FLYNN CLAYMORE

Flynn could not put himself to sleep. The fear that he would dream of that night once again lingered not too far from him. It always came when the sky had grown dark and when his eyes had gone shut in the flickering candlelight of his room; the same hallway, the same door, and the same shadowy figures of his father and… mother. The words too, those ones he could hear even as he was awake. …Don’t tell him… those words. …I do not want to see him… he did not need sleep for these ones to come to him, the silence in the bleak of night was more than enough.

Then with the words there would always come the eldritch finger-like tendrils coiling around his heart, thin, pale and cold, filling him equally with dread and… anger. Anger at who? Those he was to hate were gone. Gone! They had escaped his loathing, avoided it, but someone had to be an outlet for his feelings of spite, someone had to. If the words would not leave him be, then the same would prove true for his anger. He had to give it to someone, his loathing and his spite. And he had given it to them, the only ones that he could. The children of the ones he loathed. The princes and the princess of House Ravenswood. Only, even that had grown lacklustre now. He could not even hate all of them any longer. Growing too close with those two must have been his greatest mistake, one he might never recover from. His chest tightened. He needed an outlet for all this pent up rage. But where could he put it all?

The fire before him grew, chasing away the whorls of tendrils around his heart with screeches and scurries, but in return for that moment of calmness it gave Flynn it chose to suck him in instead. Flynn did not mind most of the times, he always knew he was being sucked in but he had little care, and now was one of those times. It grew and he gazed. Dim yellow becoming brighter and brighter by the second, and Flynn slumping closer and closer in accordance.

He had been sucked in by the fire once as a child, and he had been burnt then. A small burn on his chest, one that had now completely faded through the efforts of his father’s medics and attendants. The scolding he got was not what had stopped him from being burnt again, it was the books he began to read in preparation to become a royal advisor. He had found his way to exert his revenge then, and at that moment the fire had ceased to suck him in. But just when he had achieved his goal and was about to confront one of those he loathed, the king: Sargon Ravenswood, the man died. He died and left Flynn all alone bearing the loath, bearing the hate, bearing it all.

The fire that brightened his room hissed for a second as the candle it reigned upon melted fiercely. It was almost as though it shared Flynn’s rage as well, almost as though he and the fire were connected. Maybe they were to connect physically as they were already doing emotionally. Maybe they were meant to be one in both body and soul. Maybe… He eased himself closer, and closer, and closer, and when he was almost upon the connection he sought, a voice came to pull him out of his fearless reverie.

“My lord.” He knew the voice at once, after all it was the only voice that could call upon him at this time of the night, and there was only one reason that it no doubt would bring with itself.

“Send her in,” Flynn told his steward before he had the chance to say anymore. The young lord of Claymore, tousle-haired, rose from his seat and donned a thick woollen night robe over his exposed body, then went to his window and pushed it open as his door did the same. “Must we always meet this way?” He told the person who had sauntered in. The person who was none other than Melisandre.

“It’s not my fault that we do,” she replied.

Flynn turned away from the window to behold her seated beside his hearth. “If you make a choice then it is your fault. What happened at the feast?” He wasted no time. Luckily for her, he was not angry, at least not anymore.

Melisandre let an oblivious demeanour shroud her face. “What do you mean?”

Flynn was not in the mood for her play. “Don’t do that. Do not act ignorant. I lack the patience.” He dropped on his bed, thick robe tucked beneath him. “I’ll ask again: what happened at the feast?”

Melisandre sighed with a shrug and put her arm to rest on the table. “I met with him like I told you I would.”

“And? You did not think to come to me after you did?” Flynn was not impressed. He was rarely impressed in truth.

She had been gazing at the flame in the hearth for a while, but now she took it up to Flynn. “The Ravenswoods still roam the castle unharmed, isn’t that enough proof that I have not succeeded in getting the king to do what I want? What we want?” She sighed again. “He’s stubborn, and has some of these little ideologies that he chooses not to go against.”

Of course… he lost his memories, not his personality… Flynn was not a stranger to what and who Zephyr was as a person. The man valued his ideologies so highly, he would never choose to harm anyone based on the words of another. Melisandre would not understand that. She never understood anything that was not fitting for her ploys. “What did you say to him?” Flynn asked the black-cloaked Melisandre.

Melisandre flung her palm outwards. “That his half-family were the ones that killed him, and he should have their heads.” Her mood was as weak and tired as her eyes.

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“And?” Flynn already knew what he had told her. He could guess it. Zephyr was as plain as a book to him. They have been friends for a long time, and now he was his royal advisor, ever closer than they were before. He knew both King Zephyr and just Zephyr, both shared no difference but the crown.

Melisandre’s face screwed in irate. “He told me to bring proof of my claims.” She scoffed.

Flynn smiled. Of course that was what he expected Zephyr to say. Losing his memories did no change to him. “What did you do at the feast to make him spill the wine?”

“Nothing,” Melisandre told Flynn. “I did nothing but say the red mist, and he lost it.”

A plausible reaction, Flynn deduced. The wine had become something that would fill Zephyr with dread no matter where he’d see it or who might serve it to him. It was something that he had no choice but to grow to fear.

“He’s afraid of dying but he hesitates to kill them,” Melisandre continued. “There has to be some way. A faster way to get rid of them all. I’m losing my patience here. I’ve waited long enough. It’s been—”

“You may leave,” Flynn rode her off. He wanted to hear no more, if he had even still been listening in the first place. “I want to have my rest now, and so should you.” He was about to tuck himself, robe and all, beneath his blanket when Melisandre suddenly voiced in spiteful curiosity.

“You do not care?” She said, “you do not care that they still live?”

Flynn spared her no glance, but his tucking slowed. “I do. I just need my rest.”

“You lying lord,” she spat. “What has gotten over you? Have you forgotten what they did to you?”

“They did nothing to me,” Flynn barked. “The ones that did it all are dead! Dead and gone! Do not make me angry and just leave. My sleep is all I crave now.”

“Their children live,” Melisandre was not stopping, she never did. “All you ever let yourself do when we were still at the Vale of Rocks was weep and speak of revenge, and now that you see it you say they did nothing? I can’t believe my ears. Wax must have found its way into them.” She stuck her forefingers into her ears, twirling them in hope to remove the wax she spoke about.

“Leave me be,” Flynn hissed. It must have been a jape though, because even he knew she would never leave him be, at least not now, until she’d said all she wanted to say.

“No,” she told him, then rose to her feet and trudged before him where he sat on his bed halfway beneath his blanket. “We must do something.”

Flynn was exhausted. As the royal advisor his workload was already cut out for him, and Melisandre was making it ever more daunting with any chance she could get. “What would you have me do?” He said tiredly. “I killed him and you brought him back. Now what else would you have me do?”

She crouched before his bed and looked up at him. “I brought him back because he’s the only one that has the power to kill them.”

“And now he does not seem to want to do it. You made a choice and this is the consequence of that choice, so why do you bother me so? Maybe find a way to conjure a proof of your claims. You are a witch after all.”

Melisandre inhaled sharply. “Do not call me a witch.”

“Then what are you?” Flynn asked incredulously. “Tell me. You’ve never been able to tell me what you are, so why correct me if you yourself don’t know what you are?” He sighed then, he had said too much. “Just leave me to sleep.”

“I have a plan,” Melisandre said, completely forgetting she had just been called a witch. Her thirst for revenge burned so strongly.

“What plan?” Flynn was tired of plans, especially ones that came from a certain witch who went by the name: Melisandre. “What plan could you possibly have that would not fail the way your last one did?” He tucked himself completely beneath his blanket now. “I am tired of hearing you speak, and I am tired from the day’s stress, so just let me—”

“Become king,” Melisandre cut in, and silence followed. A long, dragged out whistle of unheard voices, one only home to the grand whooshes of the wind, smeared with the smell of sea salt, that made its way into his room through the opened shutters of his window.

Then he laughed. A long laugh at her joke, and it almost brought a tear from his eye and down his right cheek. “Thank you for doing the job of a fool. That was such a good one. Let me sleep now.”

Melisandre knitted her eyebrows, thin and cleanly shaped they were, but now they made her demeanour into a frown, a beautiful one. “I joke not,” she said, words devoid of any beauty like the one her face bore.

Flynn quickly lost all the humour that his face had had a second ago. “You should stop it.” His voice was hard.

“You can take it if you want, you know it. You also have a—”

“Stop it,” Flynn roared. “And leave now, before I lose my patience. I will have no word on this matter leave further from your lips.” Flynn’s chest tightened and his heart raced. On his skin rose a thousand goosepimples, each one standing with a different fiery rage than the other, but at the same time… “Please, no more,” he begged softly with a sullen shake of his head as a single tear rolled down his left cheek, warm and tender, but at the same time cold. “I beg of you.”

Melisandre retained her crouch for a while, silent as she never was, and soon after she took to her feet and waddled out of the room, her lips held shut and her eyes tenderly broken.