Limbo

Every third Tuesday of the month, Arik makes a trip down to the castle dungeons. 

It’s a pilgrimage of sorts, he thinks privately, though he knows Miriam would scoff at the likening of her dank cell to someplace sacred, or holy. But the journey - if travelling three flights of stairs and across a courtyard can be called a journey - is important to him, for all that it has fallen into mundanity, routine and redundant. It brings him little in the way of comfort, and is the cause of more than one set of suspicious eyes following him around court, and indeed Miriam herself has on multiple occasions bid him not to come, with firm voice and gaze set anywhere but upon his face. But it is important to him, that he keeps going, if only to prove to himself that he can. It feels dangerous, to give up these visits - like he is hastening the inevitable end that he fears has already been long in-motion. It feels like the admission of something he would rather not confront. And so, without fail, he makes the trip down, on the third Tuesday of every  month.

The day always plays out the same. He leaves his chambers sometime after noon. Edmund comes and finds him before he goes (and he is Edmund then, for those few minutes at least, not the Prince Regent). Sometimes he is already there, waiting, when Arik steps inside. He says very little, but will give him some small offering - a handful of berries, an apple, perhaps a small pouch of sugar - to pass on, and a kiss on the forehead, and take his leave, with an odd expression on his face, neither sad nor content, and falling just short of hopeful.

Sometimes Arik thinks that he visits Miriam for Edmund’s sake more than he ever has for his own. Often he suspects that she entertains him for much the same reason. On the worst nights, when he lies in bed, awake and alone, he wonders how it is that he and Miriam, tied together by their birth and their blood, can give up on each other so easily, while Edmund’s faith never strays.

He follows him out of the room, more often than not - he isn’t sure that he looks forward, to these meetings, precisely, but he doesn’t like to linger, even so. Still, sometimes he fumbles with his cane a little more than is strictly necessary, or else pauses to take frequent breaks along corridors that have never been difficult for him to traverse before. He does not like watching the Prince Regent reclaim his childhood friend - from behind, he cannot see his expression turn sombre, and his eyes cold and dead, but he emanates an aura of cold uncaring as he walks, and it pains Arik to watch a man capable of such great warmth harden before him to ice.

Through the corridors and down one flight of stairs, and then across the courtyard and down two more. The trip is tiring - he approaches the stationed guards already fatigued. They take their shifts on rotation, but it is always the same two men on duty when he walks through,and he suspects that the Prince Regent may have had a hand in ensuring that his visits are scrutinised only by those predisposed towards sympathy. Those who will not think that he too is conspiring to commit treason, but rather that he is simply a loving brother, seeking to understand.

Miriam waits, as always, as if she is unaware that he is coming, or as if she simply doesn’t care. She sits in the near corner of her cell, leaning back on her palms, knees drawn to her chest, gaze facing the stone back wall - stone still, as though she might never move again, and simply let time solidify her.

Arik mimics her position in a fashion, crouching slowly, and not without some muted trepidation, as he eases himself onto the cold floor. His cane clatters as it falls from his grip, and more often than not he splays his legs out before him rather than huddling close. Visually, they ought to look very different, with her aura uncaring and his eyes already water-bright, and yet there is something there, intangible but undeniably present, that betrays their relation. The curve of their necks perhaps, their close-bitten nails and hanging heads.

He reaches one hand behind him, tentative, searching, through the iron bars. Her own is always just barely within reach, and he strains to find it, his gaze still trained forwards. His fingers are trembling when he finally brushes her knuckles, and it is an effort to hook their smallest digits together, until eventually she shifts her hand closer and so allows him to relax his own.

This is also a routine. She never moves first. Always it is Arik reaching out, Arik’s hand finding hers, Arik seeking to assure her of his presence. He might be tempted to believe that his simple gestures mean nothing to her, except that he returns each month to find her in precisely the same position, never any closer, but also never moving further away. He takes comfort in that - he is hardly spoiled for choice in things to take comfort from, these days. It is an assurance of sorts, though of what he isn’t certain.

They sit together, back to back and hand in hand, silent for the most part, as the long hours stretch towards the evening. Any conversation is light and meaningless, cut off by one or the other before it can brush any topic of substance, and every subject is loaded with potential, so they tend not to talk. It aches, deep within him, constant in its presence, the pain seeped into his bones, that this is what they are reduced to, family fast becoming strangers. He doesn’t know if he still knows his sister, knows the person she is now. He doubts she knows him.

But though it might hurt less, to forgo these sessions, he will not let himself let go. For Miriam, or for Edmund, for himself, or for no one, he keeps going, because he fears that there may be nothing else. Perhaps there never will be the after he used to hope for, perhaps there is not an after at all, and if he lets go no he will simply fall into oblivion. He sees his sister but a dozen times each year, and sometimes he feels as though it is all he exists for. He goes, he comes back, he drifts aimlessly through the month and then the cycle renews.

In better times, in the years long gone, he and Miriam and the young Prince Edmund would come together in the evenings, and narrate to each other the events of their days. Often, Edmund would relate to them the nature of his various studies, and once, training as he was then to be a leader of his church, had come to them with a new word: limbo..

Arik had been young - he hadn’t quite understood the term at the time. He is certain he understands now.

Limbo. He thinks it has claimed them all. Miriam languishes in her cell, with no hope of release, and no release in death, unable to die and unable to live. The Prince Regent has all that he needs to rule - the trust and respect and support of his people - save the will to do so. He could have any companion he would choose, save the one whose company he needs, and so is alone. And Arik, between the two, knowing he is not who either wants or deeds, and knowing that he is the only goddamn person there.

He wonders if that is all he is now. An intermediary. An endless wanderer, a witness with no story of his own.

He returns to his chambers before nightfall, and then he is dressed for bed and the moon is high in the sky: he does not know how he passes the time in between. It is likely that he does nothing at all. He lies awake in bed, long after the Prince Regent has retired from his court, and then Edmund comes to his chambers.

Month after month, they play this game, and Edmund asks his questions, asks after Miriam’s health or mind or this or that, and each month Arik finds it a little harder to control the note of disdain his voice. His response has not changed in all the years since he first went to see Miriam sitting dejected in the dark, unapologetic but no less resigned to her fate. It has not changed because she has not changed, and because he has not changed, and Edmund and the world he represents is horrifically constant as well. The universe is trapped in a point of stagnation, and he wonders if perhaps it all did come to an end, on that day the First Prince was discovered dead, and they are all simply clinging on to their feeble facsimiles of life because they do not wish to acknowledge that yet. Perhaps they are in the truest sense in limbo.

Month after month they play this game, and Arik burns to ask why the Prince Regent does not simply visit his closest childhood companion himself, rather than relying on information by proxy, but that fire dies a little with each repetition. That seems only right - everything is dim these days, Miriam’s burning passion quenched and Edmund’s brilliant light all but put out.