The Queen, part one
Maya introduces us to the Shadow from Lirahndür
This week we begin a new story with The Queen. You can read part one below or listen to the audio at your leisure.
The Great Fire is designed to be read in any order but you can catch up on the previous stories here:
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The Queen
Part One
I don’t know whether it’s a result of the curse or if people choose not to remember but what all these stories haven’t said about Favian is how nice he can be.
He can make you feel like you’re the only person in the world. That your ideas matter and that you mean something beyond what everyone claims you are. That you mean something to him, which so quickly becomes the only thing that you want.
I wanted to mean something to him, because he was nice to me, in a world that had quickly forgotten the word.
If you were to meet him on the street and ask for his help, he would give it. He knew what it meant to be nice, he knew how easy it was to forgive someone who was nice.
Then, when he starts to treat you differently, you choose to ignore it because you remember how nice he was before. The horrors begin to pile up around you but you can still see the light from those nice moments, you can still feel their warmth.
But that doesn’t change what happened and when I returned from the tunnels I found that the room was cold and the doors were shut.
I climbed back up into the throne room and had to peel my hands off of the floor because my skin stuck to the stone like ice. As the doors loomed over me, I realised how small the room was and how small I was inside of it.
The doors were carved with Neeran that sealed its magic, I couldn’t read the beginning because it was too high but from what I saw I realised that my father was right, only those who had closed the doors could open them.
I tried nonetheless but I could barely move the handle. It was infuriating. I pointlessly pulled at the handle and kicked the door. I screamed at them as if they were Favian and my voice alone could stop him. I screamed at them as if I were screaming at myself and my voice could wrench away my stupidity.
My kingdom was crumbling around me and I had done nothing to stop it. So I screamed until my voice ran hoarse and then I stood panting for breath, staring at the doors, waiting for something to happen.
I watched my breath hang in the air like mist and my rage subsided, only to be replaced by the cold.
It was the cold that told me I wasn't alone.
I felt its presence before I saw it completely. That’s the way it always is with those things from Lirahndür. They want you to know they’re coming. They want you to fear their arrival.
You can’t call them human, they would barely be considered alive. They are dark, evil beings whose magic drains the warmth from the air to sustain them. That’s how you know they’re coming. That's how I knew they had come.
From a very early age I was taught about the horrors that comes from the kingdom that cleaves our world in two, separating us from the East. Rules sung like nursery rhymes so that we’d never forget.
Don’t ever cross their border
Don’t ever catch their eye
And if you make a deal
Hide quickly or you’ll die
I kept my people away from Lirahndür, from anything to do with them. I would rather send ships to sail for months to reach Centra or Molinos than send them trekking through those cursed plains. No good has come from those lands. They stole evil from anywhere they could and dragged it back towards them.
As I stood watching my breath, I knew that something from Lirahndür had come to Teron. To make it worse, I had the suspicious feeling that they had been invited. We had measures in place to stop them from crossing into our lands and some of our best soldiers’ main task was to enforce them. To make sure that we would be protected against their intrusion.
But the room was cold and the doors were shut and I could feel it watching me.
When I was a child the idea of them used to haunt me at night. My cousin had told me stories about Lirahndür, she had sworn that she had seen one of them once. A shadow, she called it, and even though she couldn’t describe what they looked like she said that she couldn’t get rid of the taste of metal from her tongue.
During the day I could forget about them but then I would lie down to sleep and my mind would begin to clear and there it would be, waiting in the dark. Lurking in the shadows.
There were years when I didn’t sleep and my parents, gods bless them, worried about me. They tried to soothe my fears and explain to me that it wasn’t real - that there was nothing there. But it had already taken place in my mind and grown roots that bound it to my being.
I would close my eyes and wonder whether it's just the memory of the thing I'm frightened of or the shadow of it towering over me.
The fear makes you believe and as my cousin used to say: the shadow doesn’t wait for you to open your eyes; it grabs you by the scruff of your neck and makes you scream.
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