"Get out of my sight!" The red gleam in Hercules eyes beamed hatred of the chains which bound his hands and feet as he knelt before the throne of the Fallen King. Forced to remain on his knees by the two, iron-clad palace guards pressing heavy hands down upon Hercules shoulders. He could do nothing but glare at the black draped form of a illegitimate king with a silver broach pinning his cloak together at his neck and silver point of his blade held against Hercule's neck.
"Leave Kodia and never return, you spawn of darkness." The voice of the king boomed throughout the open halls of redstone throne room. Standing before the judgement seat, the throne of Adonidus, the walls sloping heavenward gave a spacious feel to the room, but Hercule felt smothered neath the invasive dark presence of the Fallen King. Venturing to speak against the point of the king's sword pressing upon his throat, Hercule whispered his reply.
"The darkness in me is of your own making, Leor, king of heretics." The air thickened as gasps from the nobles gathered to watch the parade and shame of the traitor prince Hercule echoes into the silence. King Leor flinched for a moment, he had expected this from the young buck, but the words still felt like knives in the back of the man who had raised him. For a nearly imperceptible second in time, the face of the king softened as he stared at the humbled state of his godson and ward. Mercy hinted at the fringes of King Leor's brown eyes, rimmed with black clay. To Hercule, the ritualistic eye paint of the monarchy had always made their eyes look to be sunk deeper into the skull than they were. But the moment of compassion passed as quickly as it came and Leor's expression hardened. His sword point dropped to clink against the stone steps upon which Hercule knelt as the king bent to lean close to the traitor's face.
Barely above a whisper Leor's powerful voice seemed like that of a serpent near Hercule's ear. He would've recoiled back against it, but was held in place by the palace guards and his restraints. "Give your mother my love, Hercule." A smile split Leor's face, a sadistic throaty gurgle rumbled in the back of King Leor’s throat as his thin pale lips came close to Hercule’s ear to whisper his next killing blow. “Don’t worry about your sister… I take good care of her.”
Hercule’s eyes shot wide as he thrust himself at Leor, his restraints didn’t allow for much movement, but Hercule managed to swing his head wildly up into the arrogant king’s face, busting the man’s perfect nose with a loud crunch the split the silence of the echoey throne room. Leor stumbled back stunned as the guards instinctively forced Hercule to lie on his face upon the steps. Hercule’s locks of bloodied brown hair brushed the coarse stone as the steps jagged edge sliced into his cheek.
The onlooker froze, as if the first to move would receive the rate of the king which was sure to come. If Hercule had been paying attention to the crowd of painted faces, mouths gaping and eyes bugged, he would’ve thought them all to be the biggest group of idiots he’d ever seen. But hate has room in it’s eyes for only one object. Hercule’s gaze never strayed from the object of his hate; the man who had raised him, taught him to fight and to rule the kingdom someday, the man he’d loved as a father… how could he have been so blind. Now every one he’d ever loved would suffer for his weakness. That very fact hurt more than any wound Leor could ever inflict. Even death was better than facing his failure.
Leor regained his composure, blood rimming his broken nose. He looked down at Hercule and sealed his victory with a smirk. There was truly nothing Hercule could do but prolong the inevitable… they both knew it.
“Take the wretch away. He has earned himself a traitor’s death.” Leor turned his back on Hercule as the guards, with no regard to the fact that Hercule was a human being, grabbed him by the feet and drug him on his face out of the hall. The stoney floor bruised Hercule’s side and scraped his face and shoulders, but he felt nothing. In the stillness of the back of his mind, behind the tumult of hate and whirlwind of murderous thoughts, back in the solace of insanity, a single haunting image of a child watching him from afar burned itself in his vision. He saw flashes of red and black, and a child, staring on. What did it want? Who was this child?
The floor spun to the ceiling, then back to the floor, and left became right, then the opposite of left and then right again….Flash!
A rack. A whip. A face. A scream. Blood dripped down the mangled body on the wooden cross and into a crimson river on the floor that flowed between the dirty cracks in the stone floor, streaming down the hall of cells and cries for God and for death to a lonely cell at the end of a lonely hall where darkness would not enter: a void of all light and peace, good and bad, life and death. A chatter of rats and gurgle of worms as they fed on the flesh of corpses who used to live in this cell and the body of the unfeeling, forgotten, being who now called it his home. Eyes nearly blinded by the darkest dark. Hands that have forgotten what it felt like to feel. A mind lost to the most hateful thoughts. The river of blood dripped through a seam in the floor to a lighter a room a level below where the light of a thousand suns burned the thoughts and feelings from a pitiful mess of a man covering a fleshless face from the burning light. Scraping his fingers to bloody bones on the stone floor as a voiceless agony ripped through his shredded throat.
Flash!
The light disappeared. A room. A woman. A chisel. A hammer. A stroke. A body crumpled to the floor. A woman standing alone in a dimly let room, a heart in her hand. Blood dripped from the heart into a pool on the floor. Looking down at the pool a reflection of a cell, dark, alone. A man being taking by the legs and drug upon his face through dark halls of a palace in Jong Kabur, city of Kodia screamed in pain as stones cut his flesh. But in an other worldly place, Hercule felt nothing. Lost deep in subconsciousness. Then, all at once, everything stopped. Hercule felt his body stilled. Even as a stranger to his own self, in this moment he was vaguely aware that he was no longer being drug across a floor of knife-like stones or beaten to bloodiness by the steps to the dungeon’s depths. Was he dead? Or beyond that?
A figure-, no two figures. Moved across his blurry vision, like a dream world of smoke and cloud a scene unfolded before the subconscious world of Hercule Savoor.
“Do you feel anything now?” A voice spoke and it’s sound fell dead as it spoke. No echoey, stoney chamber of sound. Dead silence. Hercule wasn’t underground…. Hercule wasn’t dead…? Hercule wasn’t in prison. Hercule wasn’t being tortured. But where was he? Why couldn’t he see?
Hercule opened his mouth to speak but no sound would come.
“Rest.” The voice sounded familiar in a far off way. Hercule wasn’t sure what familiar even was anymore. “You’ve been lost so long I doubt if seeing or speaking will return anytime soon. Regain your strength, friend. There is work to be done.”