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You are insane.
Walking quickly, fumbling, stumbling, the world and the faces around you a whirlwind of blue and gold and I'm falling, I'm falling, I'm falling.
You do not hit the floor. Only the sound of your heels' soft padding echoes through a marble hall, colored by darkness waxy moonlight. There is no one here. There is no one to catch you.
There is no one to catch you.
Weaving yourself a net of torn off hairs and shivers, you limp against the cool wall.
Hold me. Hold me.
The night is starless, even above the clouds. Wind whistling through the windows, always open —there is no rain or storm in the magical kingdom of Zeal— does not comfort you, does not whisper you calm, does not sing you to sleep. The wind tastes like iron, and it feels like the hilt of a sword —no, that is your mouth, and that is ancient history. Stop it.
Stop it.
There are scratches on your limbs where no one can see. Your children are in bed. Your husband is dead.
The night is starless, but the moon glints, evil, threatening, taunting. Nighttime is a nightmare. Your ivory skin, rubbed raw with the small hands of a woman destined to be anything but a queen, anything but a ruler, crawls with the sensation of bedsheets soiled red: red for the baby, red for the king.
Faces spinning, faces that are not there yelling, wailing, condemning their worn hands and dirty feet. Your first impulse is to whisper, to scold, "You'll wake the children, please don't," crying now, "Please don't wake the children."
The pulsating red is dim from afar. Its familiar rhythm is comforting; it beats out the song of a fading pulse and you are at peace with your sins, if only for a few minutes, shaking forehead, sheeny, bright pink with whimpers, against the pillar, against worship —is this what they call god?—, thinking with guilt and agony; his final drops of blood warm on your mouth, his little twitching heart, too small to carry all you knew he had in him, his eyes, vacant and long gone.
You do not remember much from that night but you remember the burning sensation of too much warmth and too much cold coming from different directions at the same time. The faces, turning, eyes and mouths grotesque and monstrous, the tiles on the floor, glittering amber and ruby after the light above them, colliding and spiraling into your skull.
I have no one to hold me.
"Mother?" the black wind howls, murmuring in the back of your ear.
There has never been anyone else but you.