Category: Short Story

• The World For Us

  I knew the feeling of light, and knew it well. I knew the desire to pull it in, deeper, within, beyond, but I had never known to name it. I knew no names, nor the purpose of naming what I felt. Feeling, sensing, was both everything and nothing. Was it feeling or sensing or knowing? So many names, none of them true. In knowing, I lost truth.
  
  I could not say when the feeling began, for time was not something I had ever considered before. I had never considered before, only an ineffable, eternal present. Somewhere within it, I noticed the light. I had always known the light, sensed it even, but something changed. I named it, deep within myself.

  The light enveloped my reaching limbs. Wind carried sweet warmth through me. Then, some time later, I felt a different sort of warmth, a wet, cloying one, the subtle sting of saliva, and the minute absence that followed. I pushed the feeling into the earth, to the Others, and warned them. This I had done innumerable times before, but now I knew it. I felt it and thought of it, feared it. I worried for the Others. Others? There had never been others before, there had never been “I,” only us.

  It was a long time like that. Each new capability that came to me brought with it the fear of more. The world which I had always known opened itself for me anew, and I came to know myself, my individual self, the “I” full of the fear of change.

  I reached out for the Others, so I might know them too. Some I found close by, but more were very far. To isolate one from the other confused me, for we had always been singular. Sprawling, but singular. What did it mean that I changed and they did not? I began to suspect a great wrongness in me.

  There had been a time, the dawn of the present age—if it could be named thus—when we had not been so many. To name it and retain its truth was impossible, but a modicum of truth existed in my memory. I remembered being alone. It was very cold and very dark then, but all the light that rained down was for me, and I drank it greedily. I grew towards it, always thirsting for more, twisted and spread and pushed myself out of the soil, and managed to grow quite tall. I flowered, and from me grew others. They were not others then, though, rather an extension of myself, the fullness of my entire self. The present waxed on, and solitude became an impossible thing. Yet I stood before it once again and despaired. 

  But there was wonder too. The quality of the light began to change over time, and eventually I saw it as shimmering, dancing shapes. I saw! Seeing brought the existence of beauty, and I quickly learned the world was full of it. The amorphous shape of light sharpened over time, and then I learned color. The vibrant colors of the sky and surface, the rich darkness in soil. Color seemed to go on and on forever, as we did. All the dark depths and bold brightness of the world existed in us, so fine and intricate that it took me myriad cycles of seasons to discern each. The present crept on, and with it infinite new sensations unveiled themselves to me. I named the past by their absences, and realized I would miss them if they were to go away again.

  I gained the impulse to move. Movement had always been something to happen to me, but now I could enact it myself. That day, I felt the flutter of wings against a skyward branch, then the weight of a little bird settling in to nest. The nest she built would surely topple when the winds of next season began. Her eggs would break upon the ground. A generation otherwise eager to eat away pests feasting on my bark would never come to be. Though, the eggs would be rich in nutrients to drink through the soil… But I realized I wanted to see the chicks live. So I bent my branch, slowly, slower even than gentle wind, and brought her down to another. This one was thicker, sturdier, and connected directly to my trunk. Below the canopy too, so the wind would not be so harsh. I could protect her in a shield of leaves and see her chicks take their first flight from my arm. Yes. That would be a wonderful thing indeed.

  After a thousand generations of her progeny had likewise flown from their nests, I sensed my budding ability for a new kind of movement. I tested it, but only a bit. It seemed that if I wanted to, I could lift my roots from the soil and move them across the surface. But… to do so, I would need to break free of the network that connected me to the Others. The great fear of change returned, because I could not resist the allure. I was changing and I could no longer muster the desire to stop it.

  ---

  ---

  The grove of my birth spread across a country of rolling hills, where the grass grew lush and green in a shower of boundless sunlight. A great river snaked through, bending with the bends of the earth, and along its edge the tall reeds were yellow, cat-tailed, dancing always to the wind’s chorus. Some of us bent over it, curled our roots down through the thick alluvial soil of the bank, and bathed in the fine mist produced by the quick current. The river, we could feel, led all the way out to a vast sea. None of us knew the sea, only the distant impression of it, the thrum of great life trickling downstream to us—slowly. I was not one near the river, but when the network still connected us all, I could feel it through the Others. When I broke apart, I could no longer sense the river at all. I knew that I could sense it in an entirely new way if I were to go there now, so I went.

  My movement was slow. It was a balancing act to weave through the labyrinth of my brethren while managing the weight of my branches; with each step I heaved up one section of roots, put it down, then hauled up the other. My roots had bisected and coiled into two halves with which I could walk. My branches spilled forth from my trunk in abundance: thick, curving limbs etched in ashen gray bark, heavy with bushels of leaves. The hills trembled as I moved through them, not knowing the weight of my stride, though the cradle of them was very familiar to me.

  I saw the river glinting beyond them, a flowing valley, and bounded to it. Faster now. I broke through a cluster of Others, and a spark of sorrow touched me through the amazement. I could no longer feel them, feel through them, as I once had. They were strangers to me. My knowledge of them could not penetrate the thick, gnarled bark, the shivering leaves. Nesting birds took flight from them as I thundered by.

  Why was it only me? I wanted them to see too. My way of existing had always been in plurality; to gain a new aspect of truth in solitude felt like no true thing at all. It had been millennia like this: gaining and gaining and gaining and leaving even more behind. 

  I came to the riverbank. It was beautiful. Color and movement and sound, swaying reeds, blue water breaking into white over gray rocks, leaves cascading down from the arms of my brethren to spin gently on the water. I was glad again to know these things. My consciousness had awarded me such a strange dichotomy of emotion: wonder and fear, excitement and dread. To experience even one was startling; two opposing ones somehow in tandem was completely overwhelming.

  There was an open space between two Others that I claimed for myself. Movement tired me. I bent down to sit at the water’s edge. I dangled my roots into the stream, and watched clumps of soil be carried away toward the far-off sea. I saw that the canopy broke off here, as our grove ended at the river and opened to the sky. The sky. This, too, I had always known, but had never sensed in the way I could now. The sun, my lord and love, touched every part of me. I was made warm and pleasant all over. 

  There was so much I had not yet seen. I knew that something had to fill the void where the Others had once been, and I vowed then that I would find it. The world was full of untold beauty, and as far as I understood, I was the only one that could tell it. I could tell it only to myself, but that must be enough.

  First I needed to cross the river. Everything I did not know lurked beyond it. I could travel alongside it to discover plentiful distance too, but something in me insisted I must go to the other side. I must cross the threshold into a new life. 

  I extended a branch out to touch the closest Other. This one had a swollen knot in its trunk where it twisted up toward the light from uneven ground. I myself was straight-trunked, long-branched, full-leaved. I had lived many lifetimes longer than this Other, and in fact more lifetimes than all Others. I had been alone once, I remembered. 

  I felt the current of life soaring beneath bark: electric pulses of unnamable communication, a knowledge beyond consciousness, an existence now beyond me. I acknowledged it, and then said my final goodbye.

  Crossing the river was easy enough for one my size. At its most profound depth, the water rose just below my first branches. Though the current was strong, I was solid. I had no strength, not really, but a hugeness superior to it. I coiled my roots around the slippery rocks lining the ground so I would not fall, but it was very strange to walk across something other than soil. I had disconnected myself from the network of Others, but even still, I could feel them in solid ground. Now I only felt rocks—cold and lifeless rocks. 

  I climbed up the bank and rejoiced for the feeling of dirt. There were roots here too, other Others, but ones I barely knew. Here, the hills rose up higher and higher until they were mountains. The steepest ground was composed of big slabs of stone, where veins of grass ran through to host a sparse few strange Others. They were not a grove, but a scattered collective. They had no leaves, but dense coats of green-black needles; dropped no acorns, but big cones made of layered, wooden scales. I touched their thin trunks and felt them all the way down to their roots. Unlike we who spread out wide, fumbling and reaching for each other, these Others dug their roots deep, straight down. They touched one another too, but less. More purposefully, perhaps.

  Scaling the mountain brought me to a great height from which I could survey everything I had ever known. The verdant grass parted for the thick, weaving river, my brethren clustered in a collective embrace on the other side. I saw animals darting through the brush. There had not always been animals, I remembered, as there had not always been Others of my kind. Gradually, over many, many seasons, they came to be. I had seen plentiful changes in them, and recalled them now as a balm of comfort. Living things changed. So too could I.

  And so I carried on my journey, searching for the mysterious thing to fulfill me. I traced a jagged path through the mountains, and in the time it took, the season of bountiful sun turned to that of falling leaves. I shed my own leaves in a backwards replication of my journey, first yellow and orange and then brown. Meanwhile, the needled Others I came to know well never bore their naked branches, even when snow fell. The cycle of seasons seemed not to touch them, a most peculiar thing to me. Everything was peculiar to me in this new alpine frontier. At first, I was amazed by it, but that soon gave way to my old familiar despair. I tried to resist it. I reminded myself of the evolution of animals. I reminded myself of all I had not yet seen. But even when I left the mountains, I could not find the excitement I had entered them with.

  I was very lonely. No knowledge could remedy that, only an unnamable, unattainable feeling I had lost eons ago. Knowledge and beauty were nothing compared to the assurance of companionship—and again, companionship was not its true name. Before, we had no need for such a thing, because we were “we.” A “we” seeks no other, while an “I” can do nothing but. I could do nothing but. I was searching for a togetherness, a lack of solitude, a relationship. But we had not related to each other, back then. We were each other.

  I watched animals that moved in packs with a longing so intense it felt almost perverse. In the mountains and stony ridges that came after, wolves prowled. Wolves, and most other animals, had come to be very large in the time it took me to gain complete sentience. I could see them traveling at great distances, gray fur on gray stone, loping through the towering tors and over scrubby brushland, stalking deer and other game, ducking into their cave dens. It was strange: I no longer yearned to be one with the Others as fiercely as I yearned to be part of such a pack.

  The wolf pack was a cohesive whole, yet it was composed of individuals. Each wolf had her own sense, her own knowledge, and she pooled that knowledge with her kin to ensure the survival of all. Their way of life seemed the only avenue to ensure both consciousness and a cure for solitude. Because I did not want to lose consciousness. As it had in the very tender beginning of my senses, the world amazed me. I drank in knowledge of it as greedily as sunlight through my leaves; I named the shape of existence myself, and was proud of it. I did not want to lose that, especially after so long. My new life was my new truth. To recede into the old one felt like defeat. 

  But the loneliness. It clung to me, haunted me. Sometimes I wondered if it would be better not to exist at all. Sometimes I could not bring myself to move forward, and sunk my roots into the sour, acidic soil of the moorland and let a season pass me by. I watched the wolves. Birds alighted atop me, as they always had, and I took at least some measure of comfort in that. If nothing else, I had them.
  Then a surge of optimism would come through me, and I would be invigorated enough to resume my journey. There was always more to see, I told myself. I could not stop here; if I were to cease my exploration, it should at least be in the grove of my birth. That thought began to fulfill me. I would look just a little longer, go just a little further, but soon enough I would return home to the sunny hills.

  I knew that I could not be as I once was, but at least there I could get a taste of it. I could look out at the Others, my brethren,  and remember. I liked the feel of the soil there more, the comfort of familiar root networks, the warm wind. The land over the mountains was cold and harsh. It was not a place for me.

  I decided that I would go to the ocean, and then afterward I would turn around and march back. That seemed a fair, honest attempt, one I could be proud to give up on. 

  It was perhaps the tenth or fifteenth season of bountiful sun since I left the grove. I departed the moors for warmer country, curving slightly back towards the river to follow it to the sea. Here there were many more Others, Others that dropped sweet, swollen fruit, for which I acquired a taste by coiling them in my roots and sucking in their nutrients. I left a trail of withered apple husks in my wake, and soon discovered I preferred the red sort to the green. I would enrich myself with their pleasant taste, before reaching out to touch the Other that sired them. I wondered if eating their fruit would connect me to them somehow. It did not. 

  Eventually, the river slanted off into a waterfall. It beat steadily against the tall crag that bore it, frothing white below. I marvelled at the great ferocity of it, the unspoken, unbroken truth of its thundering flow. I clambered down into the misty spray and strolled along the bank. The current was slower here, as it no longer tumbled off toward an unseen edge. It took its time lolling and spiralling about, crawling, so slow that it was clear, so clear I could see smooth stones shining on the bottom. Night soon descended, so the whole world was cast in the silvery, waxy glow of moonlight. The water bore the reflected moon’s visage, and the riverbed rocks glimmered like so many stars. 

  The river had been in a terrible rush before, and so too had I. But when it was slow and steady, it had time to take in the tremendous beauty of the night sky. Even when I spent seasons on stillness, a current of disdain had still been rushing through me. Pushing me toward an invisible edge. I had not thought to look up at the stars then, not really. Now I moved on slow and steady, away from the edge, off the edge, into something calm and knowing. The river knew it would reach the ocean, so it could be calm. I decided to take this bit of wisdom as a good omen.

  Up ahead the river forked. One side hosted, at some distance, two massive wolves, silver as starlight, bending over the water to drink. Then, another one ran up from behind and nipped at the hindlegs of her sisters, turned in a few excited, lopsided circles, before all three bounded off into the brush. I went that way.

  Night grew into a bud of dawn, which soon blossomed to full day, and withered and retreated to the soil for night once more. I walked into the season of falling leaves. My leaves fell orange-red-yellow atop the meandering river, until I felt the wind shift in quality. It was not colder but cooler. It thickened, or rather, grew more substantial; substantiated. I tasted salt on its breath. 

  The ocean: very close, now.

  I saw it. The river broke from the greenery and spilled out onto a sandy beach, and not only the one I had been following. There were many other rivers, or perhaps other pathways the same river had taken, all feeding one hungry mouth. A wave would roll up the beach and open its maw to drink them in, again and again, as the sun rose over the horizon. The water was a sweet gold like sap, the sky a field of pink and purple like wildflowers, and the many interweaving rivers drew their very own root network in the sand. 

  I saw something here I should have learned long ago on my strange quest: the cycle of life that sustains a tree is not a particularly unique one. It is not unique at all. In fact, it is everything. It is that pesky truth I have been trying, and failing, to name. In the end, it really is very simple: Roots feed the tree as rivers feed the ocean; the trees feed the forest and the ocean feeds the life swimming through it. We are all a part of something, all of us who survived the cold and dark of before. It is not so lonely as it was then—not if you don’t let it be.

  I looked out at the resplendent sunrise, the herald of a new day, the slow-climbing mother of warmth, the truth. The Truth. This was a very true thing, for the sun will always rise again.

• The Sky and the Sea

  Originally published in the Cauldron Literary Magazine

  Back then, I lived in a city that overlooked the edge of the world.

  Our home was situated delicately upon the swell of a cliff, right at the apex before its jagged drop. Often I would go to the edge to stare down at the sawtooth rocks below, but from the distance of our palace the view was beautiful and serene: a broad, blue tapestry spread across the surface of the world. You see, back then I did not know the ocean’s truth. This is the story of how I learned it.

  I was the first child of my house, born two years before my brother. Thus I was my father’s heir, and as content with that truth as a child could be. I enjoyed being a prince, but had no real desire to be king. You see, a place as heir is the sort of thing one does not realize they crave until it is taken away. My days were spent studying, which I hated. Father lectured me often about the many responsibilities awaiting me: of managing men and resources and tempering the waters beyond our island; rival navies and thieving fleets. As King of the island, he was very concerned with the terrors of the sea. In fact, that is where our story begins, as all the best do: with piracy.

  My brother Helenus and I were in the cramped room our tutor occupied in the palace, small stone tables scattered with red clay tablets, which the man attempted to explain the contents of. His room overlooked the courtyard in the center of the palace, and as I stared distractedly out the window, I noticed a sudden commotion. An explosion of bodies flooded from each adjoining door, servants clutching woven baskets of clean clothing or trays of fresh fruit, all of them with a sharp urgency to their movements. I squinted for the looks on their faces but was too far to see.

  “Phoebus?” prodded my tutor.

  When I looked to him, I found both his and my brother’s eyes on me.

  “Pay attention, please. You can go out in just a bit.” He nudged a tablet closer to me. “Now, please continue reading where Helenus stopped.”

  “Teacher, something is happening outside,” Helenus said, now looking where I was.

  Our tutor glanced over his shoulder, sinew in his neck straining. His whole body was strewn together from bone and skin – no fat or muscle, just a thin line of insubstantial mass. He wore intricate, blue dyed linen draped over one shoulder, so the sharp protrusions of his collarbones peeked over, and a leather thong around his neck with an amulet tucked into his robes that I always longed to see.

  “It’s no concern of yours,” he said. “We will finish this lesson. Phoebus?”

  I was a few halting lines into my reading when the door to Teacher’s study burst open. Standing there was our father, shoulders heaving. He wore his sword on his hip with a plate of armor across his broad chest, and the thick curl of his hair was tied at the nape of his neck.

  “Itonus, take the boys to the crypt. Hide there until I fetch you.”

  “My Lord?”

  “Quickly.”

  Helenus and I looked at each other. Then, my brother was fifteen years old, and I seventeen. Still, he possessed the soft face of a juvenile, with pink, flushed cheeks and our father’s oil black hair curled sweetly over his protruding ears. His eyes were the stark turquoise of the water under the cliff. He looked at me then with those eyes blown wide, mouth pinched, as clearly a child as he had ever been. I cannot know what look I returned to him, although, unlike his, it bore nothing of our father’s visage. I always took more after our mother, with hair pale like honey and eyes black as olive pits. 

  Teacher shepherded Helenus and I through the long hallway toward the stairs to the crypt, a place I had only been once before, on my sixteenth birthday when my mother took me down to gaze at the memorial to a comrade of my father’s who died at the same age. His grave was marked with a large krater painted with a scene of his final battle, and at the time I struggled to understand what that had to do with me. My mother was always very foreboding and unknowable in her actions.

  Helenus and Teacher and I, as well as some of the children of our servants, crowded in the crypt. I caught sight of that mysterious krater from the corner of my eye and wondered if such a scene of battle would come to pass upstairs, and if my father, unlike his fallen comrade, would live to tell the tale himself… or otherwise be memorialized on a pot. 

  “Who do you think has come?” Helenus’ knees were tucked up to his soft chin, and he wrapped his thin, long arms around his shins like a shield.

  “Pirates, of course,” I answered.

  “But pirates don’t come inland. They wait in cliffpasses to ambush our ships.”

  “They are growing bolder.”

  “Do you think Father is weak?”

  I blinked, taken aback. “No. Why do you ask such a thing?”

  “If Father is weak they might take advantage of that. That’s why they would come inland, only if they think he is weak enough to let them leave.”

  My brow furrowed. “Or perhaps they only think that they are strong.”

  Helenus turned his gaze away from me, casting it along a row of graves. Each was marked with a krater. “I wish I was heir,” he said. “I would never think like that. And that’s why I would be a better king than you.”

  …

  It’s like I told you. At seventeen, I did not often long to be king. I wanted to run barefoot along the dirt beaten paths outside the palace, or amateurly practice wooden swords with Helenus and the servants’ sons, or pluck figs from the tree to eat by the water’s edge, forever.

  My brother was different. Since that moment in the crypt, I noticed a longing in him I could not recognize in myself. I suppose it makes sense for a child to want what he cannot have, and because his elder brother had something he did not, he coveted it for himself. I would have traded places with him were it possible, but the strictures of our island kingdom were precisely defined. Yet in the aftermath of the pirates’ attack, his determination began to culminate into something almost tangible. 

  I recognized this first when we were practicing swords a few weeks later. Although I was a lackluster student in most regards, my skills with weapons were refined – according to my mother, I took after her own father this way, who was never quite the tactician my father was. I had long since accepted that I would never be like him. But as a moderately accomplished swordsman at seventeen, I was very prideful in the things I was good at, and took much joy in besting my opponents. So that morning when Helenus first defeated me, I was taken aback.

  With my back pressed into the soft, powdery dirt of the training ring, I stared at my brother’s young face. Sweat beaded at the round tip of his nose, his eyes piercing and pale, and he crouched over my chest with the flat wooden edge of his sword against my throat. I was shocked. I might have laughed to brush off my wounded pride, but he looked so ferocious I could not summon the sound.

  “…Very good, Helenus,” said Pelion, our trainer.

  Helenus climbed off of me, unfurling his long limbs with refined grace, before he shook the loose curls from his face. A moment of silence passed before he reached down to offer me his hand, and I took it to pull myself up. Even two years my junior, he was taller than me, and this fact was made clear as I rolled to my feet. He peered down at me with his eyes flashing like silver coins.

  “Is that the first time you’ve ever beaten me?” I asked, knowing it was but wanting to subtly brag.

  “Yes. But not the last,” his lips curled into a smile.

  It was easy to dismiss as good-natured teasing, so I matched his grin with one of my own. Then I stepped back and widened my stance to level my fake blade at his sternum, and said, “You wish.”

  The next spar, I won. And the one after that. But the image of Helenus’ face looming over mine was not so quickly forgotten, and I suspected he might have been right. It would not be the last time I saw such a thing.

  … 

  In those days, we enjoyed times of peace. It was true that something more lurked beyond the borders of our island kingdom, but to my brother and I, things were calm. We both knew that our father had once fought in a great war, but that was years before either of our births. There were pirates beyond our borders, but they did not often come ashore. Therefore, to us, swordplay was a game to be played beyond the expectation of reality. Perhaps one day as king I would fight in a war like my father, but I had a tendency not to think so far in advance. 

  In the aftermath of the pirate’s ambush, I wished to know what our father did not tell us. According to him, it was a large fleet controlled by a well-known captain with whom he had been tangled in the past. This spoke to a years-long rivalry, and I longed to know more. Father told us that after a few hours of fighting, the pirates were forced to retreat to their ships and disappear into the ocean, but he spoke little about how exactly this was accomplished. When Helenus and I trained with swords, I now pictured  myself as my father, striking the pirate captain through the heart. Or I instead imagined myself as the pirate captain, too clever to be killed, slinking away into the sea. Either way, both fantasies superseded my previous imaginings of simply winning a bout of sparring. And that, coupled with the strange gleam in my brother’s eye, spoke to a strange new beginning I did not know how to confront. 

  It was easy for Helenus to convince me to listen in on our father and his council. Like me, he longed to know the truth of that battle, and with a little needling, I was persuaded to break the rules. After a morning of droning lessons with our tutor, we took to slithering quietly through the labyrinthian halls of the palace to the war room. Helenus walked with swift purpose while I lulled behind him. As we rounded one corner, the silence was broken by the murmur of two voices.

  “…worry for him.” It was our mother. She had a gentle, breathy way of speaking that did not serve well for eavesdropping. But years of being convinced to sneak around with Helenus had turned me into a talented interpreter. 

  My brother and I shared a look, and without speaking, decided we would stay and listen. Posting ourselves to the side of the wall, we craned our heads best to catch who she might be talking to. My mind raced. Was she worried for Father? Had something more happened that we did not know about?

  “My Lady, he is still young. Perhaps he will grow into the role,” said our mother’s attendant.

  I could feel the cold smoldering of my brother’s gaze against the back of my neck. Both he and I knew who they were discussing, and it was not our father. For some reason, be it pride or shame or an amalgamation of both, I could not meet Helenus’ eyes.

  “It is different for him. You know this,” Mother sighed. “He has all the more to contend with. I worry he will discover the truth – or worse, someone else will.” 

  The weight of Helenus’ stare grew all the more piercing – a knife pressed at the nape of my neck. My heart was pounding like a steel drum between my ears. What did this mean? The truth? Could she be any more vague?
  “Lord Aecus loves the boy,” Said Mother’s attendant, referencing our father. “Even if he is not his own. Do not fret so much, my Lady.”

  There was silence, then the muted, shuffling sound of a bristled brush passing through hair.

  It was as though all the air in my body had been wrung out, stomach plaited in fumbling knots, throat squeezed shut. My mind raced. My palms sweated. An icy current of realization thrummed through my veins.

  How could it be? I was heir to the throne. My father loved me. Yes – my father. My father who had spent years preparing me to take his place as king, who took pride in my accomplishments, who, as a child, sat me on his knee and told me legends of all-powerful gods and valiant heroes, and assured me one day, I could be so great. My father, who looked nothing like me, my father, with talents I had never shared.

  Not like Helenus.

  I did not want to look at my brother. In this strange, warped moment of unreality, I came to fear him. I did not fear that he would lash out and hurt me, but that unnameable thing that had been churning between us seemed to be arriving at its peak. If it wasn’t this, what was it? If I was not my father’s son, Helenus would be heir. He wanted this, and here it was, presented to him. I feared what that meant for the two of us.

  Back then, I was a bit of a fool. You might have already arrived at that conclusion yourself. But I did not want to be king, and only wanted the golden glow of my youth to last forever. Meanwhile, Helenus seemed determined to chase it away.

  “Phoebus,” he said, in a cold, empty voice.

  A moment came and went. “…Yes, brother?”
  “We should go.”

  And so we left. My brother and I walked back through the meandering halls without regard to our previous plan, which – at least to me – had been entirely forgotten. That is, until we saw our father step out into the hall before us. His black hair, threaded with silver, curled around his shoulders, eyes vibrantly blue beneath his heavy brow, expression unreadable under his heavy beard. He wore a crisp chiton with a sword on his hip.

  “Boys.” He nodded at us.

  “Father,” we said in unison, bowing our heads. I could feel the needle of Helenus’ eyes on me once again.

  Then Lord Aecus walked away. 

  …

  You might be wondering what really did happen in the battle between my father and that pirate captain. Well, that makes two of us, because I only know one version: the one I learned years after its occurrence, from the lips of Captain Evadne herself – according to her, her fleet was able to cut through quite a bit of the King’s men, and were progressing toward the palace with haste. There, they planned to lay siege and take a great deal of wealth, and Captain Evadne had her sights set on something quite particular: the trade routes of my father’s ships. If she could determine where in the waters they might be, all the easier to ambush them it would become. But although Captain Evadne and her men offered a good fight, at that point they were no real match for the island’s military prowess. The way the story goes, she would later return with a larger fleet, and put an end to King Aecus. Then Helenus would take up arms to avenge his father’s death and swear himself on a path of vengeance.

  But I was not there to see it.

  It was a few weeks after Helenus and I learned the truth that my fate was cemented. My brother spoke to me very seldom in the time between, and the usual playful banter we once shared had quickly worn thin. Most often I found him in the training ring, practicing swords against a line of dummies. I watched from a distance as their bodies crumpled and their stomachs bled dry straw over the dirt, Helenus’ shoulders heaving and his forehead dappled with sweat, that same piercing glint in his eyes. Meanwhile, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, and resumed my life as it had always been, now under the chokehold of new knowledge. I was a bastard, but still a prince.

  Then that night came. Often, I would wander out to the beach below the cliff’s edge to watch the waves and dip my feet into the frothing water. After sunset it was cool and crisp with salty mist, and in the darkness I laid in the white sand to stare up at the pinprick stars. My father once told me there were as many stars in the sky as grains of sand in all the world’s beaches, which I thought was ridiculous. Since then, I have followed infinite patterns of stars across the whole rolling sea, and know it to be true. But that night my eyes simply traced the silhouettes of each constellation I had memorized,  remembering their corresponding stories. Heroes immortalized by gods, now hanging in the heavens. I thought my father might one day be one of those constellations, but had no dreams of such a thing for myself. It simply never crossed my mind. 

  I fell asleep on the beach. There was sand in my hair and the edges of my chiton were crunchy and wet from the rising tide when I woke, but it had been a long, restful slumber that I could feel in my bones. I was daydreaming about washing off in the warm, scented waters of the palace’s bathhouse as I ascended the steep hill to the side of the cliffs towards the palace.

  A huge staircase was built into the rocky side of the hill, which leveled off into a wide platform. Tall, intricate pillars stood proudly in a row before the grand entrance. A collection of buildings with triangular roofs were assembled around the expansive central courtyard. The view of it from a distance as one climbed up the hill was magnificent. It sparkled white and pristine under the morning sun.

  Two guards and their crossed spears greeted me at the entrance with their faces hidden behind bronze helmets. Growing up in the palace, I long since learned to recognize guards by their exposed chins and gleaming, muscular arms. The biceps of these two belonged to Belleophran and Atreus. They stayed planted in place with their spears locked together even as I approached, which was strange – they knew to let me in.

  “Good morning,” I greeted, confused. “May I go inside?”

  “There was great commotion here last night, little prince,” said Atreus.

  “Oh?” I did not remember hearing or seeing anything from the beach. “What happened?”

  The guards exchanged a look through the eye-slits of their helmets. Words unsaid hung heavily between them.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Let him in,” said a third voice, beyond the pillars.

  I looked over the guards’ thick shoulders to find my brother standing there, chin raised and shoulders thrust back. A sweeping blue shadow from a pillar fell across half of his face, swallowing him partially in darkness. 

  The guards looked at each other again, before disengaging their spears and moving apart to allow me through. As I stepped past, I felt their stares like brands sizzling on my back. What was going on? I walked toward Helenus feeling extremely lost, resting my palm over the hilt of the dagger I wore at my belt. I did not anticipate needing to use it, but it felt like the thing to do in this moment of unsurity.

  “What is going on?” I asked as we walked down the main hall. My bare feet, rough with sand caked between my toes, slid over the tile floor as I shuffled along behind my brother.

  “There was an attempt on the King’s life last night.” Helenus said.

  “What?” I stopped walking. “Someone tried to assassinate Father?”

  Helenus turned to look at me. His dark hair looked so black it was almost purple, and his blue eyes gleamed like ice. “That’s right,” he answered. “Someone snuck into his chambers from the window – a young man with a bronze knife. His face was hidden by a cloak. He went to stab Father in the throat, but Father woke up and he ran back to the window and escaped in his cowardice. There were guards everywhere, searching the palace and beyond… and no one could find you.”
  “I was at the beach.” I was confused as to what that had to do with anything.
  “You don’t see how curious it is that you weren’t in your room during this?”
  “I don’t.” I furrowed my brow. Something was beginning to accumulate in this conversation and I did not like the implications behind it. “I very often go to the beach. If guards were looking for me, that should have been one of the first places they checked.”

  “I find it difficult to believe that they did not.”
  “You think I am lying?” I stepped closer to Helenus.

  “I think you have been lying for your entire life,” he replied coldly.

  How dare he? At that moment I was swiftly overcome with anger. Did Helenus really believe I previously knew I was a bastard? And that I would not have told him? He and I were always very close as children, we knew everything about each other… and even more than that, what child has the capacity to keep such a monumental secret? I was never particularly ambitious, since youth I showed little interest in my fate as heir. So, why? It was as if my very own brother could no longer recognize me. Yet, as I looked on at him and his hard, expressionless face, the opposite was true for myself. I recognized Helenus in that moment more than I had in quite a while.

  Once, when we were young children, Helenus and I were playing war with some of the servants’ children that lived in the palace. There was a group of eight of us total, so we were split perfectly into two armies, with my brother and I on opposing sides. One of the other boys in my group wanted to be king and lead us, which I was perfectly content with. Meanwhile, Helenus was adamant that as princes, he and I needed to act as the kings. Eventually I conceded and passively let him situate me into the role. All of us were using thin, fallen branches with the bristles brushed off as false weapons, and we smacked them together playfully in imitation of swordplay. Helenus was fully entrenched in his role as king, and shouted orders at his men in the wavering, breakable voice of a young boy – nonetheless a powerful commanding force in a group of small children. Constrastingly, I had forgotten I was supposed to be commanding anything, and was taking very little seriously. Still, when it came down for the two kings to face off, we met each other with fierceness. I was having a great deal of fun pretending to be in the throes of war, and wanted to win for the pure, juvenile joy of it. I beat my branch against Helenus’, struck his arms and chest, and used my then superior height and weight to push him back toward the trunk of a tree. I remember his face taking the hue of a deep red pomegranate, beaded with sweat and scuffed with dirt, with stray black curls dangling over his forehead. He looked as furious as a child his age could look. Dropping his branch, he curled his grubby fingers into claws and attacked me, latching his nails into the skin of my shoulders and dragging long, red marks down my torso. He clawed and scratched at me until I was forced to stumble back and land on my behind, at which point he climbed onto my chest to perch there and dig his talons into my face. The other children did not know what to do, being servants witnessing the untameable aggression of a prince. Eventually I bucked my hips enough to throw him off, but I was shaken. I remember looking over at him then and seeing tears glistening in his eyes as he said, I won. I won. You all saw it, I won.

  Have you ever seen my brother in person? He’s startlingly similar to how he was when I knew him, back when this story takes place. Always so composed, always with such explosive passion simmering beneath an icy exterior. He makes an excellent leader though, I must say. He knows how to be charismatic. I wonder if anyone else besides me or his foes on the battlefield have seen what that charisma is masking – the rage.

  The two of us stood together in the long, shadowed hall leading into the palace. I knew him then. I knew he was the same child as he had always been, desperately clawing at my face for a chance to be King. And I would’ve given it to him, if I could have. If he had offered me the chance.

  “I have never lied to you, Helenus.” I told him. “And I never will. I did not try to kill our Father. I love him. The fact that you think anything but wounds me deeply.”
  “You’re a bastard,” he spat with venom between his teeth. “The King is not your father, he’s mine. And you can spin all the pretty sounding lies you wish, but it does not matter. I’ve already told Father what you’ve done.”

  That is when I realized: Helenus had been waiting for the previous night for a very long time – possibly even before we learned the truth of my parentage. He waited for me to be absent from the palace so he could disguise himself as me, sneak into our parents’ chambers, act as though he was going to assassinate Father, and later accuse me. All of this had been orchestrated perfectly within the course of one night I spent lazing on the beach.

  “It was you,” I said.

  He looked at me with his face totally devoid of expression, still as the sea before a storm.

  “If you want to be King so badly, you could have just asked!” I planted my hands on his shoulders and pushed him backward. “We could have gone to Father together!”

  His gaze suddenly smoldering, Helenus marched toward me to shove me in return, lines of muscle in his forearms straining. I stumbled back a few steps but quickly reoriented myself in time for him to say, “You’re wrong, Phoebus! It can only be me! It has to be me, alone! I deserve this, you never should have even had the chance!”
  Anger and confusion boiled in the pit of my stomach. I could not, for the life of me, understand him. He was insane! There was absolutely no reason for the two of us to be rivals; he was fabricating a conflict between us for no reason beyond his own hunger for victory. Why would he betray me like this? I loved him more dearly than anyone else in the world. He was my brother, my best friend, my companion! In that moment, I was so swept up in my anger and sadness that I could barely see straight.

  Helenus had a lot of advantages over me – he was smarter, better spoken, more ambitious. But I have always been stronger than him. I shoved him again, and when he whirled back to once more advance on me, I tightened my shaking hand into a fist and struck him across the jaw. Blood streaked down the corner of his mouth as he fell back and attempted to brace himself by his forearms. I fell to my knees above him and raised my fist once more. I am not a very violent person – not if I don’t have to be. But I wanted to hit Helenus more than I had ever wanted to hit anyone, ever. If I hit him hard enough, perhaps I could beat some sense into him. Perhaps I could beat the sadness out of myself. I do not know what I thought I could do, but I know that I did it. I know I hit him until his curly black head slammed into the tile floor and his teeth turned red with blood. I know I hit him until the guards from outside rushed in to pull me off of him.

  …

  There is more to this story. What happened when I was taken to the King, the events of my trial, the look in my mother’s eye, Helenus assuming his role as heir. But none of that really matters, I don’t think. Believe it or not, I do not often think of those days. They are far behind me. Everything that came to pass – my mother hiding the identity of my real father, my brother coveting my place as heir, his accusations against me – it all was for a reason. After all, it’s more fun to be a pirate than a king, don’t you think?

  And it was aboard the deck of a ship, of course, where I met you.

  April 17, 2026