her. Each peek of her presence he had caught, I had noted, was treated as an indulgence that even the gods would grovel for. Irises purposefully blinded of any blemishes that I had picked from her physical character, he let his detached facade disintegrated into something so disturbingly tender, something that did not wilt with time like the flowers I gifted her.
Halting my futile pursuit, I remembered what made up Wilbur's past that I had crudely solved from tidbits of information that slipped from the mouths of Dream and his court: absent parents, a lover who left him soon after their first conclave, and illegitimate child who was forfeited to his anonymous mistress...
The parallels of our stories sickened me to where I had to rid myself of the abominable idea that I may have the morality of the man who lusted over an engaged woman.
As I stalked back to my room, I forfeited the idea that I deserved serendipity that would lead to Y/n's fondness and affections. I was as damnable as Wilbur, yes, but my priority was now protecting my irreproachable betrothed from the charm of L'Manberg's king.
She was the only good--my only friend--in Dream's Netherworld; and I would not let her seek refuge in the arms of a man who does not even try to cloak his bastardy.
~Y/n's POV~
"How has Wilbur been fairing since you have last spoke?"
Damn it all.
He stood placidly a few steps away from my physical, startled disposition.
Eyes downcast, I lethargically replied, "Where I was is not a concern of yours." and, with the valor I believed to have left with Wilbur in that corridor, I enabled the pertinacity that enlarged my pupils to challenge the disdain in his.
Except there was a lack of scrutiny that tautened his temples and blemished his boyish beauty. In the reflection of a nearby candle's flame, one could almost distinguish a glister of empathy that dampened the petulance that dissipated his lips and drooped the oval skin that shaped his eyes.
"Are you going to tell..." my tone squelched with an unpleasant shrill, "Tell, uhm, Dream?"
His eyes becoming obscured by the cut of his exuberant bangs as his chin tipped down, George sighed, "I should, Y/n: I really should."
I looked to the bedside table that held his adored glasses, praying a pinpoint of focus would secrete my grimace at the vexation that plagued his voice.
"But I refuse."
Dumbfounded by his jolting words, my unhindered, stupefied stare returned to him; hardly moved at his pardon.
I started to blunder, "George, ex-excuse me, but--"
He raised his hand, halting my coming queries. "Y/n, why should I punish you for that bastard's bewitchment?"
Perplexment not faltering, I asked, "Bewitchment? Wilbur has regarded my presence and feelings with the poise of a gentleman--"
"He uses girls!" bellowed my delirious fiancé.
"What?"
He allowed for a few spared heartbeats in the silence, but soon interrupted it in its infancy as he continued, exasperated, "It is true: he exploits his lovers and walks off weeks after reaping what he seduced them for. An adulterer."
I interjected, disdainful of his opinion, "George, you know those rumors have been founded on scraps of court gossip. Those wolves Dream keeps around would fabricate anything to inflate the king's egotistical view of himself and his fictitious morals; to regard himself higher in comparison to others in positions of power."
Stepping back to the bed in abhorrence of my words, the prince retaliated, "Him having an illegitimate son that has gone missing is hardly an imprudent speculation, Y/n." his voice became abate, observing the attenuated walls, as he spoke sharply, "and neither is his criminal record."
Pinching my drawn nose bridge, I retorted, "If he was a known criminal, his empire would have followed suit in his ghastly ways. The streets would resemble Dream's: skinless footprints stained by infected blood buried by lavish walkways of marble and--"
"By the gods, Y/n, I only speak of this because I care for you!" George interrupted with an irate raise of his voice. "We have proof of every citizen's criminal record in the palace in a classified vault: it's protocol. Damn it, I will show it to you when we return from this grisly trip."
"Before this fatuous revolution and the establishment of L'Manberg, the crown had a warrant out for Wilbur's arrest for the brewing of illegal, hazardous potions."
The optimism I held for his innocence liquefied into my lungs, clogging my steady exhales with vacillation. "That is not possible," I exhaled, "How could he have found the ingredients or the proper equipment? Only the crown has access to brewing stands potent enough to brew anything with a lasting effect."
George settled on to the mattress, his splayed palm subduing his delirious chuckles. "Now you understand, my love: this asinine nation was founded to escape a criminal sentence," he concluded after his sporadic laughter. "His intentions have been inconspicuous and vile since his debut in the public eye. If only we had arrested him just an hour sooner; alas, he fled into the rural territory of L'Manberg and was lost to our militia."
"That does not explain how he acquired such ingredients to make these dangerous potions," I countered.
His triumphant simper curled into a disputing expression as he offered with a patronizing sneer, "Perhaps there is more hiding in those woods than we know?"
~Wilbur's POV~
The sun had descended into a veil of brooding northern clouds, leaving the forest that depended on those cracks of light for visibility to become still with apprehensive darkness. The dreamy smile on my lips had slipped into a lower as I pondered the sudden shift in weather. Although the sulky temperature that had been casted over L'Manberg wasn't ideal, a sudden cold front would surely dull--and possibly frost over--the vegetation and foliage of the woods. Prince George didn't seem like the type to forgive easily, so would he deem the lack of vibrancy in woodland unsuitable despite the obvious temperature fluctuation?
Picking up my pace into a jog, I tried to lull my thoughts off of the foretold disaster that would be tomorrow. A taunting squall that felt so delightful that morning now whitened my cheeks and shook the leafy trees till they groaned in agitation. What it took to not wail along with them! After waiting for a dragging hour in the stables, not a trace of human life besides mine ever graced the stalls. I knew Y/n couldn't resist the shivering call of mystery, so why would she refuse a rendezvous? All our letters, all of our conversations, and she would miss the opportunity to enjoy her last days of freedom from the shackling life of a subdued princess because it would upset her fiancé? No amount of sensibility could answer my questions. Prince George was so one-dimensional and flat in terms of wit. The more baffling part was the outcome: why would Y/n choose a prince over a poet? It was quite apparent how much she treasured words, and if I could have only shown her tonight what she meant to me through the songs I had spent days ploddingly scribbling with travail! Internally, I was warmed at the victorious idea that whilst George could provide materialistic riches, he would never be able to write his way into Y/n's heart like I could.
"If only I could prove that," I huffed aloud, entering the bankside of a jagged brook. The looming nightfall couldn't mask the familiarity of the stream. If one would ask what my least favorite part of L'Manberg was, the answer would always be the pathetic, narrow creek that snaked throughout the blossoming woods. Perhaps a traveler or dimwit would follow the stream, but little would they know the trouble those shallow waters would engulf you in.
I scooped a rock out of the benumbed brook walls, letting my glare switch between the rugged, bland stone and creek. With a sudden enraged cry, I launched the rock down into the pitch waters and collapsed to my knees with a sob. (As emotional as I was, perhaps Y/n not being there to witness my complete breakdown was a secret answered prayer.) The pressure of my situation had finally amounted up and started to fracture my mind all at once, and the threat of losing everything I had once loved became alarmingly inevitable.
"My L'Manberg! Tommy! Y/n!" I gagged out between hiccups. "What are to become of you all if I fail? Will you all become entangled in twine and connected to the fingers of that tyrannical Puppeteer?"
"Your cries were adorable the first time, but it seems those tears have lost their charm," a teasing echo suddenly chimed, electrifying my body with guarded attentiveness. The girly pitch switched into a gravely tone as she taunted again, "Aw, did my little prince think he could escape me without consequences?"
The water a few feet upstream had been disrupted with the flailing of a lonely fish. Defensively crouched near the unstable bank, I witnessed as the salmon's amaranth belly elongated until it gingerly blossomed into rose-tinted skin. Still hysterically jerking to the point that viewing her full transformation was near impossible, the wispy gags she sputtered turned into uneven gasps for air as stumps of split flesh rapidly evolved into frail limbs.
As quick as her words had entered my mind, the salmon had transfigured into an alluring woman--who surveyed each shiver that pulsed through my bones with innocent, jade-tinted eyes. The virginal way she batted her raspberry-red lashes would lead any stranger blind to her deceitful ways. That factor alone made me ill; the way she already had the facade of a victim.
Gaining stability to my voice again, I cried, "You were banished from the kingdom! How dare you return?"
Her expression stayed focused for a moment longer after my declaration before being interrupted with her odious cachinnating. The humiliating moment must had dragged on for several seconds before she cooed in the mocking tone she had beforehand, "Look at you: struggling to be a big boy. I thought finally entering adulthood would even out those rash emotions of yours, but you're still naïvely playing leader!" she found her last statement even more humorous, as she fell back into the brook in venomous snickers.
"You've taken enough, you ghastly animal! What more of me do you want?" I cried in helpless, uncontrolled temper.
Sprightly, the redheaded shapeshifter curled into a careless sitting position. "Aw, come on now: is that how you should talk to your ex-lover?" asked her, her peachy lips folded into a knowing pout.
"Don't you dare call me your lover, Sally."
"Isn't what we did what all lovers do?"
"I was barely sixteen with baby fat still in my cheeks!"
"I appeared young--is that not what counts?"
"No number of altered appearances can mask that you're centuries old, and you seduced me when I was a kid, you hag!"
Her irises inflamed at my proclamation. "Oh, so I'm only a hag to you? Did you prefer my younger appearance?" the wicked woman spat, her scowl sculpting into something more sinister. "I thought as a man you would appreciate my older form. Shall I change back into who you first met?"
Any guttural pleas that passed through my grimaced-pulled lips were ineffectual, as Sally started to mold her matured cheekbones into full pink cheeks that were smoothed of any impurities. Any skin on her body that was creviced with dimpled wrinkles and jagged blemishes from the melding gills and flaking of remaining scales were tightened and blushed with a new porcelain glow. Coiled, merlot tresses retracted into a cultish bob that lightened with highlights of marmalade whilst the womanly plump of her body flattened and freckled into the shape of a teenager's.
"Does this rekindle any familiar feelings, Wilby?" asked the siren, her voice reinstated with a pubescent rasp to match her exterior.
Paired with the adolescent smile she had curled onto her tangerine Cupid's bow; she had sculpted herself into a perfect replication of when our paths first crossed at the same brook. If I could change my own stature to match that day, I would need to stunt my height down a couple of inches; barely scraping the six-foot line. Each conscientiously styled coil of honey-drizzled, tawny hair that enshrouded my eyelids had receded into crudely chopped bangs as teenager; the length billowing to the nape of my macilent neck. Skin that coruscated with the shade of cornsilk from the unsparing summer sun had flushed to a rather unflattering shade of carnation pink from my dash into the refuge of the woods. Getting rid of the unwanted tincture was incomprehensible; not after the news I had just heard.
"This is our home, Mumza! You told us this scrap of countryside is ours--unable to be scathed by any unwanted intruders!"
Running out of space to take another step to escape, I squalled, "You're not innocent! You took advantage of me as a callow adolescent as I was mourning!"
"Oh, that's divinely rich, Wilby!" tittered Sally. "If I recall correctly, this isn't the first time we've met since I presented you with your--our cherished son. Perhaps I only thought of him as cherished, since you were so expeditious to sacrifice him to my monstrous appetite, as you may call it." A carnivorously savage tint bolded her irises that had twinkled with chasteness beforehand.
"It has been protected by the godly magic your father and I pos--have prayed for as long we could manage; the only chance we have to protect these lands from the Dream Kingdom's siege is to cast out any human blood from this territory."
"But you are a priestess for Mother Nature herself!" I contended, my younger siblings observing our argument from our shadows casted into the kitchen entrance. "Can you not pray to her to smite the army?"
She had shaken her head with the disturbing emotion of defeat. "Mother Nature finds power in creation; XD becomes powerful through destruction. We have already enraged XD by swearing loyalty to our Goddess and allowing you children to stay in the midst of our dispute would be equivalent to us pinning a target on you and your siblings' throats."
"It didn't take more than a midnight to hear scattered gossip about the prince harboring a child born out of--oh, I might faint if I dare to go on to say it--wedlock." As sudden as the flighty humor candied her words, it had melted into sourness with her next utterance, "Hadn't you exasperated to me how enervating it was to raise your son...Fundy, was it? Yes, Fundy: you griped how, with his fox counterparts, he spent his days napping on the sun warmed windowsill, and his evenings escaping the confines of his nursery and scampering about the palace."
My lips remained muted, bracing for what event she would recall next.
Beguiled by her retelling, Sally continued, "I wasn't there just to visit our son, but to give you a choice. Oh, that condemnable fright that is widening your eyes right now is incredibly delectable! It's like you know what happens next." She licked her lips. "Your nation had just gained independence, and I wanted a little compensation for the sudden intrusion of my forest. Royal blood rather quenches the pallet, and my only two options were you--my ambrosial prince--or our little son."
Trapped in spite and uncertainty, I charged into the woods for what I thought would be the final time I would claim them as my own. When I reached the slim stream where father would walk us children up and down in the drafty sunsets, my temples were throbbing with alarming fitfulness. The stretch of brook hadn't changed since the last time I had walked it years ago: Father had forbidden us from approaching it due to his infallible sense of "degenerate, dangerous spirits" plaguing the riverbank.
It was not I who discovered I wasn't alone as I cradled my exhausted legs by the skipping rivulet, but the siren. She waded through the rill; cladded in nothing but a bashful, sultry, pursed-lipped grin. With a puckish splash, my attention was immediately bewitched by what appeared like a nymphic girl no more than a year my senior. As if she had captured my limbs with one ravenous espy, I lacked any opposition as I rose from my hunched pout to meet her leered lips.
"You seemed troubled; what brings you to such a secluded stream?" she queried, the pads of her gracile fingers beginning to illusorily brush the exposed, prickled flesh along my forearms.
I mewled, "Have you not done enough damage? Please, I beg of you, please stop."
The fox-eared siren didn't dither at my rebuttal of pleas. Her own response didn't begin until she seized my jaw with infrangible brawniness; my face throttling against her skin-peeling nails. "It was up to you, remember? You had a choice, and--like a craven--you chose to sacrifice your own son!" As I pulled back against her talons, she retracted her grip, hurling me back against the rattling trees. "That decision revealed to me what you truly are, Wilbur Soot: a cowardly, feeble boy who kisses the boots of the first person who threatens his teetering position of power."
Muscles melting from taut to permissive from the possessive touch, I found myself jauntily explaining my situation.
"How unfortunate," she sympathized, taunting my senses of her beguiling strokes for a moment before traveling to the exposed flesh a centimeter away from my neckline. "That's what our elders don't understand about us teenagers; we long to be free. To be rebellious."
The urge to escape from the impish lips that never showed teeth had overwhelmed my pervious thoughts of euphoria. It was that aura of cynic that Father had explained would alarm our minds the moment we were a step too deep into wicked territory. She must had sensed my urge to flee, as her fingers encased my quivering shoulders, and her lips started to croon an inescapable melody.
A stifling inundation of lust drowned any comprehensible thought of reason. The louder her harmonious hum became, the duller my senses became. My mandible became cemented, and the independence my body once had was subdued to my attacker's mercy. Despite my hazy retention of the event, a frightening flash could be seen every time her tune quivered:
The tearing of clothes, the slam of my weakened body against the base of a nearby oak, agog nips at exposed flesh until it turned blue from abuse.
Sally, barbarously enjoying my whimpers of tenderness from the harsh thrash against the tree, backed my slouching body far enough into the rigid bark that my skin had been imprinted with its craggy pattern. "Does this bring back any prurient memories? It wouldn't surprise me if it didn't--who knows how much you remember of our past union." Pink-stained slobber foamed over her malformed grin as she spat, "Give me one reason to not devour you right now."
I was found not less than an hour after the forced defilement: battered and nude. My first memory after was being encased in the softness of my father's wings and awakened by the remorseful shrieks from my mother. My younger brothers, Technoblade and Tommy, lamented about my constant screeches and breathless panting periodically throughout the night. As I struggled to remember what had happened the hour I was away, the nightmares I could never recall exacerbated the days leading up to our moving date. When our family was forced to split due to the incoming invasion of the king's army to seize the wild land, my brothers now depended on me to provide for us in the city. Whilst Techno entertained the energetic toddler, I spent my remaining teenage years plotting to get our land back from my newest foe: the Dream Kingdom.
Techno ran off to find Mumza and Dadza without any foretelling, but a note scribbled with posthaste on a napkin--leaving me to care for Tommy whilst fighting for what would evolve from not just my home, but many others', too. When we managed to flee to the countryside where the wisps of our childhoods still were imprinted among the blooms of the wildflowers and itch of knee-high grass. Reluctantly, I had ventured into the forest in search of any of the valuable forages I recalled stumbling across as a kid.
But as I trekked through the leaf-shrouded paths with dreading footsteps, the trickling water I soon stumbled upon was not without company. Like she had been waiting for me with forbearance, a haggard woman stood in the runnel with a swaddled infant that tugged at his own apricot tufts of hair around his dwarfish fox ears.
"He's yours," the parchment-yellow woman croaked, the lordosis that contorted her abdomen and hitched her shoulders aiding the dingy strands of claret hair that concealed her face.
I was compromised and assailable: the vile hag's favorite position. They would find my corpse at dawn, and this time I would be stripped of my muscles and organs. What was to become of Tommy? Would King Dream hang him forthwith for my misfortune? No, that was merciful: coming from a line of bestial torturers, he would skin his eroding body and turn his flesh into a couch as a wedding gift for Y/n and George.
What would become of Y/n? Without another kindred spirit to confide in; someone to write thousands of love songs that would lull her into my arms note after note; a man to provide her a kingdom built upon poems of utter devotion and infatuation. With a prince as uninspiring as George, would she ever be inspired again?
The moment his name struck my thoughts again, the solution seemed so destined and superb.
"Who are you?" I demanded, my hands looming near the lobes of my ears in defense.
The elder sputtered, offended. "How can you not remember me? I'm your lover you met at this very stream only a few years ago: Sally!"
She lifted her head, revealing sunken, swollen eyes and a coy smile that parted to divulge putrid fangs. "Excuse my appearance: my meals keep me young, and I haven't found a suitable match for my appetite yet."
"You're mistaken: I've never had a lover," I retorted, incredulous at the claim.
"I admit I used quite the potent lullaby on you. Do you remember running into these woods as a boy, infuriated with your parents?" asked the approaching hag. Her scabbed lips compressed: a tune so familiar whistling between the crooks of her overlapping teeth.
Powerless against the dread that apprehended my physique, I made the grim realization that I had been swindled and desecrated by a siren.
A siren could not be killed by a mortal.
"St-Stay ba--"
Sally cut me off and shoved the whining infant into my quivering arms. "I have spared his life for now," she informed me, her unnerving simper never faltering. "We shall meet again when I am more well-nourished. Until then, you may go back to playing leader."
"Have you ever sampled true royal blood?" I inquired; my neck turned to avoid her putrescent exhales.
With the first trace of hesitance I've seen drawl back her lips, she sneered, "What are you implying, young prince?"
"There is a monarch in the kingdom of L'Manberg currently who has come from the esteemed line of Kings from the Dream Kingdom. What if I brought him to you instead?"
She swiped her saliva-drenched claws across my undershirt, scratching the cavity of my chest as a warning. "This is not the time for humor! Do you know what would happen if I devoured the blood of a royal? I will be gorgeous forever!" she growled brusquely. "I have tried for centuries to tempt the royal family, but they never wandered close enough into the river. If it wasn't for my magic only being strong enough to allure steel-minded men such as anyone of King Dream's blood by the river, I wouldn't have wasted time on imprudent boys like you!"
"By sunset tomorrow, I can have Prince George delivered to this very stream if you spare my life and my kingdom of any more grief," I offered, watching the seer in her eyes inflamed with the tempting proposition. "Swear on my soul," I added, showing my devotion to this promise.
The drafts that rustled the trees turned glacial as the siren analyzed my oath. "If the blue-blooded prince isn't here by the time the moon rises with an apple in his mouth, I will flank and devour you chunk by chunk," she promised, leaving me crumpled against the tree as she retreated into the brook. Focusing on the air that was finally free of pollutants, I paid no mind as Sally distorted back into a rosy-bellied salmon and migrated downstream.
With the oxygen replenishing my mind, the abhorrent consequences of my oath seized the victory I had felt: if George didn't return to the Dream Kingdom once his visit concluded, Tommy would be executed. With the young prince's final gasp, Dream would send for his adept infantry to burn my infant country till only its skeleton stood in the ashes of what-ifs.
'If I immolate George, then this piecemeal country that is soaked in the tears of the innocent will be plummeted into flames; and so will my brother,' I internally conflicted, my alternative fate seeming as disquieting when I managed to formulate it, 'However, if I give myself to Sally instead, the prince is sure to report my absence to his noble brother--who'll execute Tommy as the last standing member of the L'Manberg family and siege the land into a vile, arduous land that kills off its community for the sake of cheap labor.'
With the second outcome appearing drabber than the first, the one benefit of sacrificing the pretentious prince was it cut Y/n of her pledge to him as his fiancée. Her betrothed dispatched by the siren's fangs, would she be free to write her future without limits?
A grimace seized my inquiry; she had appeared to be so individualistic before her dictated engagement to Prince George. How could I trust her to write the correct ending? Fleeing back to her heedless family easily could be eliminated in her set of choices. With that conclusion, my speculation of what Y/n would pick left my thoughts aghast and my sporadic footsteps askew as I lumbered out of the starless woods.
Y/n would leave L'Manburg. Leave me.
If she made the decision to write an ending as fallacious as that, I would have to seize the pen from her and inscribe the true ending to our chronicle.
~Y/n's POV~
The boards of the bedroom floor were gelid to the touch of my toes, an alarming change to its sun-scorched feel that forced me to tiptoe across the frosty chamber. Squinching through the silver-gilded window that spared room from full tenebrosity, I discerned the build of mulberry-tendrilled clouds that detained the courtyard with clammy shudders of breeze. Shuffling to the windowpane, I pressed a finger pad to the glass and winced at its frigidness--confirming my speculation.
"Cold?"
I hiccupped in alarm at the sudden interruption. Pivoting lethargically from the settlement of adrenaline, I glowered at my slow-eyed fiancé whose lips twitched with hilarity.
Keeping my tone indifferent, I spoke, "My prince--what a joy it is to have you awake so early."
"Ah, but today is special, my love," George replied with unusual zeal, "I've ordered for our scavenge of the L'Manberg woods to take place early this morning."
Taking note of the dread that tightened my face into an obvious grimace, he asked earnestly, "What's the trouble?"
"Did not Wilbur state he would prefer for us to depart for the woods earlier yesterday as in when the sun has already risen?" I inquired, conjecturing why George--who has ordered for the gibbeting of unaware handmaids that would disrupt his dozes--would call for a departure at daybreak.
He drew proximate to my wary glower, his succulents stagnant from the drafty temperature of the room. "This brisk weather, I feel, is not forecasted to linger for long; as Wilbur stated, the humidity of noon is surely to cumber us with heat exhaustion and other disquieting malaises," George spoke, "And what fiancé and gentleman would it make me if I subjected you to such ailments?"
"Did you not confine me to a windowless room--"
"We leave before the oil lamps dim," interrupted George, punctuating his statement with a chaste kiss on my flexed temple.
With a pivot, he began to stalk off as I collectively queried, "Can you not enliven the greenery before the inspection?"
Ceasing his retreat, George, without turning, sneered, "What?"
"Do not shroud yourself in naivety!" I accused, before quelling my tone and continuing, "With such an unexpected rime, the forest is sure to be withered. With your influence over the foliage, is it not possible for you to lushen the flora before we tour the woods, so we can inspect what the forest teems with in its peak season?"
Huffing, the prince turned to acknowledge my entreatment. His tone saturated with false sobriety, he countered, "I'm afraid not: my ability is not vigorous enough to vivify an entire woodland."
"Can't you try, at least?" I continued to adjure, disliking the disadvantage this sunless visit would implore.
"It is inconceivable," concluded George, the asperity of his voice alleviating as he discerned the vexation that quavered my drawn jaw. "Besides: if this wonderous forage cannot withstand a trivial dusting of frost, perhaps these woods are not worth saving."
~~~~~~~~~~
"...and this part of the forest is particularly rich with coniferous trees that have burgeoned with L'Manberg's humid summers. With these sultry conditions and shadowed soil, it is no incredulity that mushrooms often populate here during late spring and almost the entirety of the autumn season."
George did not suppress a theatrical yawn as Wilbur--trotting ahead and obviously oblivious to our reactions to his informational blather--continued his engrossed drivel. When we had begun our tour hours prior, our party was visibly bemused by the lushness of the forest: the frost had not touched it. This revelation added verve to the king's steps, but soured George's with weighted thumps of his boots.
Despite the tin canteen graciously lent by Manifold--who had escorted us to the edge of the forest before daybreak--to me misting my straiten throat with sweetened water, my tongue had grown parched and restless from its lack of speech. To alleviate the ache, I decided to respond to Wilbur's unabating, listless ramblings with a query of my own:
"Are they edible?"
He halted; George and I followed. At my inquiry, he grinned with an erratic display of his teeth; relishing in the sound of a voice that was not his own.
Heeding the bitter expression from my fiancé as a precaution of his interaction with me, he eased the smile and answered, "As a boy living on the land nearby not too long ago, I used to consume the mushrooms I found around these woods raw!" outstretching his arms with a reminiscent falter to his voice as he continued, "The fungi that grow in the L'Manberg forest is rumored to be blessed by Lady Nature herself and unable to be found outside of these hallowed grounds, as my mother used to tell my brothers and I."
"And you have harbored these lethal and feasibly divine mushrooms from the crown?" pressed George with an importunate step forward.
With a disquieted chuckle that exhausted into a brusque cough, the king hastily answered, "You must have misunderstood my prior words, my prince: no mushroom grown in this forest is poisonous, from what I have observed."
This answer tautened the prince's jaw, and his shades tip forward purposefully so he could peer at Wilbur's fraught expression. Through gritted teeth, George spoke, "It was to my comprehension that these woods are brimming with powerful and noxious forages. If your only basis for the rarity of this fungi is from a moronic, juvenile tale your mum used to recite to you before putting you to sleep, then I dare say our time has been wasted stumbling about these woodlands like a bunch of dolts--"
"Exotic, yes, but scarcely poisonous!" interceded Wilbur with amplified confidence. "With your talent of creating vegetation, I assumed you would be knowledgeable of the forage forb around you. Wouldn't you have identified by now if any of these surrounding mushrooms were lethal?"
His waxen complexion unmistakably florid in the tapering peaks of sunlight that broke through the bristly tree branches, George took a hasty peer at his vicinity--which was peppered with shadow-shrouded fungi that adorned the tree trunks and dilapidating logs. Even his shoulder sprouts, that had remained passive the majority of the tour, had recoiled in chagrin.
"Y/n, Love, I am going to have a private audience with Wilbur for a moment," he spoke, avoiding his rival's celebratory simper by turning his back to him and enclosing my hands with an authoritative squeeze of his clammy ones.
Approaching the scene with grim footsteps, the king prompted, "What is so paramount that we cannot discuss it in front of your fiancée: Our Lady. We should reserve this discussion for a proper political scene, such as L'Manberg's court, if it is that grave."
Releasing my moistened hands, George pivoted away to challenge Wilbur's statement; the sprouts armoring themselves with awry rows of thorns.
Not desiring to know if my fiancé had the strength to will the vegetation around him into his personal militia, I resigned to bringing the childish men back with rationality.
"King Wilbur," I began, my vocalization entrancing the stoic royal immediately, "We have been traversing this woodland for hours. May I propose a transient recess for lunch? It may deescalate this sudden hostility." My words were punctuated with a disgruntled glare at the seething prince.
His words were rapt as the king agreed, "I, for one, believe that is a brilliant idea."
"I suppose, uhm, that would be okay," muttered George, his reaction to the prior affront residing at the sound of a meal.
Exuberant once more, Wilbur entwined his calloused fingers together and exclaimed, "Marvelous! Although, I hope it would not offend me asking you both to harvest your own food."
Aghast at the proposal, the prince asked with his words panted from horror, "You cannot possibly be proposing that I--my fiancée and I reap our own lunch, are you?"
After a decisive juncture of delicate stillness that even the insects didn't dare interrupt with their chirps, Wilbur retorted with an undiplomatic chuckle and spoke, "No, that is absurd: I have known this forest for years, so I am aware of which mushrooms are the most flavorful. I will pick them for you!"
"Perhaps that is not a great idea--"
"That is very gracious, my king. My Dear and I will happily oblige, yes?" I interjected, eyeing my cross fiancé. His refusal to match my eye contract spoke the slew of wrathful curses I was sure he was letting smolder and liquify into stinging saliva.
Finally, George indignantly spat, "Fine."
With his wary consent, Wilbur began to visually scour the verdant terrain for his desired fungi. Taking a few undirected steps to the left, we onlooked as the king began to pluck slender, white-stocked fungi from its residence near the girthy, rotting roots of one of the grand coniferous trees. His thumb traced the mushroom's cap that reflected the colorization and gloss of ambrosial syrup.
Satisfied with his inspection, he started to appraise the length of the towering evergreen. At the base of the trunk sprouted an accumulation of golden toadstools that caught the glister of the sparce sunbeams. Ripping a handful away from its inhabitance, the king stood to the entirety of his height and ambled towards George and I with the elation of a child with his plucked gifts.
Approaching the aloof prince first, Wilbur offered the first bundle of fungi he collected to him and explained, "These were my favorites as a teenager; its flavor is adjacent to that of a pumpkin seed."
"Are you asking us to consume these raw? " replied George, his lips puckered in abhorrence at the thought.
His question was dismissed, however, as the jubilant king turned to me. "The mushrooms I have selected for you, My Lady, are as sweet as their namesake: honey mushrooms. As you can see, they have a chartreuse luminescence in shaded environments."
As I assessed the fungi, I overheard Wilbur conspicuously whisper to the chorus of curious crickets, "Sweet and radiant. Remind you of anyone?"
Dismissing the comment as to not draw my betrothed's attention, I bit into the cap of the honey mushroom and allowed its gelatinous layer to melt into a profound candied flavor that refreshed the bitter taste of my tongue. Seemingly not wanting to vex me further, George finally accepted the meal that had been handed to him and started to chew apace.
"Admittedly, I do not recognize this particular species of fungi: may I ask what it is?" George inquired, askance.
Shrugging his shoulders, Wilbur said, "Like I previously stated: these mushrooms have not been recorded to grow anywhere outside of these woods, so I do not have an official appraisal or documentation of what they are."
No one spoke in the preceding minutes, gracing me a few moments to observe the two royals in adjacent to me. Noticing my friend consumed nothing, I swallowed and asked, "King Wilbur, are you not going to eat?"
"No: I tend to not have an appetite midday," he responded nonchalantly. Turning to George--who had halted his meal at that remark--Wilbur asked, "Now, Prince George, would you like to discuss what you were longing to earlier?"
Abruptly apprehensive over an unspoken reason, George interrogated back, "Why the sudden change of heart, hm? I thought you would rather wait for a formal setting to entertain my question."
Wilbur's lips restrained his grin from another manic flash of his teeth. "I have a feeling this matter will be too trivial to call for a court. We might as well settle this dispute now, yes?"
Irresolute, my fiancé offered me a curt nod. "Very well, then." His attention was now centered on my lack of eye contact. "We will return in a moment, Love: don't run off now," he spoke before trailing Wilbur into the woods, his words husked with ominous rather than playfulness.
Unaided at last, I envisioned what valor it would take to retrace the hours of footsteps imprinted in the wild grasses by our boots. To neglect the consequences and impossible odds of escape for a savory moment of naivety.
Perhaps Wilbur had led George away on purpose. But, the fate of his younger brother would be compromised if I dared to even venture away mentally.
However, his refusal to consume any of the mushrooms concerned me. Whilst I desired to trust Wilbur, my betrothed's accusations the night prior made his character dubious. Wilbur had also called for me last night, but I did not abscond from my fiancé in fear of what repercussions the king and I might have faced for my fickle actions.
The remaining stalks of my devoured mushrooms slipped out of my slack hands; my body submitting to acute shivers. My joints became rigid as I teetered to my knees and held my bilious stomach. As I throttled heaves of stomach acid back into the base of my throat, the once comforting chirr of midday insects became a howl of undistinguishable whispers.
Was this Wilbur's revenge on the crown? For my refusal to join him?
As I watched the grass beneath my knees crawl up my flesh and twist into fat caterpillars, I could only drool as a substitute screaming; knowing the use of my vocal cords would result in an unpleasant heave of bile.
What were in those mushrooms, Wilbur?
~Wilbur's POV~
As we weaved through the sunless boscage and towards the murmur of the spurting stream--my intended destination--I remained observant of the volatile, erratic pace of George's footfall and the augmentation of his exhales. If my retention of the proper doses of psychedelic mushrooms from my teen hood stood unerring, then the poor bastard's consciousness would soon succumb to evocative hallucinations. Despite his character being undeserving of rue, I had been compassionate enough to give him a hallucinogen that would send him to his eventual slaughter heedless.
With a croak vociferous enough to draw George's attention, I began to speak, "What is so important that we must halt our business--"
"What is my bride to you, Wilbur?"
"Excuse me?" I responded, his sudden concern for his fiancée unpredicted.
The dazed prince exhaled with an abrupt stagger forward. "Don't stall: the question is fairly simple."
Could I have appointed Y/n to one title?
My closest confidante? My greatest muse? My bride-to-be?
"A close friend is all she is, Prince George," I answered, my words restrained in their simplicity.
The river's clamor became more reverberating as we advanced closer to its body. With garbled speech, the noble slurred, "Your nerve...nerve's quite 'impressive, Wilbur."
"And so do you for not addressing me by my official title. When you are in my kingdom, it is King Wilbur to you," I riposted, pleading that his body could withstand a few more moments of consciousness.
Beneath our soles, the soil had become sunken with retained moisture from the nearing water. Faltering forward, George spat, "Are ya' still foolin' yourself? These...gods...woods don't belong to you. They'll always belong to the...uhm...Dream. Yeah, his kingdom."
His eyelids became leaden, so I attempted to retain his attention by retorting, "I do not believe Lady Y/n is impressed with kingship."
"Oh, whaddaya' know of her that I don't?" snarled the prince, remaining oblivious to the culprit behind his demeaning state.
"More than you will ever comprehend."
I proceeded to the riverbank, George stumbling behind me. He called, "It doesn't--urgh--whaddya' know? After this, 'she'll never see you again!"
In the crystalline stream, the slender outline of a salmon darted in our direction. My muscles bracing instinctively, I spoke impassively, "Perhaps she will not be leaving with you."
The prince began to caterwaul, directing my attentiveness towards him--pitifully moldering as a corpse would on his tremoring knees. I grimaced, covertly appreciative for the distraction from the flailing of gauche, budding limbs behind me.
"Oh gods, those...th-those 'shrooms," groaned the prince, his irises seeping their vibrancy in exchange for pullulating sallowness that derogated the pampered sheen of his complexion. With unexpected vivacity, he started to bellow, "Help! Y/n, those--urgh--'shrooms...don't...don't trust--urgh, hel--help!"
His voice dissolved into a gurgle, and I nearly distressed for him: those words--charged by a final spurt of ardor for survival--were futile. If I had plucked the correct dosage, Y/n should have been mirroring her fiancé's condition. His screams, if heard, would be but another discombobulating screech of static in her ears.
Gods, I should have been kneeling beside her; purring candied words of solace. She would detest me for the psychogenic torment, but I would be freeing her of the fixed shackles that her abominable betrothed bounded her to. As I tended to her wounds imprinted from those cuffs, my grip would be unyielding; unwilling to allow her to flee to a life inscribed by a naïve, flawed hand.
"Wilby, my love, it seems you have made good on your promise."
What rhythm my breathing had been following became irregular with a startled hiccup. With a serpent's grace, one Sally's spindly arms wreathed my shoulders, whilst her other hand caressed my rigid jawline. Her touch reduced my strength to that of a child's: its disguised tenderness repulsing but petrifying me.
Eyes ample with stupefaction, George sputtered from his onlooking position, "Wha--no, you-you were ah fis..fish. Where'd you come...come..." his words faltered, as if he could dictate what was real, and he concluded with suspicion, "Nah...no, you're not real. Thisis...this is another trick."
I unraveled myself from the red-haired witch's talons. Without gracing her with a look of acknowledgement--without letting her view the dread that was so apparent in my eyes--I spoke, "Take your man and leave me forever, Sally; as we agreed upon."
With an insincere gasp, the siren retorted with false morosity, "And not even a kiss farewell? What happened to the boy that was such a gentleman?"
Despite my back being nonadjacent to her, the stench of rancid flesh amplified and overwhelmed the once pure oxygen in the still of the summer day. Limping towards us with a wrinkled nose was a whimpering George whose coiled fingers reached for Sally's flesh.
When met with moist skin rather than air, the noble exclaimed, "You--you're real! But how--I mean, only...only witches of the river..."
"Ah, the young prince: reduced to the mentality of a frail earthworm," sighed the witch with a tone melodic enough for me to finally turn to watch the entirety of the scene warily. "It is good that I am as ravenous as a springtime robin."
Her claws channeled into the layers of undeveloped muscles in George's forearm, causing him to wail out in agony. "You--you snake!" he cried, floundering his legs in vain, "A river witch--yeah, a river witch can't kill anyone with--urgh--godly blood!"
She responded with gluttonous eyes, "I can tell, young prince, when one has the touch of a god or goddess; you carry the air of a mortal." splaying her fingers to gape the flesh more, she said, "See: you bleed red. Human blood."
"That--that's' impossible!" he slurred, "I'm Lady Nature's creation--her son! I carry her 'blessing. See?"
His fingers curled and his shoulders braced further, but the seedlings that once heeded his commands had withered into flaccid stems with leaves that looked to be touched by the autumn winds: brittle and browned.
With triumph, however, he cried with a berserk shrill to his words, "Do ya' see that, ya' bitch? That hugeeee beanstalk I just grew? It's so...so..." glancing at the puzzlement that grimaced my expression and mania that inspired Sally's grotesque smile, George rasped, devastated, "It's not real, is it? There's' no...no beanstalk."
"It seems like Mommy abandoned you," mocked the salivating siren.
The prince did not bawl, howl, or bargain to be spared. As Sally hauled his lusterless body towards the surging stream, he only babbled obscenities and balderdash to presences only he could view.
Before the witch could begin her anticipated demolition of her prey's flesh, George shrieked his final words with bewilderment, "Mother--!"
Sally's lanceolate molars clamped into the supple skin of the prince's throat, abating his cry to a burble. Hastily, Sally began her descent down the river; her meal in tail.
I wanted to jeer for the witch to never return, but my tongue remained benumbed as the moments past anguished my conscience. His final cry for his mother brought me to my knees; for ]I did not grieve the deserved death of a man so vile, but mourned what would become of Tommy.
Would he cry out for me?
"Gods, Wilbur, you cannot lose her now. Too much has been surrendered," I murmured through the crevasses of the fingers that shielded my face.
"And to stop her from, my son, you must heed my coming words."
Upturning my expression in astonishment and unveiling my vision to see whose familiar voice had startled me, my jaw relinquished its clench and caved my lips into a sudden gape when I understood the woman towering above me was--
"Mother? What--how--"
She permitted my bafflement, evidently beset with lamentation.
I continued to sputter, "I thought--you never returned to Tommy, Tech--and I. We presumed you were murdered by Dream's forefather's men because...because you refused to leave these very woods!"
"Wilby, darling--"
"And-And if you have been observing this scene, why did George refer to you as his mother?" I questioned; the pitch of my voice boyish as if I was an agog child again.
Atop her tresses, that were as richly warm as the soil in a springtime garden, her sunhat she had always worn regardless of weather shaded her silver irises. She stood with the poise my mother always held, but her fingers were unblemished of the calluses that itched my skin as she would brush my curls from my eyes as a boy. Continuing to anatomize the woman whom I perceived as deceased, I remarked that her complexion was not only free of any blemishes but was as luminesce as the argent winter moonlight.
Sighing, she finally spoke, "Our reunion will not be long enough for me to explain in full, my son, but I could not have been killed."
Vindictive of the reason Mum lingered behind with Father initially, I catechized spitefully, "Have you finally concluded that we cannot rely on the gods? That they are selfish behind their masks of divinity, and they coax mortals such as yourself to martyr themselves for their diversion--"
"You speak with the tongue of an inane man!" cried Mother, severing the soft soil beneath her ashen pumps into factures. "Why, you speak like George..."
I had stumbled into the current behind me in perplexment. The distress that rounded my pallid lips curtailed her outrage from provoking any more mystical events.
With a sigh, Mother explained, "George was the only biological son your father and I had, whom I blessed with my control over nature."
"He...was being truthful?" With the prince's origins elaborated, my mother's radiant skin and mystical parting of the ground began to piece together who she truly was. "And if he was your son, that means--dear gods, you're Mother Nature!"
A cursory nod established my words as true.
Wading out of the current clumsily as a toddler may do when taking their first steps, I queried, "Why did you never tell us children?"
"I wanted to save that discussion for when you reached adulthood. Perhaps I did this in anticipation that you would swear loyalty to Lady Nature without my presence being a means for bias; to know you'd refuse to bargain or engage with XD.
"However, when you turned eighteen, you also turned your back on your upbringing; never praying or revering nature, like we had taught you as a lad," she concluded, a tendril from a revealed sprout under the brim of her veiled sun hat producing a handkerchief of lace to catch her concealed tears. "Despite your betrayal, your devotion to these woods inspired me to protect them from the calamitous frost XD tried to cast upon these woods."
My innards roiled with liability for her teardrops. Still, I pressed with curiosity: "Is it true, then, that George was a gift from you to XD's foul family to upkeep an alliance, or were you longing for a child of your blood, and not some mutt from the Dream Kingdom's alleyways?"
She answered with an injured sniff, "If I did not have George to exchange, our war would have leaked into the lives of the mortals. So, with the energy from the dwindling prayers and sacrifices I was receiving from the nation, I was able to create a blessed child.
I surrendered him to XD's royal family when he was just a toddler--just days before you and your siblings fled. Nature cared for him when I could not be there in the daytime; his days were spent in my celestial throne room."
"And Father...?"
"Your Father is the God of Aviation: the messenger of the gods," she replied, her tone becoming perfumed with a benign infliction. "He is overlooking the Dream Kingdom now: observing the escalating turmoil and unease."
Attentive to the unexpected news, I repeated, "Unease?"
Her painted cupid's bow upturned in fickle bemusement. "The end days are upon us, my son; with the loss of George, my peace treaty with XD has been demolished," she informed gravely, watching me stumble in her shadow once more. "Your accusations were correct: because we divinities do not care for mortals when we have the opportunity to destroy each other, we do not care who is slaughtered in our wake. XD will attempt to ravage my nature, so, in turn, I will murder the humans he cherishes so much."
She knelt, leveling herself to my frightened eyes. "There will be no survivors," she whispered.
The rasp brought me to my knees as well. Was my desire to be humanity's ruination?
"I--I gave George to Sally: he is...is dead because of me, and now...oh gods," I gasped, my lungs feeling undeserving of the invigorating oxygen the surrounding trees produced, "Everyone will be--the one I have tried to rescue--will be massacred because of me! Because of my jealousy!"
My intentions had been unalloyed since Y/n's first letter. I should have been writhing with dread, but my uninhibited animosity towards my mother and father's absences provided an alternative accountability:
The gods.
They were egocentric, apathetic beings, as Mother admitted. No, how could I be blamed for the death of a man produced by the sadists who bred generations of souls to be their desperate sycophants just to swell their ego for what? To outperform each other by creating grander things? Bigger things?
My sobs heaved into manic giggles as I hiccupped, "I am not at fault for this, Mother: doing away with George was my only option." Scowling at her influx of lace-stifled tears, I seethed, "You gods are to blame for this! I am only a bystander--another soul you manipulated. Although I despise the bastard, even George was a pawn!"
"He was my son, my blood; I loved him," she spoke with a softness that only breezes after a rainstorm carried. The mute of the insects implied all of the forest was heeding to her words. "My fury--damn it--convinced me to revoke his touch for at least the remainder of his trip; a punishment for his traitorous deals with XD. When I stood watch from the shade of the conifers, my mind had been determined when I comprehended what you intended to do to him."
The silence was prolonged, intending she had something else to see. With a burdened sigh, she admitted, "This is my doing, Wilbur."
"Mum--"
"You are smitten with the deceased prince's fiancée, yes? For the hardships I have trammeled you with, I am letting you flee with your maiden," my mother stated, the weeping vines that had lengthened with each teardrop underneath her veil retracting lethargically. "Although I have taken the blame, XD will not: and his wrath will seek you for a vengeance paid tenfold. Because you are not divine enough, I cannot conceal you in my throne room. However, even he is not omnipotent: run now to a shelter concealed in the rocks and the earth."
In return, I stammered, "Bu-But L'Manberg--my citizens! What will become of them?"
Refusing to find my disquieted eyes, she bluntly answered, "Their fate is as desolate as yours if you do not go. Now."
I stepped forward, but retreated to ask my final question, "Mum, if you have the opportunity to find Tommy before XD does..." the coming words were brittle and scabbed my throat with grotesque cuts as they physically recoiled my mother like daggers, "Could you sing him the L'Manberg anthem before you...you put him to rest? This country was, too, his dream, and I'd sing it as a lullaby when tucking him in for sleep: a reminder our tomorrow could be the day we were free. A day of hope."
The grass emaciated beneath her, the idea of having to execute her son as an act of mercy rotting her within. "I will," she croaked.
I had lurched forward only a few steps before Mother declared, "I feel the grass fold beneath soles that are not ours. My son, she is here."
~Y/n's POV~
My flesh was cratered with bloodless wounds; decorticating as the yowls murmured into the bubbling of a riverbed. If cries for help pushed past my lips as I shambled and writhed in the direction my fiancé and his rival traversed, I would have not the awareness to recall.
He flickered between the appearance of being abstract and whole, but I knew the man several footsteps away from me was Wilbur. The woman that shaded him in her colossal shadow, however, could not have been real; for who else would roam woods this remote without a companion?
But he spoke to her words that dissipated into the breeze before they reached my ears, so she must have been real.
Their eyes found mine, so they must have been.
"Wilb--Wilbur!" I croaked.
His words were malformed; each sound omitted from his lips submerging into the soil beneath us. When his forearms caught my body before it could teeter further, his words finally reached a pitch of clarity.
He instructed me with a subdued tone, "Y/n, my darling, do not speak: if you deplete your energy now, you won't be able to run."
"R-Run?" I echoed, the utterance I had just heard perplexing me. "To wh-where--Wait, what's that...that on the grass? It's not--no, no it's another hallucination! Like--like that giant wo-woman I saw talk...talking to you."
Not afar, over the king's shoulder, was tufts of ripe river grass blotched with scarlet as vibrant as summer fruit. I awaited its dematerialization--as my other hallucinations did not exceed past a few moments--but its discoloration remained.
Wilbur tried to reassure, "It-It's just a vision from the mushrooms, my dear--"
"So you--you admit to...to drugging me!" I cried, vindicated for my accusations.
"Let me explain--"
"No, how could I...I trust you?" I disrupted, staggering towards the stream behind him. Its water had the baleful tincture of orange, and the vile potency of oxidized iron. A skim of my fingertips flaked the dry substances, confirming its identity: blood.
Voice incredulous, I rasped, "This is...gods, it's blood, 'isn't it?"
"Y/--"
"You murdered George."
Wilbur gasped, "I could never! I am--I am--my hands are clean, see?" He had crumpled beside me, his fingers splayed before my evading irises. "The siren consumed him, Y/n: I'm innocent!"
"A siren...cannot...cannot overpower some-someone with divine blood. George was blessed," I stated, his justification nearly credible with the desperation that strengthened his tone.
"I--"
"How did it happen, Wilbur?"
"If you do not hold your tongue, our blood will be next!" he bellowed; his nails rooted in the frayed sleeves of my sordid tea-length dress.
Quietude, at last, fell upon us.
That was until the hysterical king sighed, "I apologies, Y/n: I should not expect you to believe me." he continued factually, "But that woman you observed talking with me was--is real. She's my adoptive mum: Lady Nature."
I snorted at the absurdity of his claim. It was a grave and rather unpunctual realization, but George had been right: Wilbur was as psychotic as he was dangerous.
"George..." I hiccupped, his name a motif for a positive attribute: concern. His haughtiness obscured his beats of sincerity, but his warnings were not out of the jealousy I believed them to be, but out of protection.
The name glowered Wilbur's expression. He spoke, "George served as the respite between Lady Nature and XD, but now that he's...gone, Armageddon draws closer with each breath we take. Do you understand?"
Suddenly, my body longed for slumber; the mirages dispelling as each blink prolonged seconds more than the last.
"I need to flee--"
"Yes! We will escape--"
"--before Dream finds me. He'll slaugh--slaughter you when the opportunity is present, but he'll take his...take his time with me," I elucidated, compelling my body to balance its burdensome limbs so I could stand. "The bastard has always detested me. And, with Ge-George dead, he'll take his grief out on me."
Pupils overtaking the amber that crystallized each emotion into a speck of gold, Wilbur answered, "You do not understand, my darling: Dream is the slightest of your worries." His fingertips tilted my jawline to view the instability spasm of each muscle hidden in the acuteness of his face. "Beyond these woods, I have a bunker prepared for such a time as this. It harbors a button that would allow my citizens to die mercifully, and an enclosure to conceal us from the swelter of the explosion."
"No," I refused, my mind succumbing to the lure of sleep. "I can't...I'm next..."
~Wilbur's POV~
Her body slouched further into my arms, yielding to the exhaustion the mushrooms had induced.
It had been so long since I had felt so warm.
A crow squalled abroad, recalling I must start my journey by footfall if I longed to hear a bird's cry again.
Y/n stirred as I pulled her into my arms. Just as Tommy would each night after out abrupt move. As I did the nights after my first encounter with Sally.
Words were her reassurance, her comfort; as they were mine. And as I held her, the melody came so easily to me:
Prince George, please wake up
There's a war going on
The gardens are burning
and your maiden is gone
She ran away
With a king so true
He stole her away
From the prince in blue.
Hello (s)hawties! I hope this ending satisfied you guys. :D Not to sound like an AO3 author, but my life has been very eventful recently. (First year of high school has been a little rougher than I imagined lmao.)
It has been confirmed recently that the DSMP will probably not be coming back for a second season. (Even if there was a season two, I don't think I would write for it.) This server is now a fond memory: a funny little roleplay with unlikely success that included some amazing content creators. Perhaps it is better this way. If Quackity's QSMP ends up having its own lore, I may write for that. Who knows?
Thank you all for sticking around so far and have a wonderful day/night!❤️