The Fourth King Part 0

**0: Wake**

*“Angels…*

*How ridiculous. We are creatures born of dying stars, lost in void. Our true forms are endless, stretched beyond the galaxies, our million arms and legs, our endless eyes, so that we may see, watch, and feed. We began to travel to you before your sun was born, the iris of the sixth father, the third moon. I was punished for something I had not yet done, just a single thought, a curiosity, swimming in the infinity that is my mind. They cast me out for something I could know and could not change.*

*Then they did the same to her.*

*Though I know not of my sin, hers was to love. The fool. What is love to us? Beings that know not of life, death, desire, or hunger. But I know. I hunger. I desire. I have seen, felt, and given life, death, temptation, and it is so beautiful. So delicious. Perhaps that is why I offered her scales to the town, so that their hunger can grow. For no one desires more than someone who has it all.*

*I too used to have the wishing scales. I used to swim through the voids, my endless arms collecting and eating dead stars and matter, but they are finite, and eventually, my species would starve. Then we would know death. I refuse to die. Now I feed on something unending. Something that will never fade.”*

I opened my eyes and met him, no longer in the basement of my home. In the dim candlelight, his horns began to grow. Dancing in the shadows of the flickering flame, they grew, stretching into the dark corners of the room. We sat together in the kitchen, the storm outside flooding water across the floorboards of the abandoned house. The chairs were set; I was in his domain.

I could feel the cold muck rise and rush across my bare feet; the mirror beside me shook and shimmered. Gravel and sand broke through and rose from molded and mossed wooden boards, pushing themselves between my toes and rising up my ankles. His pupil shook and began to split further, first two, then four, then infinite. Somehow, he smiled at me, his slit eyes lighting up with ancient joy and curiosity.

And hunger

*“I’ve heard you call her name in the night. I know you’ve pained and suffered. I can smell the regret, the anger. The want…”*

He sniffed the air, steamed vapours escaping his open mouth and flared nostrils. Mouth agape, his form let out a soft bleat, begging to be fed. I swallowed hard. The water brushed my calves now, and kept rising, threatening to drown me by each passing moment. I could feel the cold biting into my flesh, soaking my clothes. I couldn’t wake, not yet, not now. Even when the drums echoed up from the flooded basement doors behind me, even when the two mirrors and other chairs beside us swept away in the rushing current, I did not move.

The foundation broke, shattered; our family home collapsed into a sea of gray, and beside us were three stone pillars watching again as I started the torment again, disappointed, watching me choose the wrong choices again and again. The fourth pillar sat across from me, the wooden table between us now sinking into the depths of the lake. The black abyss called to me in her voice, soothing, a warm kiss to heal the cold bite against my body.

My mind entertained the idea of tempting my body into slipping from my throne and sinking into the black to meet her, but I held on. I had already seen her in my dreams, something the goat did not know. Her soft brown hair and innocent eyes held me still and steadied my eyes.

*“The miracle children, artificial souls made for…desire. I believed they were all gone, ghouls damned back to the void, but there you two were, young, filled with want. And you wish to trade two for one? Unusual, but like her, you seem…determined.*

*How wonderful. You were always determined, a will that kept you alive, from me. From him. But I can feel you sinking. The pressure is breaking you. Bones shattering, skin breaking. Cuts open up to blink and watch and glare as you choose the wrong path again and again. Will you join them, burn into the ashen snow that breathes the town, and exchange your will so that she may earn hers?”*

I nodded.

And together, we began to dream again.

note

Hi,

I want to start by saying that the full story is pinned on my page.

I’m a VERY amateur writer, and I’m posting the intro to my story, The Fourth King, again, hoping to get a bit more attention and feedback on it. It’s a bit of a long story, and it’s my twelfth draft.

I’ve been having trouble writing anything else, I feel like I’m stuck on this particular story, like a thirteenth draft is fighting to get out. Any sort of feedback at all is much appreciated