Wind of Night

Year 3021; Capital City – Halphis; Orraman Kingdom

“The King has been murdered! The King is dead!”

The shouts of panic and fear erupted throughout the palace. Soldiers scrambled to their stations, still drowsy from having been startled from their slumber. Maids ran to the exits in screams of panic.

The wind drifted through the curtains of the windows, bringing in the scent of the blood oranges ripening this season from the orchards.

“King Abd Al-Malik has been murdered!”

Nobles stood in the corridors, either crying in confusion or shouting in fear. The Royal Guard restrained the distraught Queen, having been pulled away from the dead body of her husband, covered in blood which was smeared down her face with tears.

“Please calm down, Your Majesty,” the guards tried to say above the uproar in the royal bedroom.

“Oh, Malik, Malik!” Nada wept.

“Where is Jetim? Where is the Captain?” Another one bellowed.

Queen Nada could barely hear the commotion over her sobbing. She could not hear anything, save her heaving breaths, and feel the disturbing chill and simultaneous heat across her skin as both hot and cold sweat broke out over her back from the horror to have taken place.

Her husband had been murdered by her very side, while they slept. Who would have commited such an ominous act? Who could have possibly come so close with no one noticing? How could anyone have slipped past their Guard Captain?

Where was their Guard Captain?

Nada could hear her baby begin to cry in the next room.

Her skin chilled like ice and she froze. Everything around her fell away. It was all a blur of unnecessary imagery and sound and smells. It all became very quiet to her ears.

Except for the sound of her son crying. It felt as if a hand clutched her heart and squeezed unbearably tight, so much so that it was about to burst within her very chest.

“Juda!” She gasped.

The Queen ripped herself free from the arms of her confused protectors and bolted for the doors.

“Your Majesty!” They cried after her, hounding her with purposeful duty in a desperate attempt to keep her emotion from possibly landing her in the same state as her deceased beloved.

For a Kingdom to lose both their King and Queen in one night would be a disaster of the most cursed kind.

Queen Nada swept down the corridor, barely taking note of the two dead bodies of their guards, floating in the courtyard pond outside the stone pillars ringing the inner yard.

“My baby, my baby,” she gasped as she ran, the satins of her nightgown fluttering with splattered red behind her from the haste of her passage. Her blonde hair was free and a near mess down behind her shoulders.

The doors to her son’s chambers were open, and a few maids cowered outside, afraid of obviously something happening inside.

“We are so sorry, Your Majesty! Please forgive us! We deserve to be punished!” They wailed.

Queen Nada thought the worst. Her heart lodged in her throat as she swept past the crying servants and burst into the room.

What she saw, rooted her to the spot, and for a moment she could neither move nor make a sound.

Her three loyal chambermaids – who had protected and guarded her better than any man, aside from her husband – stood facing the balcony, daggers out and glinting against the bright light of the candles. They faced a man dressed in dark clothing, who’s mask had been cut from his face, drawing a line of crimson across his cheek from where the eldest sister of the chambermaid had revealed his identity.

“Don’t hurt the Prince, Captain Jetim!” Melisa shouted.

“Let him go!” Erin echoed her older sister, creeping around the left side with controlled steps.

“Please put him down,” Ela-ah, Erin’s twin, coaxed. “We are not your enemies, Captain.” She crept around the right side, blocking the man off as he held the screaming baby in one arm.

In his other hand, he held a knife over the baby’s chest. Nada’s hands flew to her mouth with horror. She felt like she was going to be sick.

His eyes flew to her face. His hazel gaze was as cold as ice, so very different to the loyal friendship she had known between them in the three years she had been Queen beside her King. His hands were crimson, red with the blood of her husband. It splotched the wrap of her son with scarlet taint.

She could not understand what she was seeing, even as the guards piled in behind her and took their stances.

Deputy Ashim stepped forward carefully. “What is the meaning of this, Captain?”

The Captain did not say anything. He only watched, with a calculating stare which reminded Nada all too much of a circling eagle waiting to come in for the kill.

The kill being her son. She trembled.

“Captain,” Ashim said calmly. “Put the Prince down. We can talk about this. This doesn’t have to end with more blood.”

The sisters and Royal Guard crept closer and Jetim stepped back for as many they stepped forward. A quiet cry of terror escaped the Queen’s throat.

Dear great God, Sahin, please don’t take my baby away to the Sky yet, she prayed a thousand times to their overruling deity. I will give you anything, anything! Just please don’t take my son from me too!

“I am no ally of yours,” Jetim said as he backed towards the balcony.

The curtains fluttered around him in the ever present wind up in the mountains, of which this palace was situated. The curtains danced like shadows around him as additional allies, creatures from the Underworld of Stone, who rose to taunt the dead King’s House.

“What nonsense is this, Captain?” Ashim demanded. “Stand down at once.” His sabre’s broad blade glinted in the candlelight.

Jetim took another step back. He was now on the balcony. The flutter of curtains divided them between the candlelit room and the night of the starry and moonlit sky. The warm glow of fire met the cold shine of space.

“We do not wish to harm you, Captain. You are one of us,” Melisa begged. “Please, lower your weapon.”

A cold smile touched Jetim’s lips ever so faintly.

“The King is dead, of which I claim responsibility,” he announced. “And soon so will the Crown Prince be.” He stepped back again.

And threw the wailing infant over the side of the balcony, down the cliff of the mountain face.

Queen Nada screamed in horror.

Yells erupted in the room. Melisa and Ashim leapt to the Captain to stop him from slitting his throat, while the twins jumped onto the balcony edge with a similar cry of horror as the Queen.

Queen Nada rushed forwards. The world came crashing down around her. Her son, her son had been thrown down the mountain. She had lost both her husband and her baby in one, horrific night.

The twins grabbed the Queen’s arms to stop her from throwing herself off the side of the balcony.

This had to be a nightmare. Such misfortune could not possibly happen to one person all in the space of one night.

The wind howled, gushing up from the base of the mountain with such a force and sound, that it drowned out all over noises. The blast of cold air seemed to pierce through the hysteria gripping the Queen, and she stopped, staring over the side of the balcony.

Dark, smoky grey eyes, rimmed by an ethereal and ghostly pale face, gazed back up at her.

Queen Nada blinked, unsure if what she was seeing through her blurred eyes was in fact what she was truly witnessing.

A person, a woman floated there, in the air, a dozen metres beneath the balcony, dark cloak rippling in the wind. Nothing else supported this individual.

The woman flew up, and the twins – who were also as baffled as the Queen – stumbled back, taking Nada with them. Behind, Melisa, Ashim and the Royal Guard forced the Captain to his knees and held his arms behind his back.

The cloaked woman landed on the balcony banister with a lithe footfall, and stepped down onto the balcony. She held the infant Prince in her arms. The Prince was silent, the shock of having been thrown through the air, silencing his cries.

Her hood had fallen back, revealing long, jet black hair. Smokey quartz shards glinted from her earlobes, dangling on fine silver chains.

The twins moved in front of the Queen with unison. “Who are you?” They demanded simultaneously.

“I am Isik,” the woman said in a surprisingly clear voice. She held her arms forward towards the Queen. “I return Prince Juda to you, Your Majesty.”

A strange memory passed through the Queen’s mind just then with a flash of deja vu.

“My grandfather always used to talk about stories of his grandfather, and of how his grandfather’s father created this Kingdom and won the Battle of the Ahru Peninsula,” Malik said one evening as they lay in bed, with her in his arms.

“It used to be under the control of Sarahad Empire, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“How did he manage to win such a vast swathe of the continent?”

“They had a powerful Sorceress.”

Nada smiled wryly. “Every nation has a handful of Sorcerers and Sorceresses.”

“This was not any Sorceress. This was an Immortal.”

Nada felt an unsteady flutter in her stomach as she comprehended the terrifying power which went with such a title.

“They were great friends. I cannot recall what her full name was, but my grandfather said they used to call this Immortal, Isik. Black haired and grey eyed, with smokey quartz earrings. These seemed to be the Immortal’s defining feature.”

Queen Nada stared with numb shock at the cloaked woman, offering her son back to her. Was this all a dream?

Her son was whimpering, bringing Nada back down to Earth, and she nervously took a step towards the strange woman.

“Your Majesty!” The twins strained.

The Queen ignored them. Thinking only of her son and the words her husband had told her.

She felt no danger or malice from this stranger, but nor did she feel anything else.

The Queen approached closer, her hands trembling, despite the curious calm which seemed to emanate from the Immortal Sorceress before her. The Royal Guards echoed the twins discomfort.

Queen Nada reached tentatively, desperate to feel the warmth of her child within her arms, to at least have one small sense of security to ground herself to amongst the shattered shards of her life.

The Immortal did not move, and held the child out for the Queen to take. Nada’s shaking fingers touched the wrap of her son, half expecting the stranger to then replicate exactly what the Captain did just a moment ago.

She did not.

Queen Nada quickly snatched Prince Juda back, cradling him tight within her arms.

“Oh, Juda. Oh, my son,” she crooned, her voice thick with distraught tears. “My poor son.” Her breath came in ragged gasps.

There was a snarl, and all turned back to the restrained Captain, who glared not at the Queen, nor even the young Prince. But his furious glare with fixated on the newcomer.

“It does not matter that you are here, Sorceress,” he growled through gritted teeth. “The Sarahad Empire is on the move. And this time, they possess a weapon which even you cannot defeat. All hail the Golden Eagle!” He spat.

Then, he crunched something between his teeth and swallowed.

“No, no! Don’t you dare! Captain!” Ashim suddenly grabbed the man by the front and tried to force Jetim’s mouth open with his free hand. “Damn it! Get some water. Make him vomit the poison back up!” He bellowed.

Someone ran to grab a jug.

But even before it had arrived, Jetim began to froth around the mouth and seized, which quickly resulted in his eyes rolling back into his head, showing the disturbing whites of his eyes like an undead creature. The Royal Guard Captain fell limp against Ashim’s grip.

A startled silence fell over the room.

The King and his Captain both lay dead. An unknown Sorceress stood on the balcony having saved the Prince, and the threat of a war from their restless neighbour was suspended in the traumatised air.

A forsaken wind had blown through the Kingdom on this night. It was a wind which heralded many things to come in the years ahead.

But not all whispering tidings, were ominous. Some, contained a sliver of hope.