Spectral Crown: Chapter Thirty-Four

“Oops, I did it again.”

Happy birthday, Nick!  If you’re reading this on the day it’s published, this post actually falls on December 21st, 2021, which is my brother’s 21st birthday!  That’s a pretty big milestone!  It’s almost like I should have something really special planned for it, huh?  Well, I did, but I completely lost track of time this week between a handful of things that I had to do, and my blog slipped my mind.  I’m barely getting up this week and next in time for travel, since I’m spending the holidays with my family.  So, sorry, Nick.  I’ll get that birthday post to you eventually, just not on your actual birthday, sadly.  My bad.

But happy holidays to everyone!  If you celebrate a holiday this time of year, I hope that it’s a lot of fun and you have a good, safe, covid-free holiday!  And if you don’t have a holiday to celebrate this time of year, I still hope you have a great next few weeks.  To kick off the holidays on this blog for no reason at all, other than the fact that I won’t really be able to write a blog, here’s the last few chapters of Spectral Crown.  Wow, I can’t believe I’m really here.  This is, like, almost the end.

Previous chapter here.

Spectral Crown, by Andy Sima: Chapter Thirty-Four

We were only in that secluded room for about an hour or two before there was a knock at the door.  I stood up, but as I stood, Freda moved to stop me.

            “Please, Saelac,” she said.  “They’re coming to take us.  Don’t open that door.”

            “They won’t go away, and they won’t be denied,” Franz said, eyes darting from one side of the room to the other.

            “Alright,” I said, and sat back down.  “I won’t open the door.”

            As I expected, however, I didn’t have to open the door at all, as the knocking became more persistent the door opened up and pushed inward.  I expected to see Iacob’s servant creature standing there, but for once, it was Sorina’s maiden group.  Or rather the singular creature that served as her handmaidens.

            “Princess Sorina has requested your presence.  All three of you will follow me,” the tallest maid said, with a sing-song voice.

            We walked down the halls and ended up back in the main foyer, the castle’s hub.  The handmaidens directed the three of us into the empty throne room, then, but instead of stopping before the massive crystal thrones, we turned a sharp right and made our way into a hall off to the right of the thrones.  The hall itself had no door, but farther away, far ahead of us, there was a wooden door.  The door gave off a stench of dread and foreboding.

            No, it wasn’t just that.  As I got closer, I detected an actual, physical stench on the air, creeping out from under the crack at the bottom of the door.

            “Where are you taking us?” I asked, trying to slow our progress.

            “Princess Sorina will inform you once you are in her presence,” the handmaiden said.

            “What is that stench?” Franz asked, sniffing at the air, too.

            “Smells like rot,” Freda muttered.  The maids said nothing, but simply opened the door and stepped aside to let us through.

            I was blinded by light from actual windows.  The room we were in was tall, with glass panes arching from almost the floor to the ceiling at regular intervals.  The cloud-covered sun was still bright enough to disturb my pupils, especially after the torchlit darkness of the castle’s interior.  The room was circular and the size of Iacob’s quarters, in terms of diameter, but the edges were built up into a series of severe stone chairs, a sort of panoramic auditorium.  The seats seemed to be carved into the wall.  The room was mostly chairs, save the door at the back and a circular hole in the center of the room.  Four especially imposing chairs caught my attention.  On the largest two, the king’s and queen’s chairs, I was guessing, there was nothing.  But, like usual, Iacob and Sorina sat in their prince and princess’s chairs.

            The smell of decay and sickness was stronger here, and I soon realized why; the circular hole at the middle of the room hosted a dark opening, roughly a meter and a half across, and from that pit wafted a terrible stench.  A stench I had grown quite familiar with.  This pit lead to the castle’s sewers, where the great roaring beast lived.

            The door shut heavily behind us, and the maid group guarded it, along with Iacob’s servants, who appeared out the shadows.  They smiled at us and gestured for us to turn away from them.  So we stood and faced our prison wardens, the Blestemat siblings.  Around them, peering down from other seats in the auditorium, were similar figures of pale skin and black hair, all uniformly gorgeous.  Some I recognized.  Most I did not.  The Uradels were not present.

            “Good morning,” Princess Sorina said from her stone pulpit.  “Today we are gathered here to protect the safety of our kingdom and the sacred honor of Blestemat royalty.  It has been my job as princess of this kingdom for many years, and I must do all in my power to carry it out.  Therefore, it is come to my attention that we must deal with certain matters directly.”

            I glanced at Iacob, who was biting his nails and looking everywhere in the room except at me.

            “For matters that can remain undisclosed, I have learned that Saelac Bergmann, Franz Brandt, and Freda Brandt, members of the Uradel household, have been planning a revolt from within the confines of their rooms.  Earlier attempts at undermining have failed.  However, it is within my power to end this now.  And so I shall.”

            “That’s a lie and you know it!” Iacob stood up and shouted, his finger pointing at Sorina.  But he quivered, and her icy stare and cold silence sat him back down.  Around us, the other royals talked, and their murmuring filled the chamber.  A court room, I realized.  This was a judgement.

            But why start this now?  They had so easily killed off my countrymen before, and if Sorina really wanted, she may have locked me away in silence.  No, this was different.  A power move.  Something that could show Sorina’s total dominance and prove that she was the true leader of the kingdom of Umbra.

            A move that would destroy any desire Iacob had to fight against her, for my sake or his own.  Iacob had already lost.

            To the room at large, Freda said, “We talked of no rebellion!”  Then, to Franz, she asked, “did we?”  The red-haired giant made no acknowledgement of her question, and simply stared at the floor.  Eventually, Freda looked there, too.  I was the only one who still had eyes for the princess.

            “For plotting against the royal family of Blestemat in our very own castle, you three are sentenced to death,” Princess Sorina said.  “You shall be cast into the deepest depths of the castle, never to return to the light of day.”

            “You can’t execute us.  Maynard may not like that very much,” I said loud enough for the room to hear me.  Iacob sat up straight, watching me now.  His eyes screamed for me to stop, but how much worse could I make it?

            Sorina leaned down from her perch and narrowed her eyes at me.  “And why would that be?”

            “I am his personal servant,” I said.  “If you condemn me to death, he may resent that.”

            “Let it be known that the deaths of Josefa Bergmann and Simon Taylor did not affect the Uradel royalty in any meaningful way, and they were hands to the king and queen, and that Maynard already approved this execution,” Sorina said, and leaned back in her chair.  “Do not speak out of turn, boy.”

            “You still should not execute us,” I said.  “Let the Brandt siblings and myself leave this place, and we shall never bother you again.  What could we do against you anyway?”

            “And why would I do that when I can kill you now and have it over with?” Sorina asked.  Iacob had gone back to biting his nails.

            “Because you’re afraid of me,” I said.  Franz, Freda, Iacob, and all the Blestemat royals gasped, and the murmuring reached a crescendo.

            “Saelac, what are you doing?” Freda asked.

            “You’re battier than I am,” Franz said.

            There was a sudden boom, like the sound of a cannon going off, and Sorina was standing at the front of the room, arms outstretched.  “Silence!” she shouted.  Iacob cowered back in his chair.  “You think that I, Princess Sorina Blestemat, heir to the power of King Titus and Queen Viorel, and rightful inheritor of the Umbra throne, would fear you?” But she did.  She knew I was immortal, and knew I was independent.  That enough was dangerous.

            “You are afraid of me,” I said.  “Let us live, show us mercy, and you will have no reason to fear.  I give you my word.”  I clutched the locket against my chest.  “On my mother’s grave, you have my word.” 

            I was treading thin ice, but the ice had broken long before I stepped onto it.  Sorina seemed to grow in stature and measure, appearing to absorb the very space of the room as she filled it with her presence.  The light from the windows darkened, and everything became, momentarily, the Blestemat princess.

            “I will not be played by a simple commoner,” she said.  “You will all be destroyed.  Immediately.  Throw them to the pit.”

            A wry smile broke across my face, and for the split second, I thought I saw Sorina’s eyes flicker in a kind of doubt.  But then she was stone-solid again, and Franz, Freda, and I were grabbed in the doughy appendages of the servant and maid things.

            “So long, sir Bergmann,” the servant hissed in my ear, pale face against my skin.  “It has been a pleasure.”

            And then we were falling.

            I hadn’t quite realized that our form of execution was going to be falling from a high point, but I supposed it made sense, with the hole in the floor.  As one group, Franz, Freda, and I had been cast through the gap at the center of the court room, and were suddenly sailing through a fleshy, disgusting darkness that seemed rife with moving shadows and foul odors.

            We seemed to tumble through the air slowly, as if time had declined to make our deaths a quick one.  We fell, endless falling, and to my right and left I could make out the screaming forms of Franz and Freda.  They were doomed, from a fall at this height.  I was only in for extreme pain.

            Very faintly, in the sickly-smelling breeze of the air as we crashed through it, I thought I heard singing.  An aria, perhaps, of some deep male voice, hailing words in some unknown language, and behind it, a choir of strings and grand instruments.  It made the fall almost pleasant.  The singing ended as we hit the ground.

            The impact was startling.  I felt the bones in my spine shatter, and the collision threw my brain against the back of my skull.  For a moment, I suspected that I really was dead, as everything was a mass of agony.  I couldn’t even think straight; my thoughts were muddled and bloody.  But then my body began to repair itself, slowly, and the pain receded so that my other senses could take in the surroundings.  And there was that awful pleasure of the rebuilding.

            We were, as I knew, finally at the bottom of the pit that I had so long been avoiding.  It stank worse here than anywhere else, the horrific odor of decaying human waste and whatever other residue found its way down here.  Perhaps the bodies of dead Umbra soldiers.

            My nose, coated in the aroma of ammonia and feces, was soon overwhelmed by the air around us, and I retched up the little food I had eaten in the past few days.  I got up on my hands and knees and vomited into the slimy, viscous green goop that coated the bottom of the pit to about a third of a meter.  It was chunky and disgusting and it stained my clothes and coated my skin with a film of filth.  It seemed to clog up my very pores and wrinkle my hands.

            Tearing myself away from the floor, I saw that the room was a vast cavern, spotted above with pinpricks of light, the other openings to the sewers.  there was just enough light around that I could even make out the faint shape of the bridge, high above me.  Off in the distance, there were pillars that supported the gargantuan structure.

            And then I heard the sounds of the place.  Dripping and falling of liquids, the scrabble of rats, hands, and other vermin, and the sloshing about of something huge.  And the desperate gasping of something alive.

            I rushed over to the fallen bodies of Franz and Freda.  They were broken and mangled, just as I had been.  But, unlike me, they could not repair themselves.  So they lay there, utterly twisted.  Freda was dead.  She lay facedown in the muck, and if the fall hadn’t killed her, she would have drowned by now.  Franz, however, had fallen faceup, and was breathing raggedly through smashed teeth.

            “Saelac,” he whispered. 

            “Shh,” I said.  “Don’t try to speak.”

            “How?” he huffed.

            “It doesn’t matter now,” I said.  “Sleep.”

            “Yes,” Franz said, and closed his eyes.  “Sleep.” But I knew sleep would not come for the big man, not ever.  He would either suffer here for hours until he died of the strain, or I could end his misery quickly.

            I leaned forward and unwrapped the bandage still wound around my head.  I was about to hold it up to Franz’s face and suffocate him, when I heard something large move about in the liquid ahead of us.

            “What is that?” I asked, and then saw a head rising from the mire around us.  This was it.  It must have been the thing I had been hearing for so long, since the very beginning.

            The head grew closer in the dark, until it was near enough that I could make out details.  It was round and vaguely man-shaped.  No, more than vaguely.  It was man-shaped.  It was a man.

            It was Richter Reinhard.

            I stumbled back from the bodies of Franz and Freda as Reinhard’s form lifted out of the goop.  “That’s impossible,” I said.  “You’re dead.”

            “Not yet I’m not!” Reinhard said.  He moved with a gliding motion, as if he were on wheels underneath the surface.  His eyes were trained on me with an inhuman level of hate, but then he bumped into the struggling body of my companion.  Reinhard looked down, and his eyes glowed ever more fiercely.

            “I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” he said.  And suddenly, the liquid around him exploded with the force of a huge beast writhing, and Reinhard was suspended above the ground by a dozen thin, spidery legs.  I fell back, splashed by the liquid kicked up from Reinhard.  The appendages around Reinhard were his own.

            I crawled backward as quickly as I could, and just as quickly, more sets of vivid, red legs, pulsating in equal measure with hair and a mutated sort of muscle, sprouted out from Reinhard.  Two of these things grew from his shoulders, like another pair of arms, and they stabbed downward, striking at Franz.  Driving him through, they lifted his body up in the air, over Reinhard’s head, and in a single swift motion, tore the body in two.  Blood from Franz sprayed everywhere, mostly covering Reinhard, and the two halves of Franz’s form flew off in opposite directions.  Reinhard laughed viciously, maniacally, and clapped his hands together.  His legs and lower body seemed to dangle from him as if they were so much dead wait.  Only his head, arms, and spider-legs seemed to have any life to them.

            “You aren’t getting off that easy!” Reinhard said, and at first I thought he was referring to me, but then the spindly things growing from his body began to carry him off towards Franz’s head.  I saw the vague spider-shape in the shadows as it stabbed into Franz’s upper half over and over again.  And then there was a sickening sound of flesh splitting and opening, and I thought I saw Reinhard’s head explode with a kind of force from the inside, transforming into something no longer remotely human.  And that was when I turned away and ran.

            I was haunted by a horrid screech of the massive thing as it began to consume the lifeless bodies of its prey.  And there was that same cackling laugh that I had come to expect from Reinhard.

            I knew that I wouldn’t be able to forget it.

Only a few chapters left until the big finale, and then I’ll have posted an entire novel’s worth of filler on this blog.  What does that mean for me?  Does that make me a published author?  No, of course not, but it does look kind of cool to have the whole thing there.  I’ll reflect more on it once it’s all done.