trigger warning!!
Child neglect. Don't read if such sensitive topics upset you. take care of yourself!!
No seriously, this author wrote some really messed up things. Don't read it.
Also unedited.
"So, that's why you threw a hissy fit when I said we shouldn't go to North."
Raven brushed his hair back and clicked his tongue in annoyance. "You were scared shitless but still wanted to come because you knew there was a metal piece in Queensend"
River remained impassively silent as he followed the Southern King.
"Why though?" Raven questioned.
"Why what?"
Raven glanced at Valor, who was marching ahead. After making sure that he was out of their earshot, he stepped closer to River.
"What if they captured you at Seafort?" Raven's shoulder brushed against River's and the latter stepped away.
"And why are you trying so fucking hard to find them, even putting your life and freedom at risk?"
Raven moved in closer, yet again, eating up the distance between them. He was rocking the fragrance of wine as usual, smelling like he was marinating in it for the past decade.
In the early days of their rather odd alliance, River found the way he smelled quite offensive. Whenever Raven was in the same room as him, he would get an unbearable headache from the strong, sweet smell of aged Softberry.
It could be his personality that caused the headache, though.
Now, that he was used to his loudmouth, uncouth manners, and explosive anger, he found the scent that lingered on Raven's existence not so bad in comparison. Comforting even, at times.
"You have nothing to gain or lose, as you said." Raven probed.
"Because of you" River said, his toneless voice followed by a yawn. "I can't have you struck by lightning,"
He paused for a second. "yet"
Raven slowly blinked twice, as if he just heard a dog reciting holy scriptures.
"Even if we were attacked in Seafort, I knew you wouldn't let them take me."
River lethargically dragged his feet after Valor, oblivious to Raven's jaw that was hanging lose. "Not without a fight. And you don't lose in fights."
"I knew Missy loved me," Raven boasted, flashing a smug grin.
"I tolerate you," River deadpanned, with all the enthusiasm of a potato.
"Can you stop pestering Fuuko?" Valor called over his shoulder, throwing a disapproving glare at them. "Look how uncomfortable he is with you."
Raven scanned River's face with great interest for a while. "but isn't this his usual face?"
"I'm usually uncomfortable with you."
"Also, why do call him that?" Raven queried, ignoring River's remark.
Valor's pace slowed until he completely stopped in his tracks. He stood frozen for a couple of minutes, in deep thought.
"I..can't remember." Valor answered finally, shrugging. "That's what I've been calling him since time."
"Can I call you that too?" Raven bounced on his feet and River pushed down the urge to poke him in his one good eye.
"Besides everything," Valor sighed. "I'm indebted to you, Alistair."
Both eyed Valor quizzingly.
"For getting Fuuko out of.. there."
Valor's hands raised to his face, wiping his eyes. Even without seeing his face, both knew he was crying once more. His voice quivered when he spoke again.
"You did what I miserably failed to do all my life" He sighed deeply, his shoulders slumping.
"I'll be damned if I let him suffer,ever again."
Without waiting for a response, he sped ahead, muttering a hasty excuse.
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River owned only very, pitifully small number of cherished memories from his childhood. Most of them were the months leading up to his confinement in East Wing.
Valor and him.
Two brothers from the same father but different mothers.
Two children that were nothing alike.
One, the pride and joy of the family, a god's favorite. A bubbly, polite child who was also a massive crybaby. The boy who would be the next king of North, hailed as the golden prince.
The other, six years his junior, meek, and lifeless. The boy who was born a nobody, fated to die a nobody.
Their childhood was like broken mirror to him, where he could only recall incomplete fragments of their time spent together.
He remembers Val and him eating Frucois in the sunlight, under the shade of a towering tree. He could almost taste the sickly-sweet fruit on his tongue, feel how his fingers got all sticky from the bright purple juice. He remembers the crunch of its peel as Valor bit into it with abandon, stuffing his cheeks. They had talked and laughed, got belly aches from eating too much of the delicious round fruit.
But all that could be a dream he had in the East wing, that his mind mistook for a memory. He was not sure.
He couldn't remember what he looked or behaved like as a child. Even now, he couldn't fathom a clear image of himself. Yes, he had blue eyes, pale skin, and black hair. But he couldn't paste those features together to form a distinct human face he could call "River Verlice".
River was a deadname on memorial tablet, he had no right to the name Verlice. In his head, he was a blob of meat plastered on an awkward frame of bones, wrapped up in a bland sheet of skin. Mireya Huxley once told he had witchy blue eyes, so drew them on his face. Valor commented his hair was dark as coal in the fireplace, so he drew that on his head.
So that's what he looked like to himself, a deformed monstrosity crawling around, wearing a poorly painted face of a person.
Sometimes, in the darkness of the East wing, he would close his eyes and try hard to remember what he felt or what he did as a child.
One thing he clearly remembered was how afraid he was of darkness.
When sun set over the eaves of Arcton Palace, his caretaker would put him in his room, a closet sized chamber on the bell tower crawling with rats, where maids or guards seldom came simply because it was too high to climb. She would lock the doors, as per instructions by the king. He would not be let out until sunrise again, under no reason.
His mind started associating lack of light with isolation and it instilled a fear in him so deep that he wasted all his day dreading the night. A fear so visceral that he could tap into how he exactly felt as a four-year-old child.
Even when everything else of his life is a murky blur of a memory, the crippling horror he felt as sun sank over the horizon, bleeding day into night-was still tangible to him.
Curled on the freezingly cold floor, he sobbed silently till sunlight peeked through the high windows again next morning.
Dawn was his favourite time of the day. Time when sunlight hugged him like a loving mother,taking away all his fears and worries. The palpable relief he felt as warmth tickled his skin, finally brightening his dark world- he couldn't forget that, even if he tried.
Then, one fateful night, all his dawns were ripped away from him.
Lucian Verlice dragged him across the dimly lit corridors of Arcton palace when he was barely six, pushed him into a belly of gloom where windows and sunlight didn't exist.
He remembered how he clawed at the heavy door until his fingertips were raw, screaming, begging not to be left alone in this hell hole, until he lost his voice and throat tasted like blood.
He recalled how utterly destroyed he felt when no one came to take him out that night, or next morning.
Or the next.
He waited and waited, crouched in a corner next to the heavy door, like an animal, hugging himself for a semblence of comfort. He desperately clung to the hope that, someone would open the door any minute now, and take him out.
He waited and waited, not knowing if it was day or night.
He cried and screamed till he passed out from hunger and paralyzing fear, and woke up again to repeat the cycle.
He waited and waited, until he forgot what his own face looked like. Waited as his sense of time warped into a maddening limbo, where seconds felt like years and minutes like eternity.
He waited until his mind no longer registered his voice as his, making him jump at his own screams. He waited until silence drove him out of his mind, and he started hallucinating.
He waited until he could no longer tell he was awake or asleep, dead or alive. Until he couldn't tell reality apart from his delirious dreams, and it felt like he was living the same never ending nightmare, either way.
He waited and waited, for the next decade for someone, anyone to come and take the scared child out of darkness.
But no one did.
He always knew he was unwanted. Unloved. That no matter how much he craved for it, he will never be spared a dust of love. That he will never taste a hint of warmth. That he was not being treated like a person but a thing.
A thing couldn't feel pain or grief. Hunger or thirst. A thing didn't require to be taken care of or loved.It will remain where you left it abandoned, until it decays to nothingness.
So, somehow, at one point in time, he accepted that it was who he exactly was.
A thing.
He stopped waiting, for what will never come. The heavy door to open.
A smile from his father. A kind word. Embrace of a mother. Warmth of sunlight. A dawn.
He finally picked himself from the cold floor by the door, and ventured into the East Wing, letting the blackness swallow him up whole.
He was a thing.
A nameless, faceless thing.
A worthless ,useless thing.
So when he was given a piece of bread through a slot of the door, on the fourth night, he silently picked it off the filthy marble floor and ate it.
When he tripped and fell, countless times, he crawled back up.
When he was sick or hurt, he soundlessly endured the pain.
Whatever he felt, he ignored it.
He ignored himself as hard as others did.
He was a thing.
The thing could break but would never cry.
First, he lost his smile.
Then his tears.
Then his memories.
He lost and lost until one day he woke up to darkness and realized that he had lost his fears too.
When nothing hurt or enraged him anymore, he knew he had lost everything that made him a person.
The darkness of the East Wing would slowly sucked life out of River Verlice over next thirteen years, until the child it consumed was reduced to nothing but a dry pile of slightly bigger bones.
The child with big blue eyes and small hands who wept by the heavy door, never left that corner even after River Verlice left East Wing, thirteen years later.
Cursed to never escape.
In his mind, he could never leave that wretched place.
When he closed his eyes, he could still see that little boy scratching at the door, wondering what he had done wrong to suffer a punishment so cruel.
That boy never understood why his father hated him. He didn't understand anything. He only knew he was being deprieved of love, and it was somehow his fault. Because he was born abnormal. Because he was not good enough and lacking. Because even god abandoned him.
Yet, in his small collection of treasured memories, there was one that glittered like gold. Single flicker of brightness in his bleak existence; a bittersweet moment when his broken tender heart felt a fleeting embrace of love. A memory he would gladly die, if erased, for it quenched his soul's thirst for a taste of belonging.
The sight of his eleven-year-old brother standing in the shadow of his torment; a feeble barrier between him and the tyranny of their father. Valor, barely more than a child himself yet braver than any warrior on the battlefield, pointing a sword too heavy for his small hands at his king, the man he admired the most-his father.
"No! Go away!" he yelled, waving the sword around.
Lucian Verlice loomed over them like an angry god, far larger than the scrawny kid fumbling with the sword. His face contorted in fury and mockery at Valor's disobedience, at his utterly laughable endeavor to protect his brother from being dragged by his throat to imprisonment.
But Val did not flinch.
"He cries when it is dark. It is always dark in there!"
River's heart clenched at the memory of Valor's steadfast shoulders, a shield against the cruelty that they were both at the mercy of. That day River realized with crushing clarity; that to love was to protect. He was being protected like something Val loved with his whole soul.
No.
Someone.
He had a big brother who loved him. Who loved him even when it took a lot to do so, protected him no matter what retribution he had to suffer.
The courageous one. What a fitting name.
In a way, Valour Verlice was everything to his brother. A father, a friend, and a hero.
Valor was the one who brought River his supplies to East wing for his projects. He was the one who argued for three months until Lucian Verlice allocated him a mentor and a caretaker, making sure he didn't end up illiterate. Valor was the first one to hug him. First one to light a candle in East wing.
All their lives, Valor had struggled relentlessly to shield his brother from every hurt in the world. He had shouldered the burden of their fractured family, a boulder too heavy for his mellow heart that felt everything too deeply. He fought tirelessly to soften the harsh edges of their world, to bridge the chasm that tore them apart. Though his efforts were futile, he never wavered in his determination to bring justice to what he believed was unfair.
Alistairs were as powerful and adaptable as snakes, Wendigos nurtured wisdom through generations and their insignia was the Desert Owl. Shulz were as loyal as Snow Wolves and guarded what they loved with life.
Verlices were righteous.
They defended what they believed to be right and just with their soul. Verlices were noble and courageous as the Mountain Stags they wore on their chests.
Valor really was the golden child of Verlices. Perhaps the only heir deserving of the name and legacy.
So, when he came running today from Queensend, leaving his wife and baby behind alone, abandoning his duties, going against his father, River knew it was out of nothing but love.
When he begged Raven Alistair to take River to Sandgil, with tears in his eyes, it was because he wanted to protect his worthless brother.
Brother who didn't even deserve to become a speck of dust on the ground his feet stepped on.
Author has something to say
Lemme just copy paste this here for further emotional damage
Solitary confinement can be considered a form of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, especially when used for extended periods or under harsh conditions. When individuals are isolated in small cells for 22-24 hours a day, often with limited or no human interaction, it can lead to severe psychological and physical effects. These effects may include anxiety, depression, hallucinations and cognitive decline.
Also, hold your questions. They will be answered in the future.