The Queen
Legend says it erupted from a volcano, the earth pushing the castle spires upward and out of the ground, plunging into the vacant sky. Volcanic ash covered the many rooms of the castle. Minerals and organic powder made up this dusty concoction. And from it rose the very first subjects of Amory. But what of beginnings?
It does not matter how magic starts, but where it’s headed and what it touches.
Today in Amory, there is a facade of peace across the land. A blanket of white inactivity lies over people, the stables, the town square and even the great castle. The kingdom from afar would look abandoned, pale, dead, and frozen in time. Even closer examination would hardly expose the people plowing in their pastures–the dead expressions on their faces, no feeling in their eyes. Walk along the winding roads of Amory, with its vast architecture, the spires of the castle, the pubs and little homes all stacked together, and you will see citizens moving about, but with little life and scarce motivation.
No real existence, just grey people wandering the streets.
And if that isn’t enough to send you packing, you realize, standing amongst the stasis, there is silence. It crawls into your ears and fills your body with a violent buzzing of nothingness.
For fifteen years the great Kingdom of Amory has been like this.
The Queen of Amory remains in her bedroom, high above the roads and looks out at her still kingdom. Through a thin white fog she can see the shadow-figures move about. Most of her subjects remain in their beds until they fade away from this life. Every day she stands before her great window and conjures up the past, the way her Kingdom used to be. She tries to remember the sound of voices, but they seem as distant to her as the crown of mountains that encircle Amory. The sound of her own voice has slipped away from her.
She turns and looks into her vast room of marble, the floor covered in varying carpets, furs and fabric. The walls hanging with large paintings of old stories and myths the people of Amory once spoke of. Dragons, wizards and knights. The largest painting, a volcano erupting the jagged towers of the Amory castle. They are all thick with dust now, the colors of the paintings pale and seemingly transparent. I should have them dusted, thinks the queen. There! –a flicker of light within her, as if someone trying to start a fire with flint. Scraping, scraping. The idea of doing something, going to one of the servants and asking (with no voice of course) for assistance and dusting the paintings.
But the light dies, and she knows she won’t do it.
She walks to her large bed, trailing frail and tattered strands of her night gown as she moves. She falls forward and buries her face in the dusty pillows and visualizes what she must look like from above–a large black bird with wings spread out, thin and old, and a mat of large red curls atop its head.
I am but an old dying bird.
She rolls over and stares at the high ceiling. Large stone arches above her head keep the ceiling from crushing her. Would it be so terrible if it did? If a shift of the earth below sends a ripple of stress up through the foundation, into the walls and cracks her high stone ceilings, sending her the way of so many before her?
Letting out a slow deep sigh, she thinks about what happened those fifteen years ago when she banished all the evil from Amory once and for all. For all, she thought. Well, this is my all and it is my prison.
Fall
Fall awoke with a familiar pounding in his head. Lifting his head from the pillow he feels the full effect of the tight grip on his skull. He imagines the bone in his head tightening around the swollen meat of his brain. Sometimes it feels better if he imagines the cause of pain, even if he knows it isn’t real.
The sun invades the holes of the moth eaten curtains. The only thing worse than sitting up with a headache is the light piercing his eyes. Wrapping his hands around his sore eyes and beating the sockets, he feels like his mother, sprawled out in her bed and avoiding the light. She embraced the sun, he thinks. Whenever he visited her, she’d be standing in front of that window, taking in the what light there was.
Stepping out of the bed he freezes with an unbearable jolt of soreness running from his head to the ground and grips the sheets until it passes. This is part of his morning, every day he wakes up with the same routine of fleeting pain. It is cold today, so as he moves to the basin he brings the blanket with him, wrapped up tight. With a loud yawn he sees steamy breath spill out of his mouth. Candles are lit under the porcelain basin to warm the water. The servants must have already come in while I was asleep. Fall wonders if they ever watch him while he is dreaming.
He shrugs off the chill this thought gives him and splashes warm water over his face and long, dark hair, soothing the pounding a little. She wants me to cut it.
But Fall likes his long hair the way it is. It hides his eyes, or at least distorts them enough so that people don’t stare as much. If only he could wear dark glass goggles all the time, like the old wizard who lives in the dungeons of the castle–no longer used for prisoners, since, as long as Fall has lived, he’s never heard of nor seen a crime.
The old wizard, who prefers the dungeon to his chamber above ground, intrigues Fall and scares him a little too. He feels no danger from the old man, just wariness of his shaking hands and failing eyes. They don’t seem a good thing to combine with magic.
Fall dresses in a large, grey wool sweater and puts on pants over his long underwear, and heads into one of the great halls without shoes. He doesn’t notice the cold marble floor, due to his head, and passes many paintings of relatives he never met and stories he doesn’t know, oblivious. Soon the slap slap slap of the stone floor gives way to the swirling maroon and gold of the rug outside the kitchen, and the smell of breakfast makes him smile.
Nadea, the cook, has made breakfast everyday for as long as he can remember. It is surprising that she could still cook after the Silence, but she can, and Fall has come to think of her as a clock–always moving in the same direction, despite the surrounding conditions. She smells like butter and brown sugar, but doesn’t look as sweet. She is a big woman, but not ugly.
In the kitchen, Nadea is trying to explain something to Brigette, a chambermaid. Nadea’s hands are flailing and she mouths her directions. The servant nods, but looks nervous. Even mouthing words is no longer very effective, as people have forgotten how to form them. Sure, they can say them in their heads, but how do the lips move to make the O? And where does the tongue go to get a sharp K?
Fall sees his plate of two eggs, toast, and a glass of juice on the nearest counter and takes it without interrupting the women. He eats his breakfast sitting cross-legged in the hall, listening to the pots being moved and cleaned, like he does every morning. And then, from the compartment in the nearby bench where he hides it, he retrieves the book the wizard gave him years ago.
The wizard, over the years, has given Fall many things–things of magic and science, meant to entertain him and to teach him a few things. But this is the only book he has ever given to the boy. Tells of the days before the Silence, it enamors Fall with page after page of drawings depicting crowds of people in the market, exchanging goods, and talking. Talking.
Brigette runs out of the kitchen door with the Queen’s tea and nearly trips over Fall–another morning tradition. The Queen, Fall’s mother. Fall knows his mother is beautiful. He has the other women working in the castle to compare her to. She has long, thick black hair that she puts up in the afternoon, but lets hang all morning. Her skin is pale, but in an elegant way. Even before the Silence, when it turned nearly white, her porcelain skin stood out.
Again he wants to hear her voice. He tries to imagine what it sounds like. Maybe like running water or a stream in a forest. Yes. Her voice must sound like something as vital as water–water moving through stone or aqueducts. At night time, perhaps it changed into the sound of rain, soft, with each word spoken carefully, dropping into a puddle before the next word is formed.
Fall heads to his mothers room without finishing his breakfast. Up and up, he takes the stairs two at a time, until he faces the two large doors to her room. He wonders which mother she will be today–the one who is exuberant and full of ideas, or the one he is more likely to encounter, the one who is tired and solemn.
The Queen Of Amory
The queen was still staring at her ceiling. She had imagined the various ways that broken stone could crush her bird like body. There then came a knock at her door. Another heavy sigh, that brigette again with her unreadable face and shaking hands, spilling tea, feeding the bear rug and not me!. She rings the small bell by her head, Come in! Come in! it says. The great doors open to a small boy with shaggy brown hair, which needs to be cut and mismatched clothes, apparently the only clean ones he has.
Fall was born during a thunderstorm in October, a storm so great that all the shutters of the castle were ripped away and even some windows decided to go along with them. Amory Castle stood after the storm like a beaten dragon missing teeth and scales. The Queen lay in her bed holding her new son, while the castle grounds were tended to. His eyes are a bright auburn which soon did change to a burning green. He wrapped his tiny hands around her fingers, lingers on her great rings and giggled in delight as they shined in the candle light.
The Queen kisses the new boy on the forehead and names him Fall, after the season, and also after her plunge into being his mother. For a time after that, they never separated. In her room, they played. She taught him many things her father taught her. She read to him many stories and they played out adventures. Wrapping herself with the many rugs and furs of her room she would crawl toward Fall like a dragon and roar. The young knight, Fall knew he had to save the kingdom from this dragon. But would never pick up a stick or a stone to be his weapon. He would jump on her and defeat her with love. He would kiss her on her cheeks again and again, for dragons hated to be kissed. She would finally give up and he was the hero of Amory. When Fall was 5 years old he was given his own room in the castle and his studies began with the wizard. He found them interesting but regrettably absent of any dragons.
Fall smiled and came in, he first hugged his mother who lay lifeless on the bed(and didn’t seem to mind, he knew her dramatics all too well.), he then walked to her great windows and opened them. Even without speaking he was insisting life to her. Open the windows, breathe the air, love your kingdom. She loved very little these days, but deeply loved her son. She knew he didn’t like her to mope, but at the same time loved her dramatics. The queen got up from the bed and helped him retrieve the large stone chess board from its shelf. Fall assembled the stone pieces in their black and white square homes. Each piece was brilliantly cut from stone and she wished she could tell Fall it was his father who made them. But he happily placed them all, unaware of their origin. She admired Fall, he was one of the few in the kingdom to not succumb to the white plague of Silence. Perhaps because he knew of nothing else.
Fall was the only person in all of Amory that she knew of, that could still smile.
He didn’t speak of course, but had expressive eyes. Those green eyes. While everyone else’s eyes in Amory turned a grayish yellow, his remained a saturated color and in contrast to the white, they glowed. The game began, and the two of them gauged each other’s moods by the aggressiveness of the tactics or the lack there of. The queen held a small white pawn in her aged hands. She studied it, the chiseled cuts that shaped it into what it is now. She couldn’t help but think this pawn was her son and she wondered if he knew he was learning a strategy for a battle she hoped would never happen.
