Tenebrarum carried his father to the royal chamber, a sanctum of dying opulence.
The room was exquisite, a captured sunset of blood-red silks and gilt-edged extravagance. Every surface, every candelabra, every tapestry border screamed gold and wealth, a dazzling, breathless display of power that now felt like a sick joke.
He laid the king on a bed drowning in crimson velvet, the fabric swallowing his frail form. The contrast was cruel: the most lavish room in the kingdom, a glittering cage for a fading heart.
Here, amidst the deafening silence of gold, the only sound was the king's ragged, bloody breath.
"Where are the healers!" His voice was a ragged snarl, stripped of all its usual icy control.
Two men in pristine white robes rushed in, their faces grave. They moved to the king, their hands hovering, palms glowing with a soft, futile light as they passed over his chest. The light flickered, dimmed, and died against the shadow of the sickness within. They exchanged a single, grim look before turning to Tenebrarum.
How could they tell him? How could they shape the words? They saw it—not an illness, but death itself, a final, sinking tide pulling the king away from the shore.
"Aren't you supposed to do something?!" Tenebrarum's composure shattered. He shoved one of the healers back, a burst of helpless violence. His breath hitched, ragged and loud in the silent, gilded room as he knelt, his forehead pressing against the cold embroidery of his father's robe. The gesture was one of utter defeat.
"That's enough. You are a great piece of this empire."
The king's voice was a wet, straining whisper. He lifted a trembling hand, as if to push his son's grief away. "I wanted… to at least see who you marry. But as death has it…Here I am."
A thick, dark trickle of blood escaped the corner of his lips. He swallowed with visible pain. "I suggest you marry Matrona. She has a great bloodline. But…" A final, rattling breath. "...everything is your choice."
Before Tenebrarum could process the command, the plea, the final surrender of authority—his father's eyes slowly closed. The last breath left his body in a silent sigh, and a slow, dark pool of blood began to spread from his parted lips onto the crimson velvet.
"Father," Tenebrarum did not shout.
His voice was a hard, cracked stone of a word.
He tried to move but just couldn't.
Behind the mask, his face felt too rigid. A hot, searing track burned down his cheek. He didn't know if it was a tear or something else—something more corrosive, a larva of pure, unspent agony—but it burnt through the mask, etching its path against the porcelain as if even his disguise could not contain the raw, scouring truth of this moment.
The path through his grief did not lead to peace. It led deep into the marrow of memory.
The world swam, the gold and blood of the chamber dissolving into the sharp, sunlit colors of a courtyard years past.
( "What happened, Tenebrarum?"
His father's voice—young, vibrant, threaded with a warmth the dying king had long since lost.
The man himself was a figure of power, with thick black hair and a smile on his face that seemed brighter than the sun-drenched stone. He knelt, a giant to the small, trembling boy before him.
"Father," the little boy's voice was a hushed, ashamed thing.
"I hate when they call me a whore's child. I do not like it." His small fists were clenched, not in anger, but in a confusion that bordered on pain.
The king's smile didn't fade. It simply changed, hardening at the edges. "You always cry for rubbish." He stood, his shadow swallowing the boy. He didn't console.
"Bring the fool here," He commanded.
The guards dragged a man in—a courtier, pale and weeping.
"Please, it was a slip of tongue," He begged, pleaded, his cries scraping against the cheerful birdsong in the garden. The king was unmoved.
"Bring the sword."
"Father?" The little boy's shock was a physical recoil. This was not the lesson he'd expected.
"Kill him, Tenebrarum."
The command was flat, absolute. The boy's world tilted.
"Father, to take a life is..." He had no words for the wrongness, only a deep, instinctive horror.
"Kill him." The king's voice brooked no argument. "That is how great princes behave. You will have a gift if you do so."
The sword they placed in his hands was a monstrous, too heavy.
It dragged his small arms down, the point scraping the flagstones. His legs shook. His breath came in terrified little hitches.
The weeping man's eyes were wide, locked on his.
Look away, a part of him pleaded.
Do not see this.
But his father's gaze was a greater weight than the steel. He did not look back.
"Haaaaaa!" a sob so loud, it felt like it was ripped from Tenebrarum's core, he lunged.
He did not swing—he lacked the strength. He fell forward, driving the point not for the heart, but for the face, for the source of those terrified pleas.
The sound was wet.
Screams, then a gurgle.
Tenebrarum did not stop.
The horror that was unleashed was a frantic, mechanical energy.
He stabbed again. And again.
Not to kill, but to erase, to silence the proof of what he had done.
Hot blood sprayed, coating his tunic, his hands, his cheeks. It pooled on the stones, a shocking, gleaming red.
Finally, he staggered back, the bloody sword clattering from his grasp.
He stood there, panting, a small boy suddenly aged by atrocity. "Father… I killed him."
He was too cute, not in the way of all children, with rounded cheeks and wide eyes.
Perhaps too perfect.
Now, his face was framed in red, dropping crimson.
The king approached.
In his hands was not a cloth to wipe away the sin, but an object.
"Take it."
He held out a mask. Porcelain. Smooth. Utterly, perfectly faceless.
The boy, numb, took it. It was cool, unnervingly light. "Father… what is this?"
"Male figures are not to be beautiful," the king said, his tone one of imparting the highest wisdom. "This will hide that… curse. You will be taken more seriously, my son." )
A gift. Not for the murder, but for the lesson. The mask was the reward.
His true face—the one that could cry, that could show horror, that could be called beautiful—was the curse to be locked away.
In the present, kneeling by his father's corpse, Tenebrarum's hand rose instinctively to the mask he now wore.
It was a cage built by the first and only love he'd ever known.
And the architect, the great king was...
DEAD...
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To be continued...