A Feast for a King

[Medea Emeiyenae]

The sun had been a gift from the elves (or at least, it’s antidote had been); glorious and precious, it was a tender and precocious thing. Emeiyenae liked to cradle the rays against her cheeks, which reddened far too easily for any woman, then duck her head slyly beneath the hood of her robes. Sunlight had become symbolic of bloodshed, as well; as morning broke, the sun rising, she and her Lord King would be prepared to commit to the sin of a bloodbath. How painful it was, but how beautiful too! The Princess could not help but be thrilled with the metallic scent of death and gore, could not bother but love the desecration of the corpses thereafter. She adored how soldiers stripped the bodies of demonic nobility of their armour, how her handsome kinsmen bled, sometimes mildly surprised, that the humans could also hold their ground. More often than not she saw their shock when they finally realised the jolt of power that she possessed, looked – disbelieving and unfortunate – upon the King that was her Hiraos, and laughed in delight as her guardian dealt a deathblow to the unruly bodies that were her unsuspecting, vampiric fellows.

They deserved it; she was sure of that. Anyone who opposed her Hiraos deserved to die, because her Hiraos was always righteous and good and everything that was expected of a King. It was that inexorable opinion that had caused the Medea to appoint herself His Majesty’s chief guardian, unchanging as the centuries passed; she was so human. All the emotions, rages and protestations of the human race were bottled up within her and, so absorbed was she in being one, she even aged like a mortal woman did, expecting to look a year older at the end of a year’s turn. For all intensive purposes, Emeiyenae’s roots were forgotten; such was the matter that, since the gravest attack on Hiraos yet, she even found bloodlust natural by humans and repulsive by vampires. She checked it, quite simply, by draining the veins of Glendenvale’s adversaries; his Grace followed suit. How wide-eyed the Lords stared when His Grace (for she still thought ‘His Grace’ instead of ‘His Majesty) reached for the chests of the demonic or vampiric General he detained, tearing its heart from its chest without remorse!

How picturesque her King looked in his cleverly-mechanised gloves, with their spiked knuckles and tearing blades, as he tore the scoundrels’ chests apart (pretending, of course, that he still had mortal strength); how frightened his soldiers looked when he pulled the hearts out and sunk his teeth into them, like a lead hunter does with the heart of a stag! He had made it a human ritual, even, to eat the hearts of the enemies’ leaders and all his Generals followed suit. Of course, the Generals didn’t do the deed that Emeiyenae did after the ceremony was over; they didn’t devour the flesh of the bodies in secret, away from the public’s eye like the starving cannibal that she was. They didn’t see the little vampire act as the fully-fledged monster they didn’t know she was growing to be.

“Won’t you join me, your Grace?” the inquiry was wide-eyed and innocent as she gazed over her meal.

[Hiraos Fonfala]

Eyes betraying nothing, the King watched his proclaimed daughter, his revulsion heavily concealed within the core of his being. His senses were artfully piqued by the scent of blood and raw flesh, and he knew all other things he devoured tasted of ash because he had already tried consuming beings such as the vampire in Emeiyenae’s hold. The thing’s face was indiscernible now, the lacerations made by the Princess’s teeth robbing the meat over its face and tearing into the soft tissues of the eyes, ears and cheeks; even the tongue had been ripped out in a movement that had looked like a vicious kiss. She had drained what main quantities of blood remained in the creature’s veins, and then started to snap the bones apart and suck at the marrow while feasting on the flesh. The King’s silent observation inspired a struggle within him; his instincts cried to join her, but his humanity made the thought disgusting.

The tent was dark, and silence filled the rowdy camp, characterising it as night. Hiraos’s tent was a spacious one, and he was seated – statuesque – in one the shadow-bathed corners, his hands tightly grasping the arms of the crude, wooden chair. The monarch’s features were so finely fixed in time that they hadn’t changed throughout the war; surely the conflict had taken some of the healthy colour from his skin, but otherwise his features had refused to age. Of course, Emeiyenae’s opinion of him intensified painfully over the years, making him seem even more handsome to her in his current state than ever before, despite the fact that he was near sixty now and hardly the man he once was. Although the war did not seem to touch his mentality amidst the masses – nay, perhaps he had embraced the hushed title of ‘Skeleton King’, murmured by his desperate subjects - there was something about him that was wholly more frightening than ever before. Perhaps it was how his eyes flashed an eerie gold in that dim light, like a Convert’s, or how bitter anger simmered in the folds of his faces. There was something in how he sat unnaturally still and was always prepared to cut a man’s throat at the same time, and the inhumane strength he had exercised over the years seemed like a foreboding magical talent. At that point in time, there was also another thing that made him intimidating, as he calmly forced a fatherly smile upon his face, gazing down at where his daughter ate, kneeling, upon the floor.

Traces of another’s flesh lined the King’s blood-stained teeth, making the grin gruesome to anyone unfamiliar with it.

“I’ve consumed my fill,” he dismissed gently, turning his shark-like eyes upon the carnage strewn over his lap. The corpse was barely identifiable as a demonic female, half-undressed and long dead, with large chunks of flesh torn out of the torso and her features ruined by claws and teeth. The growls of hounds nearly drowned out the quiet confession as he combed through his rough beard with a callused hand, absently holding the body by the remains of its neck. One of his hounds had its forelegs on the King’s lap, ripping at what little meat was left on the demoness’s side; the other was fervently shaking its head in a tearing movement, the lifeless creature’s leg clamped between its jaws. They looked somewhat like Hiraos’s old, vicious, and oversized breeds of before, but for one critical difference: they were not human dogs. Bones protruded and entwined themselves in the animals' framework, all brown and black and ivory, their eyes vicious, and their mutations grosteque.

They were bone dogs - Lady Le’Feuye’s bone dogs, stolen from an abandoned territory before the Templiers had returned, just like her sword had been. Perhaps, as forgotten as her heritage had been, Emeiyenae had not quite forgotten the sister she had left and the many experiments that had been her legacy; as Hiraos’s taste for dogs had extended to a want of deadlier, more terrifying breeds with his own immortality, the little princess was all too pleased to accommodate him and retrieve some of the now wild monsters for his pleasure, unconcerned with how dangerous and horrible an escapade it had been for her if only to surprise him.

How devoted she was, the King mused, when he was supposed to be Emeiyenae’s protector. Perhaps he didn’t deserve it, but perhaps he did: the only reason he suffered being alive now was because he was charged to protect this vampire that was so devoted to being good – to being human. She was a divinely unholy creature and the sorry reason he had not arranged his own execution even after what that godforsaken bastard had done to him; she was innocent of all things except being the King’s most murderous weapon and most treasured charge, filled with such a hate for Xanthe Ezriska and her advisors that it frightened even him. He could not tell if child-like, uninhibited Mei was a saint or a monstrosity sent by the Gods, to help save his kind or purge it. Nevertheless, what she was repelled him, and what he had become to defend her did, too.

“No,” he continued, shaking his head, then suddenly gave the corpse a violent shove and rose from his place, overturning one of the dogs. The remaining one charged on the body immediately, and the King’s gore-stained clothes could be discerned in the firelight; it was the same pair they had concluded the battle with just hours previous. “Feast, daughter. I need air.”

“Our kind needs nothing,” Hiraos heard her say in confusion, his eyes flickering to where she wiped her mouth self-consciously for blood, streaking it messily from her face in a notion that made her look like Cirucci. Her eyes, though, were wide – concerned – and very innocent, worried over him and his suddenly abrupt demeanour and lack of appetite.

He loved her – truly – but he hated what they were.

“I walk tonight,” he murmured distractedly, giving a short whistle for his hounds; the one that had fallen snarled, snapping its teeth at its fellow and rebounding viciously after its master with a growl. That one that had remained succeeded in tearing off part of a limb then followed, too, as Emeiyenae hastily untangled herself from her meal. She tossed her dinner face-first on top of the other body and draped her bed cloth over it, then wiped her face with a yet-unused wash cloth in her father’s basin. It was something he had been supposed to use before that evening but had not in anticipation of feeding; he would simply stain his night clothes in compromising blood if he cleaned and changed. Shutting off lanterns as he stalked out of his encampment, the sprite-like child hastened after him.

“Allow me to accompany you, your Grace! she exclaimed, all too eager to come with him just as any of his dogs would; her devotion made his stomach turn uncomfortably in light of the savagery they’d just committed, and he wondered at how particularly human he felt that night. He had long adapted to their bloody way of life, just for her; had long embraced his gruesome nature, even if it was repugnant to his morals. “Stay,” was his cold order, and she jolted to a complete, painful stop, shocked but rigidly obedient, not moving to breathe – though she didn’t really need it. “Finish those carcasses. You need your strength when the camp smells of so much blood, and we haven’t the luxury of harvesting it in the daylight.”

---

Illogically to others, the King’s tent was distanced – isolated – from the rest of the men’s yet strategically hidden with charms; it would’ve been expected to be in the middle of the other tents, but all that was there was a meeting place. Coming out into open air, the moonlight revealed he had grasped his war hammer before exiting, and Emeiyenae’s thoughts suddenly reached him, sounding breathless within his mind.

You knew he was here; you knew he would attack, the King heard her inquire, surprised. If he had the patience for amusement, he would’ve found her question comical. He was the King of Glendenvale, reborn and ferocious. There was little he didn’t know on his ever-changing territory – from the scents of his most frequent trespassers to the sound of the heartbeats of every man in his army.

Besides, to a question like that inquired by Emeiyenae, the only logical answer would be didn't you know I knew?

He stalked forward, aiming for the trees. He had a habit of appearing too careless in seclusion, his hounds coming every now and again to snap at his heels, snarling as though they were laughing in anticipation of something. The dogs were racing ahead of him now, playing at the scents along the tree-line, and a grizzly smile lit the Lord’s grim face.

He whirled and brought his hammer cracking down against the assassin that had stalked him so, white lips pressed into his disfiguring smile as a savage snarl broke his lips and his dogs were suddenly barking with the thrill of a new hare to hunt.

“Good evening,” laughed the inhuman King of men – the Skeleton King, the Graveyard’s king – as his disgust faded away in finding an outlet to exert it upon. “Hello.”

And that was that.