The Cumbrian mountains bore the weight and beating of the pouring rain, leaving gaping puddles upon the chocolate earth. As the wind shook the trees and swayed their branches to and fro, thunder rumbled across the darkened sky, mimicking the sound of a thousand giants stomping their feet on the ground. A bolt of lightning struck a nearby cliff, causing chunks of stone to break off at the surface and roll down to the bottom with a crash. Packs of wolves swarmed the forest for a scrap to eat, their paws leaving tracks in slippery dirt.
These hungry beasts dared not approach Cumbria—the large, gray kingdom that was perched amongst the rocks thousands of feet above, less they would be met with a swift swing of a sword or axe by the locals if they even managed to make it past the walls.
The winter of 1704 was a cold and wet one, and it looked like the following year’s harvest wouldn’t bring much. Oddly enough, Cumbria’s seven hundredth anniversary was only a few weeks away, but none of its residents seemed to be in the mood for any sort of celebration. Floods and mudslides devastated their crops, destroyed their good soil. Many homes had been swept away, leaving thousands with nowhere to go—those who had managed to survive and were exposed to famine.
Approximately twenty miles from the western border of the Cumbrian mountains lay a desolate island, covered by a mass of weeds, trees, and tangled vines. The place was not fit for habitation by any means, and any fool who strived to build their home there had the shadows touch their shriveled bones by first light. The water from the murky lakes and rivers were stagnant—rotting away at the surface and attracting multitudes of flies. The land struggled to produce anything other than thorns, and not a single bird called out from the trees. Dozens of underground caves, covered in poisonous moss and algae, littered the surface and caused holes to open in the sinking ground. Snakes and rats the size of dogs devoured what little vegetation remained, leaving the earth sore and naked.
In the depths of one of these numerous caves, a faint green light glimmered for a few moments, and then faded. Like a pulsing heartbeat, it softly protested against the domineering darkness, before growing stronger until it completely bathed the walls in a neon glow and there was nothing in sight.
* * * * * * *
John Weston Tillamore III paced to and from; his hands were clasped so tightly behind his back that his fingernails dug into his palms. He was a thin, tall young man; his finely tailored waistcoat and breeches hung so loosely from his frame that they resembled curtains. His face was pale, and his dark brown eyes were large and bloodshot. He had misplaced his glasses, and all could he do was turn. Three steps forward. Pivot. Three steps forward. The buckles of his shoes glowed in the dim light. Although only twenty six years of age, his slumped over form made him feel much…..older.
He couldn’t help but flinch.
Aging. If there was anything he couldn’t stand more in the world, it was the thought—the idea of getting wrinkles. Each morning, he had made sure that his servants applied fresh rose water and the finest powder to his cheekbones, nose, and mouth. If he dare even discover a pimple on his chin or forehead, he would be sure to find the person responsible and either send them to hang in the gallows or be flogged. He would—
“That is enough.” The sharp female voice pricked him in his side, like a thorn. John abruptly glanced at his mother, Thera Tillamore, who was seated by the door in the parlor. Her curled wig was piled up high upon her head, decorated with jewels and feathers. The crackling sound of the fireplace filled the air, alongside the heavy rain pouring against the glass windows. She began to fan herself with a folded piece of paper, and her blue eyes met his.
John exhaled.
“You are going to dig a hole in that rug,” Thera snapped. “Stop this nonsense. Sit down and have some tea, my boy.”
A high pitched cry echoed down the hall, followed by another shriek. John immediately rushed towards the closed doors, but Thera abruptly rose to her feet and blocked his path.
”Sit. Down.” Her jaw was clenched.
“Mother, I—”
The look in her eyes made him immediately realize that there was no getting through to her. John reluctantly sank down on a sofa, accidentally rattling the tea set on the table and causing some of the hot liquid to slosh out of the cups. Thera frowned and folded her arms.
Another scream bounced off the walls.
John flinched and buried his head in his hands. “Mother, please.”
“If only your father could see you in this state, he would be rolling in his grave. Have we not sacrificed enough for you? I dare say that if you find yourself unable to conduct yourself under such conditions, then I imagine that the throne will be no use for—”
”I am king,” John fired back, slamming his fist against the table.
”Then act like it.”
Beads of seat rolled down the young man’s temples, collected underneath his chin. He spoke through his teeth. “Can a man not see to his own wife in her hour of distress?”
“Gloria will be fine,” Thera replied. She calmly walked to the table and poured out a cup of tea, her hand elegantly posed. The rings on her fingers caught in the orange firelight. “This is a stubborn baby that will come when it decides to. You and I have no say in it. The midwife will call you when she is ready.”
”W-what if she dies?” John murmured. He took off his crown and ran both of his hands through his hair. “The last three were stillborn. I can’t keep putting her through this again.” His brown eyes glistened in the light. “I can’t.”
”You foolish boy. You know that all of Cumbria is depending on us for an heir. A beautiful child. You cannot possibly quit so soon.” The older woman placed two spoonfuls of white sugar into her cup and stirred, causing the utensil to clang against its china surface. “If you want this kingdom to survive, you must fulfill your duty. Your father had to do it. I had to do it. And now, son, it is your turn.” She took one sip and frowned. “This is cold. Where is that blasted servant girl? Elsie?!”
The two double doors swung open. A wide eyed, freckled faced girl sprinted in the room. Her apron was stained with blood, and her face was tired, but her smile bright. “Your Majesty, come, come quick! You have a son. A son, I tell you!”
Before Thera could open her mouth to reply, John had already reached the end of the long hallway, his shoes echoing against the marble floor. The amount of candles in the room made him dizzy as he rushed into the bedchambers, breathing heavily.
Gloria Tillamore sat amongst the rumpled sheets and pillows, her dark auburn hair tumbling down her shoulders. Her eyes were closed, but she opened them and gave John a weak smile. The top of her silk nightgown was soaked with sweat, and she struggled to sit up in bed as he rushed to her side and grabbed her right hand. As the midwife wrung out some bloodied cloths into a wet basin, Thera leaned against the doorframe. In her arms was a small, tiny bundle, wrapped in white cloth. A few strands of sparse blonde hair stuck outwards. As John glanced behind him, he was astonished to see the number of servants and guards out in the hallway, peering inside.
“Everyone leave us,” his mother ordered. “Only the midwife is allowed to stay. My daughter in law is exhausted. Now.”
As the others began to file out, Elsie clasped her palms together, almost jumping. “Your Majesty, it’s a—”
She had hardly finished her sentence before the back of Thera’s right palm met her face. The young girl recoiled in pain, as the sound of the blow echoed across the room. She removed her hand, astonished to see blood across her knuckles; a great deal of it was trickling down her nose. John held his breath.
“You lazy, impudent girl,” Thera hissed. “You’ve done absolutely nothing but neglected your duties. Go and see if the cook needs help in the kitchen. And I do not want you up here again without my permission. Is that understood?”
Elsie shakily nodded. Blood leaked down her chin.
”Now get out of my sight.”
As she hurried away, the newborn’s cries filled the air. Thera closed the bedroom doors and glanced at the child, who was now screaming on the top of his lungs.
Gloria gave her a questioning look, before holding out her arms. “Let me see him. He’s probably hungry.”
“My dear, you need to rest,” Thera murmured. “Let one of the wet nurses tend to him. I’ll call one in and see that she aids you.”
“But I want to hold him.”
”John, darling, would you mind coming with me?” The older woman adjusted the wailing child in her arms. “We need to talk.”
John studied his mother for a while, before placing a kiss on Gloria’s sweaty left cheek. “I’ll be back, my love,” he softly said. “I won’t be long, I promise. You did a wonderful job. Try to rest a spell, and do not excite yourself.”
Gloria wearily nodded. As the midwife gave her a large mug of cool water to drink out of, Thera led John down towards the end of the dimly lit corridor. The baby was crying so hard at this point that John began to reach out towards his son, but Thera roughly grabbed his wrist.
“Is something wrong?” John asked.
“It is a changeling,” Thera whispered.
“A what?”
His mother pursed her lips as she held the bundle out towards him. John grimaced, nearly stifling back a horrified cry. The child’s face—he could not make sense of it. The nose and mouth hardly resembled a human’s, and the dark blue eyes were large and round, similar to Gloria’s. His chest grew tight, and his chin slightly quivered and shook.
Thera gave him a hard look. “You have indeed failed our bloodline.”
John’s eyes burned.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
“I never knew that you and Gloria could ever be so careless. If your mother in law—” Her voice shrank down to a whisper. “If our people have to lay eyes upon—”
”What do you want me to do?” John asked, raising his arms over his head. “What do you want me to do? I don’t—”
”I’ll tell you,” Thera fiercely replied. “Such a horrid creature cannot abide among us. This child does not belong to anyone but the devil. You have not become one with your wife, but with something that has no place in this world. And now, you must send it back where it has come from, lest it destroy us all.”
“Mother, I—”
”I will hear no more of it. You shall follow behind your father’s footsteps. More children will come. Yet this is a tarnished stain, a memory that no one wants to have. If anyone sees such an abomination, our people will riot.” She placed the screaming baby in John’s arms. “I cannot have it in my presence anymore.”
”But what am I to tell Gloria?”
“You leave that to me.” Her eyes narrowed. “From now on, in her eyes, this curse is a stillborn, just like the others. I shall tell her of the news. And for the sake of our kingdom, you will not mention anything of it to her or your subjects. There is no child.”
A lump rose in John’s throat. “You are asking me to lie to her?”
“You shall do as I say.” Thera’s voice was colder than ice. “Now, take this thing outside of the palace walls and get rid of it.”
“That is my son—”
”You share no blood with it. It is a demon in the form of a human. Gloria’s body has been cleansed of its presence. It is a direct threat against the future generations that will come.”
The young king stared at her in disbelief.
“It shall not come into contact with any of us. And if I as so much ever lay eyes across it again, I will have it eliminated on the spot. Do you understand?”
John’s head was spinning so much that he could hardly breathe. He watched her make her way back into the bedchambers, her long skirts dragging upon the ground, feathers floating in her elegant, powdered wig.
The hallways seemed to grow, shrink, then expand again. John didn’t recall stumbling down the steps, before sitting at the last one, holding onto the wailing bundle until at last it became silent, only a few hiccups. He could not look at its face again.
* * * * * * *
In 1083, the brave Irish knight Sir Gerald Buferon received the surname Tillamore from Robert II, the Duke of Normandy, after the murder of Earl of Northumbria in 1080. Being of royal blood and with shared ties to the throne, Gerald Tillamore, alongside his brothers, William and Henry, established and founded Cumbria. The mountains provided the young kingdom enough security from enemies who wished to seized and gain control of their lands.
For the past seven hundred years, the Tillamore dynasty was at its strongest, each chain link supporting the other. Broken ones were cast aside. Their genetics, youth, and beauty were one that many people believed could have been a divine intervention itself. Besides these physical advantages, intelligence, charm, and honorable qualities such as courage and bravery were ones that solidified a Tillamore at the core.
The newest addition to the Tillamore lineage knew of none of these things. Just a few months away from his twelfth birthday, the young prince not know what it was like to feel the sun on his face or hair. He did not know what it was like to talk, laugh, tease, or joke as people his age often did. He did not know his own name; if he had one, it was never spoken to him. It was always, “come,” or “stay.”
He only knew the dark stone walls—and what was behind them. He knew that he was forbidden from leaving them. He only knew to remain quiet, to listen to the voices of the servants outside, the woman that he knew was his mother, and his three younger sisters, all who were triplets and had inherited her beauty. He watched them grow from crawling babies into energetic toddlers learning how to walk and stand for the first time. He wished that he had been able to guide them on their first steps.
They often played and squealed as they ran up and down, their curls bouncing up and down and peeking out of their large pink bonnets. He saw his grandmother sitting in the family room, playing the grand piano exactly at three in the afternoon on Sundays.
He loved hearing her singing voice.
He had memorized their names. Whispered them. Anne, Cassandra, and Audrey. Thera. Papa. Mama. He wondered if he would ever get one.
The boy did recognize his father’s still, stern voice, when he did come to him to bring him a tray of food or a book. He had begun to learn how to read, and drew out crooked letters with a feather and ink on a page. He loved the illustrations on one of his favorite stories, Robinson Crusoe, and would spend hours drawing the ocean on the page.
The palace walls were echoey, but he soon learned what each room was, how each stair tread creaked when a foot was against it. He placed his fingers against each cold stone, peeking out of one of the cracks to see the elegant, furnished rooms, all in its splendor and glory. He was a pale, skinny child, and was quite small for his age, with unkempt dark hair that fell to his back. His clothes were clean, he received plenty of good food, he had a soft mattress and blanket to sleep on, and he looked forward to his father visiting him whenever he could.
But he desperately longed for someone to talk to. He had his books, his drawing pen, and all sorts of toys, but they only worsened the growing emptiness inside of him. Overcome by loneliness, he spent many days in his bed, curled up in a ball and sobbing until his pillow was soaked with tears.
He gazed at his sisters playing with a dog in the hallway through the cracks in the walls. Using a lump of chalk, he drew three stick figures upon the stone floor. With a shaking hand, he made sure to give the dog a long tail and big, floppy ears. Slowly, he added a fourth stick figure next to them, before placing his palm directly on it. The girls’ laughter echoed in his head.
The child noticed that Gloria’s stomach had gotten big again. Excitement suddenly took over him, and he peered through each crack and crevice, his large pale eyes glowing in the dark. It seemed like ages, but as the weeks passed and her abdomen grew, he struggled with patience. For him, another sibling would be a playmate for him.
He stayed up all night and fell asleep behind Gloria’s bedroom wall. When he awoke to the cries of a baby, he watched with anticipation through a crack in the plaster as his father laughed with glee and his sisters crowded around the bed to see. Servants filled the room, and Thera was grinning from ear to ear, rocking the baby back and forth.
“My darling grandson! My sweet, sweet boy!” She chuckled. “He has your face, John, one of a true Tillamore. Well done, John. Well done. He is absolutely beautiful. And he has your mother’s fine hair.”
“What are you going to name him?” perked up Anne, who clutched her doll with her left hand and began to suck on her thumb.
“Charles,” Gloria murmured, placing a kiss on the baby’s cheek, who was giggling and placing his foot in his mouth. “But we’ll call him Charlie for short.” She glanced at the triplets. “He is your only brother, so you shall be gentle with him and play nicely, do you hear? He is very, very little.”
“Yes, Mama,” the girls answered in a chorus, causing a few of the guards standing outside of the bedroom door to chuckle.
John’s smile slightly faltered, and he looked down for a moment before walking out. Thera shot him a menacing look, before returning a sleepy Charlie back to Gloria’s arms.
The nameless child slowly took a few steps back from the wall. He stared at his bare feet for a moment, pondering for a moment if what he had heard what his mother said was true. Surely, she had meant him as well. He wanted to draw a picture of a ship and give it to his baby brother as a birthday present. The thought of slipping out from behind the wall gave him a bit of anxiety, but it would only be for a moment. And he was used to moving quietly. He had done it his whole life.
He spent the next two evenings by candlelight sketching out the ship with a stump of lead. Once he was sure that the hallway was quiet one night and everyone was asleep, he lifted up a chunk of a loosened wooden floorboard and climbed out of the stone structure for the first time.
He barely made a sound against the floor as he made his way up the steps in the kitchen. To his surprise, the hallways looked just as plain as the outside as they were within, but he knew how to find his way to Charlie’s room. The oilcloth was nearly folded up and tied with a piece of loose thread he had broken off from his quilt.
The bedroom was dark, and he felt his way around the furniture, careful not to bump into anything. As he slowly approached the cradle, he stared at Charlie’s sleeping form, his sound breathing. Unable to resist, he gently reached out and picked up the newborn, holding him in his thin arms. A smile slowly spread across his lips as his brother looked up at him.
There was a shriek at the door.
The boy immediately spun around, startling the baby, who began to cry. Thera stood in the threshold, holding a candle, her white knuckles wrapped around the handle. She screamed and screamed, dropping it, causing the guards to come in and stomp out the flames before they spread to the curtains.
“Get away,” she hollered. “Get away.”
The child took a few steps back in a daze. He saw his father rush towards him, yelling at him to get out before he ripped Charlie out of his arms. He saw his mother, his crying sisters. He saw them clinging to her mother skirts, wailing and screaming.
He then saw his face for the first time in the dresser mirror.
He felt his father’s arms grab him and carry him out of the bedroom, down the steps. The drawing fell to the floor and slipped under the cradle.
* * * * * * *
”We are going on an adventure,” John said, holding his hand out to the young prince early the next morning. The palace was incredibly still, in pale comparison to the chaos from the previous night. Gloria had been given the laudanum drops, so she would be well into a sweet slumber during the day. “A very exciting one. So you must dress warmly.”
“Outside?” the boy asked.
”Yes.”
“Will there be pirates and sailors?”
It was extremely difficult for John to look him in the face, so he studied the wall instead. He fought back the water building in his eyes.
”Papa?”
”We shall see. Put on your coat.”
The child’s eyes were bloodshot, redder than the hot coals. He had not slept all night, only tossed and turned. But he obeyed, although, in his young mind, he found it quite strange, as he had never owned a coat before. He shrugged it over his nightshirt as John placed an old straw hat upon his head. Then, he squeezed both of his bare feet into a small pair of leather boots.
“Come. Don’t forget your book.”
The boy stared up at him. “Like Robinson Crusoe?” he hoarsely whispered. His throat was sore from crying.
“Yes,” John managed to get out. He shoved three shirts, pants, half a loaf of bread, apples, and a sketchpad with two broken pencils. As the boy finally took his hand, they ascended up the steps, and, for the first time in all of his twelve years, outside.
The cool August morning in 1714 weighed heavily upon their shoulders. It was silent between them, as it was still dusk and a deep fog had settled in the air. John rowed the oars, relieved that his son couldn’t see the tears rolling down his face. Blisters were on his palms, which were slick with blood and rubbed something fierce. He adjusted his hat and clenched his jaw.
“Where is Charlie?” the boy quietly asked, dipping his fingers into the cold, gray water. “And Mama? And Anne and Cassandra and Audrey?”
”They will join us soon,” John weakly said.
“And Thera.” A few stands of dark hair blew over the child’s hideous face, partially covering his pale eyes. John flinched.
”She as well.”
When their boat docked upon the shoreline of the island, the young boy ran up to the gray sand, his long hair blowing in the wind. He stared at the strange landscape of shriveled trees and branches, before turning around. John dropped the bag on the ground, still wiping his face. He noticed his son staring at him and got down on his knees.
”Papa?”
John could not meet the boy’s gaze. The child’s eyes were such a strange color that he had neither inherited from him or Gloria. Thera had been right. He had truly come from the pits of hell himself.
Changeling.
”Why are you crying, Papa?”
“Let us play a game.”
“A game?”
”Yes. What would you prefer?”
A broad smile fell upon the boy’s sunken and distorted face. “Hide and seek,” he whispered.
”Aye,” John choked out. “Very good choice. I will count to twenty. You hide.”
The boy giggled and took off into the woods, before disappearing out of sight. John fought back a sob, clasping a hand over his mouth. After a few moments, he weakly stumbled to the boat and pushed it against the waves, before climbing in, gripping both sides with his shaking palms, reaching for the oars. His stomach was twisting, churning, and he struggled to breathe as the island grew smaller further down the water.
”One…” he whispered.
”….two…”