User:Yuanchosaan/Conquest/Eyes I Dare Not Meet in Dreams

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Oavyce
''Oavyce sleeps fitfully, twitching and restless. If anyone were to see him asleep, at his most vulnerable, he would have murdered them. Oavyce sleeps alone. He dreams.''

He stands on the main balcony of his father’s palace, looking down upon bloody grounds. No, he corrects himself: it is his palace now. There is a smell of burning in the air, though he knows not what it is from. Somewhere, distantly, he can hear the sound of screaming. It makes him smile.

He ascends the stairs to the throne which appears before him. He is twenty-one years old. This is the day of his first triumph, the beginning of all the others. He turns and bows grandiosely to his court. Fools love a good show. The court applauds rapturously: it is a day of celebrations, after all. Some of them throw their dismembered heads into the air in sheer, intoxicating delight. He was younger and more merciful at the age of twenty-one. He has let them keep their heads.

Suddenly, he feels eyes drilling into his back. Oavyce does not feel fear, but he knows the outrage that one would dare to target him. They are jealous, all of them. They want the gifts he has won for himself, won with such bloodstained hands. They are always watching him for weakness.

The members of his court wear mouthless masks, smooth and pure as white porcelain. But the eyes…the eyes are slits, black abysses which mock and whisper endlessly. The women are the worse, with their neatly beribboned betrayals hidden behind fans and simpering smiles. Do not trust fans. Fans cast intricate shadows along the vast throne room. The light dims, turning the festive garlands and banners of entrails into dark tendrils that stretch towards him. The shadows in the corner of the hall are deepening, lengthening. The courtiers laugh silently, drift towards him with the shadows, their clothes now spun of grey half-light. He knows the growing shadows are a vile black ichor, seeping from festering wound. The shadows are the abyss that calls him.

The realisation of who has betrayed him hits him like an electric shock. Betrayal is a choking sensation, like drowning in dust ground from diamond and bone. It is cold steel sliding into a place he swore could feel no pain.

Now he is walking along the corridors of the old wing of the palace that once housed his family. As he strides past, the doors on either side are flung open. Inside, long ribbons of blood are frozen in delicate loops and twists in mid-air. He knows that to touch them would be death: their edges are sharp as obsidian, as hot as life itself.

At the end of the corridor lies his father’s office. When he steps into it, for one moment, the desk is as vast as it appeared to him as a child. He is no longer that child, no longer weak and snivelling. He is no longer afraid of anything.

In front of the desk stands his sister. Agrysa turns to him with a sad, knowing smile. The smile is sign of her betrayal. It is worse than the false smiles given to him by the prostitutes who dare to call themselves ladies, the ones who think to manipulate him or save their own skins.

He thrusts his fist towards her and Agrysa’s body is sent into mid-air. She hangs there without struggling, staring at him with the same gentle expression. Oavyce lunges forward, sword already drawn. He cuts until he can see her heart, spasming violently and convulsively in its cage. Blood hangs in a fine red mist around them, red as the miasma of his rage.

She continues to smile at him, even as her body writhes with the fury of his slashes. She smiles still as he gouges her face open with a vicious, horizontal gash. The wound widens into a gaping grin, and it speaks three words which he refuses to hear. For a moment, his vision is obliterated by the scarlet mist, and he understands that it is he himself who has been cut, that he has killed himself.

His vision returns to see Agrysa’s body collapse into lumps and gristle on the floor. Her remains form a map of Trallia, with bones for mountain ranges, vessels for rivers, a geography of muscle and sinew. He falls into the landscape of her entrails, finding himself flying on wings of night through a narrow canyon. The wind whips his hair back and bites his face with cold as he soars silently through the ravine in the ranges out into the open sky.

In the distance, he sees the unknowing, peaceful lights of cities on the plains, all ignorant of his approach. He laughs, and in his laughter is the madness of thunder. For he is coming now, dancing on the edge of the hurricane. He is the locusts sweeping through the field. He is the plague that creeps insidiously through the vessels of the body.

And naught will stop him till all smiles have been erased.

Kaliriya

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