“Where in the World is Carmen Andy-iego?”
Happy belated Father’s Day! It’s a couple days after the actual Father’s Day now, but as this is being posted, I’m still on the road. But, thankfully, I’m on the road with my dad, so at least we get to spend father’s day together, even if it’s in some other city like Los Angeles, or wherever we’ll be on the twentieth. Were at? Were have been? Will be going to be at? Will be had been? I don’t know what the proper verb tense is to describe something that I’m going to have done in the future-past (since I’m writing this from June 3rd, but it’s posting the 22nd), but it doesn’t matter. Happy Father’s Day anyway! I also wrote a father’s day post a year back (which, again, is bizarre), and I’d like to reiterate that again. Dad, I love you, and I’m very glad that you’re in my life. I feel that we’ve been able to have a more adult relationship recently, and I appreciate that you’re always willing to just sit on the porch and talk and listen to me as I ramble about whatever it is that’s happening in my life. You’re a very kind, funny, generous, and chill person, and having you around just to talk to is a privilege that I’m glad I get to experience. Thank you (in advance!) for taking Nick and I on this trip that we’re currently on/will be on. You deserve to be happy in your life, and I’m glad that things have been going your way recently. I’m glad that we get to spend more time together, even if I don’t live in the area anymore, and I’m glad that we can always just take the time to go on hikes or walk around somewhere, or look at the birds. Thank you for supporting me, even if you are a more reserved person. I know you’ll always support me, no matter what I do, and that means a lot. So happy father’s day, and thank you for being in my life. I love you. I hope that I can help you out as you have helped me, and be there for you, too.
Sorry I can’t really write more. It’s hard writing stuff in advance, but the feelings that I share here are always the feelings I feel. And I think that’s what’s important. I love you!
Anyway, onto Spectral Crown. Previous chapter here!
Spectral Crown, by Andy Sima: Chapter Twenty-Three
Even Reinhard looked at a loss for what to do or how to feel. We stood around in that blood-spattered room, glancing from face to face, trying to decipher what sort of desperate state of mind had lead us to such drastic action. My mother had been the only one to speak up. My mother…
It was then that I realized that the women were probably having the same troubles we were, if not worse. Perhaps their captors had been more willing to stay beyond the door, perhaps take more prisoners through the portal. I was sure that they had been attacked, too.
“The others! What about them?” I shouted, jumping to action.
“Who?” someone asked, but realization soon set in and we clamored for the door at the back of the room that connected us to our female counterparts. I reached the door first and forced it open, tumbling into the female quarters and leading my stumbling cohorts behind me. We began looking about for some sort of monstrous guard, but found nothing of the sort. Instead, we simply saw the woman huddled together in the center of the room, staring at a space in the floor. There was no blood to be seen.
“What happened?” I asked, moving over to them.
“Princess Sorina appeared to us, from a raven,” my mother explained, breaking off from the congregation. “And then she opened a door in the air, and the Blestemat soldiers came through. That was the point where one of us leaped up, and Sorina disappeared again. The guards did not. They captured one of us and dragged them back through the door. But that door is gone now. It was right here.” And she pointed to the space that the group of women had been encircling.
“It was the same with us, though with Prince Iacob,” I said.
Simon joined in the conversation. “We lost a man,” he said. “He was impaled with a spear and pulled through the door, too.”
“So despite our best efforts and this supposed safe plan, we still have had a loss of life,” my mother said, glaring equally at Simon, Reinhard, and myself. I looked down to my feet, unable to meet her gaze. My heart turned over.
“It is worse than that,” Greta said, coming over to our miniature meeting. “The Blestemat royals are aware of us with ever more intensity. They know we know and will react accordingly.”
“We reached the same conclusion,” Simon said. He sat down on a nearby bed and held his head in his hands. “Oh, my head. How did I let this happen? This lapse in judgement? I should have known better.”
“It was not just you, Simon,” my mother said. “We are all to blame now. But, if we are to survive, we must act with more forethought. And act soon. Dawn will be breaking not long from now, and I do not think the Blestemat royals will wait to counter.”
“And counter they will,” Greta said.
“What are we to do, then?” Simon said.
“I do not know,” my mother replied. “Perhaps now is a good time to flee.”
“Flee?” Simon choked. “Flee where? Flee how?”
“Into the tunnels,” my mother said. Her face seemed to lose some of its color, water freezing into an icicle.
“Are you insane?” Simon said.
“No, I quite like her idea,” Reinhard said, butting in. “Is it time to flee, everyone?” he shouted to the general assembly.
There were murmurs of “flee?” and “how?” and “are you sure?” and “maybe we will be safe here?” It was Franz, however, who addressed us directly.
“We have tried fighting. Perhaps flight is the answer. But how do you propose we escape?”
“Through the tunnels, as Josefa so helpfully suggested,” Reinhard said, beaming in my mother’s direction. Her face gave away no emotion.
“The tunnels? THE TUNNELS?” Franz started to shake with rage, thankfully directed at Reinhard and not at my mother. “Is that our only option left?”
“Listen, brother, please, it is not our only option-” Freda started, but was cut off by Franz’s fury.
“This is your fault, Reinhard! You suggested this accursed idea for a trap, and now you ask me to return to that place behind the wall? You’re a dead man! A dead man if anyone gets hurt in those walls! I’ll kill you myself!” Franz shouted, eyes spinning wildly in his head. He was literally frothing at the mouth, and Freda tugged him to the back of the crowd. Reinhard simply smiled.
“Do you have a better suggestion?” the little man said. An angry silence ensued before someone else spoke up, just to break the emptiness.
“Perhaps we shall just wait here and see where fate takes us,” someone said. “Perhaps the royals will not bother themselves with lowly servants such as ourselves.”
“That very well may be,” Simon said, rubbing at his glasses. “But we should still have a plan in place, in the event of negative reactions.”
“Then what is our plan to be?” Someone else said.
“If you have an idea, spit it out,” Reinhard said gleefully. He was taking great joy in the way things were going.
“How about this,” someone said. “The next time we are escorted to assist the Uradels, we attack the servant and leave through the foyer?”
There was some murmuring of agreement, and I had to admit, the plan was not terrible. The group of Iacob’s servants who led us out of the common room appeared unarmed and weak. We had both Franz and Freda, as well as me and a few other strong men and women. I suspected we could take them by surprise. However…
“What if they are not as they seem?” I said. “Nothing in this castle is as it seems. Perhaps they expect us to try something like that.”
“Be as that may,” Simon said, “I prefer that plan to escaping through the tunnels. You told us yourself, Saelac, they are a maze of passages. They do not lead anywhere but deeper into the castle.”
Though that had been the case before, something inside of me had changed, and I suspected that now I had a better chance of finding my way around. I could not tell anyone this, of course, for Reinhard would certainly pry into it. “Walking out through the front door does seem like a safe bet.”
“How do we know that they will not kill us first or take us through the strange door?” someone asked.
“We don’t,” my mother said. “We have to hope that the Blestemats need us alive for as long as possible. If they wanted us dead, they would have killed us all the first night. I suspect they will leave us alone, for now.”
“That is valid reasoning,” Greta said, nodding her grey head.
“So we make a break for it, then? The next time we are called upon to assist the Uradels, we attack Iacob’s men and run?” Franz said.
“And if something falls apart before then,” Reinhard said, “we escape through the tunnels?”
“That does seem to be the method of our exodus, yes,” Simon said. “Does anyone have anything else to add?”
The very air around me seemed to agree. “Alright,” I said. “Let’s wait until morning.”
Although it must have still been dark when our unofficial meeting adjourned, it was impossible to fall back asleep. I laid in my straw bed for a time, watching Franz spin in his own cot. I attended to the minor wound on my shoulder when the pain necessitated it, and noted that the raven who normally roosted above me was nowhere to be seen. Eventually, someone left the room for something, but when they returned they aroused us from our lethargy.
“Come quickly! You must see what is in the common room!” they shouted from the front door. Then they hurried to the back of the room and relayed their message to the maids, too. I got up, unsure of what to make of this excitement, and donned my boots and straggled out into the common room.
“What is this commotion about- oh. I see,” Simon said, one of the last to leave the sleeping quarters. He was dressed in his night gown, tufts of grey hair sticking about from his head. He had to rub his eyes to make sure he was seeing correctly.
On the tables of the common room instead of the expected feast there was an array of putrid meat, arranged in strange glyphs on the plates, moldy bread, turned green and blue in its age, and jugs of a thick red liquid that did not resemble any wine I had ever tried. Rotten fruits, half-eaten and rancid, lay scattered between dishes. At the center of the awful display was a covered platter of silver, engraved with the initials “SB.” Flies buzzed about it.
Murmurs of disgust quickly spread among our ranks. We circled the buffet, hoping that it was all some trick of the light or an illusion. But, testing one of the loaves of bread, I found it to be quite concrete.
“Has every meal been like this?” Freda asked.
“Are you blind? Of course not!” Reinhard said. But no one paid the little man any attention.
“How do you mean?” Simon asked.
Freda asked, “Do you feel that something has changed?”
And she was right. There was a sort of thickening of the air, a slight change to the ways the scents lifted themselves and the way the fire flickered on their torches that suggested a shift in reality. But that seemed preposterous. We had all tasted the food previously, and it had been delightful.
“We are awake now,” Franz said.
“That’s all well and good, but what is in that covered platter?” someone said, pointing to the only tray that was still blocked from view.
“I suspect I know,” I said, and walked over to it. “Brace yourselves.”
I lifted the lid off the tray and the flies that had been hovering around scattered to the four winds. The scent of decay filled the room and I covered my nose. On the covered tray was a decapitated head.
Someone behind me gagged. Probably Simon. Reinhard and my mother inched closer for a better view, with morbid curiosity. There was shuffling of feet as others readjusted to get a good look at the thing, and others readjusted to look away from it.
It was a man’s head, in an advanced stage of decay. Its skin was leathery and worn, brown and wrinkled, and eyes staring wide open. Those eyes gazed at nothing, splitting at the seams like spoiled grapes. The dead man’s tongue lolled out of his mouth, swollen with juices and liquids I dared not name. It sat on the platter, stuck with blood. Some black insect crawled out of a nostril.
“Well,” Reinhard said. “Whose head is it?”
“I believe,” my mother said, leaning close, “it is Pepin.”
“Pepin?” Simon said, finally getting close enough to see the rotted thing. “Why, he was here last night when we made our plan! That means…”
“He was the one taken through the door just a few hours ago,” I concluded. There was a silence that fell over all of us, but it was broken by the head, which suddenly inhaled heavily and began to scream.
“KILL ME!” the thing that once had been Pepin shouted. “KILL ME!”
We all jumped back in shock. Rotted bits of flesh fell off as the mouth jerked back and forth, screaming. The sightless eyes spun back and forth, incapable of comprehending where or what it was. At some point, the thing bit its own tongue off, and it fell to the platter in a lump. Pepin’s head continued to scream.
“Someone do something!” Simon yelled from the ground, having fallen in his mad dash backwards. He was nearly drowned out by the continued fleshy screaming.
My mother was the first to act, and ran to the wall where she pulled a torch out of its sconce. She ran back to the table and lit the head on fire. It caught instantly, and turned into a massive, stinking fireball. The scent of burning skin mixed with the already present stench of death. The tortured screams took on a new fervor.
Eventually, however, the screams died out, and the fire burned itself away, until all that was left was a charred heap, indistinguishable from the ash at the base of a fireplace. We all stood about now, carefully. I half expected the rest of our meal to begin thrashing about.
“They’re sending a message,” Greta said. “The royals, they are. They do need us alive. But they need us compliant. Or we end up like him.”
“How can you possibly know that?” someone asked.
“We’re all going to end up dead anyway,” someone else said. “What does it matter how we go?”
“Do you want to end up like that?” someone else asked.
“This changes nothing,” I said. “We cannot let this get to us. We must still carry out the plan as we decided to. Are we agreed?”
“Pepin ended up like that because we resisted the guards,” Freda said. “What will happen to us if we resist the servants?”
“I, for one, do not care to find out,” I said. “But we need to be rid of this place, and quickly. We must try.” Silence and uncomfortable squirming was my answer, but it was an answer nonetheless.
“Then we are one,” Simon said.
“What are we supposed to eat for breakfast?” Reinhard said suddenly. To my surprise, Franz chuckled and answered.
“You’ve got a whole buffet before you, Reinhard. Help yourself,” the big man said. “As for me, I’m not hungry. It’s all yours.” There were scattered chuckles, and Reinhard’s face grew red.
“I will help myself,” the little man said. And he hopped over to a plate of raw, decaying meat that looked like a foot, and broke off a bit of it. He held it in front of his face.
Franz’s face went white, but he still smiled. “Do it, Reinhard. If ye got the stones for it.”
Reinhard’s face only got redder, and he brought the sickening artifact closer to his mouth. Something crawled over the surface of it and disappeared back into the red flesh that Reinhard held.
“Don’t do it, you idiot,” someone yelled.
“I’m going to be sick,” Simon said, and looked away.
“I dare you,” Franz said, narrowing his eyes.
Reinhard narrowed his eyes in return and smiled. Then, with one swift movement, he popped the sordid excuse for food into his mouth and began to chew.
Someone heaved at the back of the crowd, unable to stomach the sight of it. I was almost respectful of the man’s single-minded need to prove that he was boss of us. But that did not change the fact that he had consumed it, and it did not change the fact that after chewing, still smiling, Reinhard swallowed.
Franz was pale, and simply looked shocked. He scratched his red head. “I’ve gotta admit it,” he said, “I didn’t think you would do it.”
“You should have thought more carefully,” he said, and stalked back to his quarters.
We stood about in his wake, well aware that he would probably be sick or dead in the coming days. But then again, so would the rest of us.
I got nothin’ for this ending bit except to say that I really appreciate everyone that has been reading my posts for all this time. Thank you for reading!
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