Memento Mori

"There was one other such as yourself." Madam Loru spoke softly. Her voice trailed off into what seemed a whisper, the hush exaggerating echo and making itself discernible. "Yet he was more willed. More capable, a little taller. He spoke with such passion and dignity that his irrefutable ask was out of my control to reject."

She looked upon me with the eyes of a lantern. My fingers locked onto the bottom of the table, an irresistible urge to flee ringing in my ears. But I settled with it: sat at the wooden table with the Everlong Candle, committing treason without a doubt of my behaviors intentions.

Madam Loru was well known for her witchery. Foul and dubious, everything from her origins was growing, rotten core. She offered endless possibilities only with the deals being impractical. I'd been told to avoid this abode, pass on my livelihood elsewhere. Though no Prince is meant to die before his rein begins. I refused to be the first.

"But you, it seems. You are a more feeble tale." She spoke, moving her withering body to a cup near a desktop. She resembled a slithering reptile, her appetite growing with time. She spun a piece of silverware inside the cup, swirling it around and around until it was complete. The cup was moved towards my front side, within hands reach of grabbing. My intuition left it there to marinate.

"Not prepared to take the risk. Nor sip from a cup of eternity. Mere tea. It is mere tea." She assured me, scooting out one of the seats and posturing her behind comfortably above it. The smell of spoiled maple wafted by my nostrils. "I know why you are here, young boy. But enlighten me. Why do you come?"

"I only ask for an opportunity." It wasn't the first time I spoke to her. The tea in front of me was likely dropping in temperature. Its flow-like current had slowed, the coloring a slight shade below the table I sat under. "My father has brought an intertwined curse to my bloodline. An endless one. We are all destined to die, but my father has hastened by committing adultery to my Queen, his selfish greed angering the Gods and undoubtedly dooming his first born son."

"And may you not deny, that may be you?" She croaked. Her fingers traced the plywood that creased the surface together, long nails and crumbling limbs almost folding under the pressure.

"Yes."

She grinned. A harboring, hideous grin. The edges of her lips were chapped and stuck to one another. Her pale, wide-eyed upper extremity was a lost soul, holding on with a fair blade of grass tied to a stick. I shuddered silently at her apparent comfort. Unsettling.

"And you only appeal to your case with what? That you are the exception? A newfound deity that deserves life beyond your bloods destiny. Even witches may not cross those lines, majesty." Her tongue rolled at the term majesty as if she had a forked tongue.

The home was beginning to creak at pressure, the winds outside placing unwanted stress on the decaying walls and rooftop. I remembered the view from the outside. Practically underbrush itself, uproots of plants had defeated the base of the home, a stone slab path leading shakily to the door, which had one large sear down the middle, as if an ax had been brought down a long the trend. Gnomes dotted the outside stealing medicinal and spiritual herbs, squealing in high-pitched vocals as anything larger walked by. The alignment of trees was choppy and misleading, surrounding the isolated home as a part of nature itself. And the largest miracle: a huge beam, leading up to the skies, to harness the light from the sky itself. Aged and counting, the shaft teetered under snowstorms, but power of the Gods likely held it together as tribute.

"You do not heed my words, but instantly assume that I am a royal tyrant. I wish to truly rule my people, but may not do so with a bounty of afterlife following my trail. I have heard the legend of a way out. The candle that burns beyond flame but will: that kills death and was forged by Fondui, God of perseverance and denial."

She took my words into account, rising as she began to toy with the rings on her hand, rotating them and counting them up and down as I spoke. Madam Loru nodded, accepting my proposal. But she was debating on which strings to attach, which legs to pull.

"You wish for the Everlong Candle. And you have no offerings of the same quality? Mockery." Those words she settled on, her clicking feet on the floorboards pacing back and forth, her cloak of cheap fabric swaying behind each trot.

"I know of your ways, witch."

"Madam." Loru corrected, a dense pause in her pace.

"Madam. I know of your ways. And I come with more than a physical barter. Your place within the castle walls may be restored as I regain the throne, even given your past conflicts. A new era may begin with the crown above my head."

I felt deep breaths coming from below even my stomach. My quaking voice was shy and diminishing. I sighed and looked down at my beverage, still unable to put my lips on the pottery. No more steam was producing from its contents, and the coldness was reflecting my confidence.

Madam Loru had worked under my father until the day I was born. It had been three decades since the banishment: he was fading with time. With his fear of losing powers, he discontinued the one practice our kingdom had developed better than any other. The alliance with a witch of nobility.

She was severely loyal to our cause, but backwards and a false prophet. She spoke of lies and gave fatally wrong information under selfish circumstance. Her servitude under the King had made her weaker. Direct hostility towards him would oath her to death under the entity's pledge. The Gods disliked betrayal, and the agreement between him and Madam Loru truly angered them, as the obvious result was more apparent to them than to us.

Storms cursed the lands ever since. The pillars, protruding from every home ( Including Madam Loru's stead ), were meant to plead guilty to the Gods and apologize for the naive decisions we made. The winds were sharpened, even bringing death once the raw power became too strong. Winhulu gusted his air into the homes, the cliffs, shaping the mountains and the forests as the Gods commanded us to cower.

And yet here I was, reconciling with Madam Loru for a slither of chance to outsmart them. To pursue a noble life and change fate as it stood. With the one God-forged item available to the skin of man, I could at least flee the wishes of a higher power. I never understood the loyalty we kept to them, anyhow: it was never two-sided, and my father blindly followed the pathetic excuse that we owe them for our existence. But his time was ending, and mine was merely inching forwards.

"You offer me a seat next to you? Under what promise? The Gods you so fondly speak of dislike that. Listen outdoors, young prince."

The howling didn't ease with each spoken word. More than ever did the thick breeze slap the edges of the cover, whistling words of the Gods almost ushering me to halt.

I was no longer under no influence but my own.

"The Young Prince Treaty is what I will call it. The open arms from witch to man, a regained ally that put us so far above those weak countries that now mock. Once you return and my name is bolted as immortal, they will gather like sheep under a higher being." I spoke more easily, even gaining pressure from the pounding door unfaltering my ego. "I see it in your whimsical eyes. You long for a position of respect again. Unless you prefer this life."

I knew I had cornered the witch herself. A home of no comfort, it was peasant compared to the monstrous castle. Beds of silk and flushed pillows with exotic feathering compared to her dirty cot clearly appealed to her.

"Your words are to flatter me. Drink from the cup, Prince, allow me to consider."

I rose the cup to my lips, feeling a frostbitten sensation as the liquid eased down my throat. It jabbed at my insides, settling in my stomach. The burning of its chemical makeup was unfamiliar but oddly satisfactory. I had regrets about not consuming it warmly when the chance was there.

"I accept. Although you shall make a blood written vow to me. I will do the equivalent." She wobbled towards a cabinet, removing a small, long vial. It stretched roughly four inches, clear in coloring and capped with an airtight lid. She pocketed another, moving back towards the table with both in hand.

Rain began to drip through the ceiling, in slow patches. A strengthening call of the Gods with little time to waste: the building was inverting under threatening oppression.

Out of the depths of her cloak came a dagger. A small blade of white steel, which I was mistaken for sharp ivory. She lied it alongside the two capsules, her hands meeting once more at once another in interlocked fashion.

"Royal blood, the proof of words spoken from your throat. I cannot pursue your dream without this assurance. I insist on you."

I slowly moved my hands towards the blade, raising the glare of it above my arm. I opened the vial below, using her aid to hold it below as I hesitated to press the dagger into my flesh.

"Young Prince, you now fear commitment?" She spoke into my right ear, her hindering words aching in my head. The thought of being pushed to do anything out of my will was foreboding.

I pressed it deep, the searing poke parting my forearm into two ends. Releasing the knife from within, I awaited my blood to spill. My heart raced as a foggy, blue aroma seeped from my wrist instead, crawling its way into the glass container as Madam Loru began to cackle. My head lolled, the focus of my vision darkening at the edges.

"What is this? You have done will against the Gods. We vowed." I hummed, falling out of the stool and trying to crawl towards the door. My left appendage below the elbow was still leaking fog, the life force inside my every mole of existence being vacuumed. A curse.

"Foolish prince. There is no such thing as the Gods. I am the closest thing there has ever been to a God: I forged the winds that beat my own home. I fabled the pillars of homage, they are useless sticks of wood that induce lightning and thunder among your homes from within your walls." Madam Loru followed my beckoning body, crawling helplessly to an outside place where no aid would find me in time to change fate. "I changed the essence within you with a drink filled with your own fathers ill ways. It runs in your blood. I made your life force not the vessels within you, but your soul, eternally worth a cracked glass bottle."

Madam Loru laughed out loud, her disorganized teeth and hunch-back frame glaring shadows across the floor in front of my closing vision.

"I do not understand. The Gods will punish you." I pleaded.

"The Gods did not curse you nor your pathetic father who labels himself a king. I did." It sounded like she spoke in a foreign language.

I heaved my body back upwards, rising to my feet for brief moments to look Madam Loru in her eyes. My legs were frail, alluring to drop my upper half to the floor. But I stayed raised, my arm complete in releasing my soul.

She closed my vial, and I felt the cold of a circular wall beginning to surround me. The clouds opened at my entrance, and I dropped at my knees first. They crumpled beneath me, and Madam Loru walked over, her wrinkly phalanges tracing my jaw as I sat on my heels at her mercy.

Her words singed into my last operating moments, the hiss of a snake covering the s' in her speech.

"Remember, you must die."