Shortstories

Fitzwilliam G. Hastings sat up. At first, he was relieved. The sudden pain in his chest had lessened considerably. In fact, it was gone. Whatever it was, it had obviously passed, and he could get back to his usual Monday evening activity during Tax season, organising his stack of spreadsheets and ledgers that had been sent to him over the weekend by his panicked clients. It never failed. It didn’t matter how much money you had, or how familiar you were with it, everyone always put off working on their taxes until it was too late, and April 15th was staring them down, and desperation drove them to throw piles of paper at Fitzwilliam in the vein hope that he could make it all go away.

The rest of the day passed quickly, like a train speeding towards a broken rail. My heartbeat struck out the seconds like a countdown, echoing in my breastbone. I felt sick.

Some of my friends noticed, and gave me hugs between the last few classes. Lindsey found me in the parking lot after school, and offered to drive me home. I declined, and drove myself after getting another tender hug from her.

The walk up the driveway was the longest it had ever been.

I found the ring when I was sixteen.

It was buried deep in my grandmother’s things, in an old dusty chest in the closet. Everything in it belonged to my great grandmother, at least, that’s what my grandmother said.

I had spent the summer looking through old photographs and antique letters, curious about my past for the simple reason that I had no other part about myself with which to be curious.

Bally walked all the way through the castle to the other side. He had to turn around several times because the settling stonework had begun to sag into the doorways, jamming the solid wooden doors shut. It was becoming a process to work through the winding maze of hallways.

At last he reached a door to the outside walls. Clamering his way through the stonework, he slipped out of the castle and across the lumpy hills back to the cliff overlooking the sea. Was it a shorter walk than before? Had a large part of the cliff fallen away into the blood-dark waters? He didn’t know. He didn’t much care, either, come to that. He’d rather just sit back and watch as the Spot grew imperceptibly larger.

There was a crowd, or what counted as a crowd, these days. Almost thirty people.

They had tried their best. That fact alone made Bally more angry than anything else he had heard the entire evening. He watched as the small group of peasants sauntered their way up the hill towards the castle gates, waving their three torches and two pitchforks. A scythe was there too, which was a nice touch, but all in all, their heart wasn’t really in it.

Bally almost tripped over the mumbling monk. Teek had layed out on the stone hallway, his head ackwardly jammed against the wall as he muttered in his sleep. Bally let out a curse from his lips as he hopped over the recumbant penetant. He caught himself expertly, just as Teek snorted and coughed.

“Oh my,” he muttered as he opened his eyes. “Bally? Is that you?”

Climbing up the ragged ladder to the old sage’s tower was not easy. It was made easier, thankfully, by the sage having moved down several floors in his tower, after the top had blown off in a sudden and torrential wind. Now three floors sat open to the rain and winds, the sage’s laboratory protected only by a single trapdoor in the ceiling, where once the ladder continued beyond. It was a flimsy door, and it leaked fiercely in the rain, but it was the best the sage could manage.

“Good Sage Ranquin?” Bally called as he climed the rickety ladder, his hands and feet trembling as they tested every rung, ignoring the creaking and groaning of the wood. “Ranquin, are you there?”

Halfway to the wine, a trumpet sounded from the ramparts. the sound was quiet over the howling winds. The poor watchman. Bally smiled to himself at the thought of the youth gasping and panting into the flimsy funnel. “The Duke arrives,” Bally raised a finger to the air, drawing Illowen’s attention. “The hunt complete, I wonder what meat he has brought for the table?”

“He wasn’t hunting,” Illowen cocked a curious eyebrow. “He was going to fight a battle against the evil Count de’Tras.”

“Ah, of course,” Bally sighed. “Then I must be mistaken.”

The Palace of Lothvar had once been a towering display of beauty and glory. Ten spires had risen to meet the blue skies of olden years, and a courtyard of massive expanse stretched out in a glittering rotundra of grass, trees, and flowers from across the land. It had been a cathedral to the Duke and his reign.

Now, it was collapsing into ruin. Three of the spires had collapsed into the courtyard, crushing half the garden and uprooting the old oak that had grown there for over a hundred years — according to old Teek the Monk. The gardentender only worked for half each day, doing little more than poking the crawling vines back from the stone walkways, and making sure none of the remaining tree branches were able to fall on someone’s head.

The sour scent of rancid meat and decaying flowers was faint in the air, this evening. Bally thanked the heavens for small mercies, before catching himself. Any thanks that made their way through the thick clouds would certainly echo in empty halls of marble and gold.

Who had said the halls of the heavens were marble and gold? Bally scratched his nose in thought. It hadn’t been Old Grunby, the dottering hag-priestess, whose joints cracked like crumbling cliffs every time she moved, and spoke of the gods with the passionate furvor of an ancient shaman dancing around a bonfire. It hadn’t been the dottering monk…what was his name…Teek? Yes, that was it. The perpetually grinning old soak spun tales of the heavens like a father lulling his children to sleep, slurring his littanies with both ale and wandering tangents. No. It hadn’t been him…

Who had it been?