image [https://i.imgur.com/pMZm76y.png]

My mind took me back to a once upon a time. Once, on the high cliffs of Anticlere I had knelt beside my brother beneath a sycamore which rocked compulsively to and fro against a stiff night breeze that streamed off the sea. Leaves rustled as we smiled at one another — in the present, seeing this again in a dream as I often now do, I envy the trusting stupidity in the way he looked at me. When I laid the mirror face up between us there were no branches visible, only an unknown star filled sky trapped within as we sang together:

“Apple eye,

Apple eye,

Tell me when I'm gonna die.

And if I live,

Then you lied,

I'll eat those apples from your eyes.“

Between the screaming-wide jaws of the ouroboros frame, a face sank up from the void. Poreless cheeks without age, brows and nose dulled to shadows as if half remembered; eyes vivid green of a tree snake, perfectly rounded and unblinking orbs without pupils.

Whoever it had been, I knew they were long dead now.

My child lips moved without sound as it tilted upon the mirror’s surface like a lily pad twisting on a pond. The entire world squeezed down to a slow trickle, branches faltered mid-wave in the air and my brother pausing where he rocked, kneeling now like a statue. I realized it was waiting for me to speak.

***

I woke from that dream, as I had so many times before, to find myself alone in bed, curled on my side around the twisting agony in my gut as if rope was cinched tight around my intestines. It must have been midmorning.

My hand clawed at the side table, passed over Benezia’s poison vial and searched until it found the neck of the liquor bottle I'd been sipping to ease myself down after the war council. Reality returned to me, an ugly rush of memory and reliving the way I had sat terrified and silent like a rabbit in a room of men. And now not even the drink could save me from the dreams.

I rose to an elbow and brought the bottle to my lips, misjudged its fullness, and spilled a trickle down my chin, cold and clinging against my collar bone.

"Blood and ashes."

I tossed the bottle at the far wall, not giving much of a damn. I had two dozen more in my kitchen for all the good they would do me. It spun a half arc before shattering into shards that rained onto the floor, leaving only a foamy wet spiderweb on the wall. The crack of it roused someone in the living room, and after a patter of feet the door swung open. Aiera.

"Berree! What happened?"

"Nothing my love, just let me rest."

She hung in the doorway, a long legged silhouette wavering in a short kimono she knew I fancied. She must have been waiting in the living room for me to wake, knowing how anxious I had been earlier, and here was her reward — a sullen manchild. There is nothing more hideous in this world than a hateful drunkard.

After a moment I cleared my throat. "What's wrong is we're going to war. The legion is coming."

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

She cocked her head. "This we have all heard, word travels fast in the Palace of Perfected Fortune as the Berree well knows. But we have been going to war for months, no?"

"Not necessarily, there were deals to be made, some truce perhaps.” She squinted at me as though I spoke another language. “I just didn't think it would ever go this far. I don't like hurting people. I–” a burp escaped me. “I just really, really, don't want to hurt anyone."

"My sweet does no harm! But we are of this world, no? And the war comes, Aiera and Berree, and everyone else can only climb the branches on offer. He mustn't blame himself —"

"But what if I am to blame? In a lot of ways I did cause the situation.” More ways than she knew. Lies of omission thicker than the cord of a fisherman's net between us.

She crossed over to me in three long strides, with her hands sliding up to cup the back of my neck. "Everyone caused it. The Berree is special but not so very special as he may think. Storms will always come but we will endure. We must."

Her kindness only angered me more and I could feel the hurt squirming up my gut. "It's not a few damn raindrops. I caused this. I told His Holiness what he wanted to hear. I was complicit in my brother's failures. I lacked the courage to speak like a real man or the real leader every fool around this palace insists on pretending I am.”

"They adore Berree because they know him, all of them—"

"They don't know me because they don't know any better, and they dont know better because I keep them all ignorant. You say everyone is responsible, but my sweetness, I have to say you’re wrong. Someone is always responsible, and I am in ways you could never dream of. I've probably already killed thousands of innocent people, they just have no clue yet."

“But what can we do? We both sought peace, to solve the riddle of rumored twin manes as Berree calls it — we know there are secrets to uncover but we cannot stop the tides of history alone…"

I shook my head. "I never really tried. I played games at it, sure, but never at any cost to myself. I should have confronted His Holiness the very day I met him. Told him what he really is."

Her eyes hardened. "What is he?"

I could only shake my head. I could not meet her gaze and my tongue felt fat and swollen.

"When Berree is ready then. but it would have been a pointless sacrifice, and the highest blasphemy in the eyes of the Lion Head Priests to doubt His Holiness."

"It would have made me decent though! To give of myself first before veiling my eyes and crushing the treasures of the world underfoot, lest I know better. It will be someone else's son catching a javelin to the chest on a barren dune, and another’s going up the bloody siege ladder. And children will live with the consequences — their homes and loved ones destroyed, precious gifts in earthen vessels to be crushed before their eyes by the cowardice of some moron living in a far away tower. And when they carry that pain forward, will they weep for me? Will they say, ‘He didn’t mean to do it — the rest of the world seemed intent on my suffering — the Fate Weaver must have known best. He who suggested mercy, but never missed a meal for it.’ Some of them will honor me, I suspect, if we somehow win. Perhaps that is what disgusts me the most.”

Her eyes searched me at a loss. I swallowed, tasted salt, and realized I had been crying. “I wanted to do better this time. I wanted to do better than with my brother, but I didn’t.”

I pushed hands off me before stumbling back to the wall, and then sliding onto the flat of my ass. Bless her heart though, she didn’t leave. "Maybe Berre does not know the future… maybe there are better things coming that Berree has never dared to dream of."

"I've dreamt plenty and it's all awful. I'm awful. And selfish. And drunk."

She let me mope for a few more minutes, bleating on in much the same fashion before I regained enough composure to apologize for my outburst. She was gracious enough to accept and took to her knees with me as we picked glass shards from the carpet and swept the mess into a tidy pile in the corner. The stomach pain had faded to mere heaviness in my chest by then, but I felt rich beyond my worth just to have her still in that room with me. Afterwards, I lay back down on my side again and she joined behind me, running her fingers through my hair. Things would get better, she promised, we would do better but we could not take on the guilt of the world, surely, but it would all resolve eventually and we would someday forget all the dark times between — it was only a matter of time.

Her warm hand paused at my temple. "Aiera does not know all of the Berree's machinations with the mirror, the alliances, and his mastery over fate — but she knows this — the Berree is a great man. The greatest and sweetest she has known, and what he does is the right thing.”

I swallowed thickly. Grateful that I faced away from her so I did not have to bear her looking into my face or see the unwarranted warmth in her beautiful eyes. I managed a numb ‘thank you’ and soon enough she snored softly beside me. She had been so tired of late.

I stared as the sun crept up the pale wall until finally, I was fool enough to close my eyes once more. When sleep briefly took its hold over me it was only to endure more familiar horrors dredged from the wells of my memory.

When I woke, I would have to poison the Mane.