The sound of blood striking metal punctuates the silence at strangely precise intervals. Beyond huge windows draped with golden silk, the stars speckling the night sky cast a silvery glow upon the prone body of a young man lying on a futon. Beside him stand two men, one tall and cadaverous, the other short and stocky.
“Do you know what kind of poison it is yet Zeha?” asks the tall man.
The short man called Zeha does not immediately reply, as he continues to stare at the black blood draining into a bowl, eyebrows raised almost touching his hairline and a slight frown playing across his lips.
“I am sorry.”
“I will report to the king” the tall man says before ambling out of the room.
In the king’s study, a small room made to seem even smaller by the gigantic bearlike man sitting at a table peering at documents over horn rimmed spectacles. The tall man pushes open the door and bows,
“Ankar greets the king”
Badruk the third the king of Sharfell, is going through state documents while his only son breathes his last two rooms away.
“What news?” asks Badruk still peering at the documents in his hands.
“I am sorry my liege the prince will not make it” says Ankar unsurprised by the lack of emotion from the king, a good king is not necessarily a good father he thinks to himself.
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“Who knows”
“Just Zeha and I my liege”
“Keep it that way, tell everyone the prince was poisoned but survived, even his mother, then activate the leper”
“But my liege, what of the blood of Arafell,”
For the first time since Ankar entered the room, the king puts down the documents and looks at him with eyes as clear and blue as the summer sky, a jagged lightening shaped scar running down from beneath his left eye down his face and through his lips giving him a permanent sneer. The casual cruelty borne by the look of indifference on the kings’s face sends a knife of fear through Anker’s guts.
“The blood of Arafell is a lie, a palliative told to the people to keep them subservient. Have you never asked yourself why my grandfather Arwin the conqueror who spent most of his life at the war front managed to birth seven children, or why four of those seven including my father looked like the dandy Lord Abinah. Do not make me repeat myself, and have all the prince’s servants killed just to be safe”
“Yes my liege” says Ankar before withdrawing from the study.
Alone in the room surrounded by silence, the crackling fire casts a yellow glow upon the calm unmoving face of Badruk the king, barely catching a single errant tear drifting forlorn down his left eye.