Lathendar 5 - Divide and Conquer

Alone in his quarters, the king of Toren took a deep swig of his country's finest rum straight from the bottle. A warm burning sensation diffused through his body to his brain, attacking his headache like a jackhammer. He felt sick. He felt weak, impotent, powerless. He was being drowned in imperial plots and head games. He had lost his only ally. He took another swig, and heard a knock at the entrance to his suite. A servant greeted his visitor, and Melwick did nothing to make himself more presentable. No one in Toren dared to question him, though they all knew he was an impotent drunkard. No one discussed this openly either. Guernos and Meyellis had seen to it.

"In your cups again, Mel?" His brother teased as he entered the room. "I don't approve of this solitary drinking of yours. It would do good for your public to see you out wenching. They seem to think you've lost whatever spine you had."

"I don't want to go out. I don't want to go and consort with all the foreign whores they seem to have produced for your indulgence."

"Ahh, but they fuck like demons, Mel!" Cuthbert wandered across the room and poured himself a drink from the king's bar.

"Maybe they are." He stared at the bottle in his hands. He didn't want to drink in front of his brother. He felt that Cuthbert had betrayed him, and the rest of Toren. Before all this, he hadn't realized how deeply his brother's decadence ran. It was easy to blame Bert for his own position, his own failings.

"You're just no fun anymore," the prince claimed dismissively. "They should have made me king."

How could he not understand what was going on? How could he not care? These people had gotten their father killed, and probably their brother as well. If they had made Bert king... They would have had to kill him first. Did his brother not care about that, either? "How can you say that?"

Bert shrugged. "You're such a downer, now. You should be making the most of what you've got. Don't you remember all the things we said we'd do when you got your crown?"

"Everything's different now."

"Why? Because we don't have to worry about Lath having a fit watching us because he can't get over some dead slut? That was supposed to be half the fun!"

"Don't you care about anything? They won't even let me send out any of my people to find his corpse!"

"Oh, right, because you care so deeply about our rites for the dead. After what you're letting them do with our father? And do you really think he's even dead this time?"

"How can you say that!" Melwick didn't even know what he was talking about anymore. He had tried to stop them from building the ridiculous monument to their father, taking him away from his proper place in the royal catacombs. Then they'd had Lathendar sent away, and he'd never come back. That had been over a month ago, and construction on the grand tomb was coming along quite quickly.

"Well if the rumours are true, maybe he's just helping them plan their next best move. Or maybe they're just keeping him in some secret dungeon and torturing him until he breaks. I really don't care, Mal. I was just hoping to stop you from becoming a self-righteous bastard like him, but that's apparently a lost cause." He set his empty glass back down with the clean ones, and gave the king a disgusted look.

It would be too easy to become as apathetic as Bert was, but now he couldn't imagine what had ever made him want to start down that road to begin with. "I'm sorry I can't be like you Bert."

"Yeah, Mel, so am I. Maybe I'll just come back when you're drunker and see what you're good for then."

The King of Toren watched his brother leave, and stared back down at the bottle he still had in hand. He brought it back up to his lips...

He was lost, but he knew he was going to make it back to the castle. It was only a matter of time. He hoped it would not be too late.

He was still being stalked by the thing. It was trying to keep him confused, keep him away from his home. The Gods only knew what would happen to Toren without him. His brother would be lead around by the Imperials like a blind horse.

Lathendar stumbled again. He needed to find water before he became delirious again. It could have been last night or last week that he had collapsed again, lying incapacitated in the forest for what seems like hours. He wasn't certain it was the same night that he had realized he had blacked out, cleared his fogged mind of its ghosts, and forced himself to go on.

He glanced at the sky, blinking to focus his eyes and concentrating to remember his astrology lessons. There was a constellation, a bird, that always stayed over Toren, always led the way there. Sometimes he could remember this, sometimes he could find it, and sometimes he could achieve both of these at the same time. He was lucky tonight.

He leaned against a tree trunk for a moment to catch his breath, and it struck him, again, how he must look. His hair was falling in his eyes, his clothes were tattered and clotted with blood. He thought it must be the only thing that was holding them in place. The same could probably be said for his skin. He'd been walking and walking and couldn't even remember the last time he had even seen anything remotely edible. The last time he had anything besides water as nourishment, he had vomited himself into unconsciousness and woken up halfway through the day shaking violently. His hands were black with filth of all sorts. He couldn't recognize his own face to the touch anymore. No one in the castle would know him, he was certain. They probably all believed him dead, for real this time.

He had stopped long enough. He could hear the creature in the woods, whispering taunts at him.

"I'm going to kill you again, princeling. It will be new, a new kind of pain for you. I like the taste of your blood, its always so fresh. Maybe Guernos will let me keep you when he is finished with this game. I'll keep you on a chain and feed you nothing but your own flesh, nothing but your own blood to drink, it is so rich and royal..."

"I'll kill you yet, " Lathendar whispered, because he meant it and because he needed to hear his own voice to keep sane. "I'll kill you, and them, and send you all back to whichever hell you came from. And then I'll make my city great again." Inertia was the key. Follow the right stars. Don't stop, ever.

"You really think that? You lie to yourself very well, but you will never be great enough to defeat all of the Imperial Legion. You are nothing. Your city is a worthless nothing, a valueless prize, nothing but a water stain on the map of our glory. When we have finished with it, it will be erased. How do you like that, little prince of nothing?"

"I will kill you, I will bring you all down, I will stop you...." He kept repeating this mantra over until it drowned the voice of the creature, its dark hissing tones blocked by the refrain of defiance and hatred. Lathendar hated the black beast that haunted and tormented him more than anything. It had killed the party he had been with, a diplomatic envoy to one of the clans who pledged their allegiance to the Torenese throne. Sometimes he knew it must have been a set up, that it had all been orchestrated to try and kill him, or lure him away so they could finish whatever it was they had started building. He didn't know what it was, but it had to be stopped.

The smell of fresh blood assaulted his senses. He stopped and ran his hands across his body. Had any of his wounds reopened? Did he have wounds anymore? It was not his blood, he thought, and kept moving. The forest in front of him broke open into a clearing, and everything was red. If he hadn't fled from a similar scene at his own campsite, he wouldn't have thought that any one thing could have bled so much. Since then, he had woken in larger pools of red ichor.

The creature stared down at him, perching on the carcass of the dead stag. It licked its bloody maw lazily.

"All this meat, all for me, pathetic little human thing. It was a better hunt than you are, and its flesh is not so stringy. Should I fatten you up and make you taste better next time? Or should I just kill you again and use your bones to pick my teeth?"

Lathendar's mantra died on his lips. The conscious, human, part of him urged to curse the thing more, to move, to attack it, to vanquish his foe by one means or other, fight and win or die. Animal instinct was stronger, had been growing stronger since he had fled the initial campsite slaughter. He turned and ran, stumbling blindly through the undergrowth, knowing that he could never manage to escape.

Behind him, he heard or imagined the thing pad out towards him, laughing or hissing as it tracked him down the trail. This had happened before. He should turn and fight, be more than an animal. He did not; inertia worked against him now. It was coming closer, meandering forward faster than he could manage to run. It was still hissing, whispering at him, but he couldn't make out any words.

Lathendar pushed aside a tree branch, but it was rotten, and he fell. The thing descended upon him, and he could feel its claws sinking into the back of his legs. It closed its teeth along the skin of his back, and tore. The prince of Toren screamed again as it ran its rough tongue along the exposed wound, still cutting into his arms and legs with its claws. It did not take long for him to pass out.

Was it the smell of blood rotting in the dampness of the forest or the chattering of his teeth that woke him? Where was he? He needed to go home. How could he find the stars in the middle of the day? Was it the sky or his vision that was grey? He crawled forward over the sticky earth because he couldn't get to his knees...

—

End. Author's notes.

Why do Lathendar chapters always seem to be so violent? Meep. Comments, anyone? Does anyone even read these? Anyone interested in plotting?

-Heather(Lathendar/Jan/Daniel/others) -- Well I lived with a child of snow when I was a soldier, and I fought every man for her until the nights grew colder.

She used to wear her hair like you except when she was sleeping, and then she'd weave it on a loom of smoke and gold and breathing.

-Leonard Cohen, "Winter Lady"