A Moon, A Mind, & the Mindless; or, The Lame Prince

The moon gazed back upon young Hephaestion. Vulcan’s inferno ever-swelling around him, as to diffuse entropic emotion and accursed reality upon what world once was his to love.

It gave a truer face, morning before the morning rose, in those moments. One no prideful person would risk showing; raw smells, stripped back and unkempt arrays of what it meant to be of nature: where hairs of grass and shrubbery were alight in the sublimation of life and the vapours of burnt blood.

Malodourous: a person’s first foul ablutions of a day laced itself within the atmosphere of cruelty. When not burning with the flesh of quivering haunches, leather and linen were stained with it. Hephaestion, a boy not of majority nor of scholarly knowing knew why then. This was the body’s final, pathetic, desperate attempt to cling to the flesh of mortality – eager to gain a moment that might bring freedom or at least deterrence with confused confusion against the predator which upon that night was nothing shy of Death’s most rapacious hound.

Anarchy: made everything but incarnate. So, Hephaestion wondering in his ending musings, what made anything more than a concept, so that it then may be blessed to ephemeral sinews of flesh? Stench-radiating and emotion-inducing, noise-emanating and iron-tasting; these were what an eve of avarice wrought, and behind them motive: dominion over the enticing Land of Pearls, and given ideal through the concept of possibility. Only flesh stood between that and humanity, and flesh was being given.

“Journeying is the destination of adventure,” old Steward-Regent Apollonius, a fox of a man, told his nephew so many years past. A boy, a nephew, Hephaestion, not seen living by any save the close court. Known to them only in rumour as “the Lame Scamp”, for even the common man surmised queen Juheraen wouldn’t cower from her people after regal birth. Lame he may be, but Hephaestion was thrice the mind of the common man and the close court. He knew what those little voices he was granted conversation with would not tell.

That journey, the adventure of those common folk, frivolling in their chaotic wave against friends of the market and companions of the inn that pledged their obliviously staunch fealty to a spire of lies they called king and country. Their destination wasn’t theirs, but it was the carnival of adventure they put on for their conceptual goals, outlined by opposing spires of lies. And, not a single one stopped their onslaught, when their goal was in their midst.

Hephaestion observed then, around him. The two black pearls of acute sharpness, glass magma, amongst the milk sclera, were darting to process the unity of human ataxia. A nameless soldier ran their lungs and legs dry as their skin, ablaze, took possession of sanity to break camaraderie and beg for selfish aid. Wailing, in instants, became clinging; transferring their glorious golden curse upon another, sharing in the hysteria. One bearing a bardiche longer than themself-and-a-half, whereupon already was the remains of something recently living, swung the great poleaxe over the necks of those two. Their travails of life were over instantaneously as they perceived them to begin; lost in the search for bringing to life that concept of chaos that blinded them to their own liege’s goal: the boy Hephaestion who stood there watching their misery ended.

Whoever controlled the Scamp, controlled the realm. And what a realm it allured to be: half of a continent and over one ocean with colonies abound. Hephaestion was the prince to be puppet, wandering like an abandoned child, an unanchored spectre. Wandering, wondering, between steel and mud, why one so desperate for hegemony – that needed him to achieve it – would find such naivety amongst their own. But finally, he was distinguished.

‘That must be him,’ a bear’s gruff with the body of a person said. Hephaestion traced his frown up slow, the gormless look of lame ridden over it. He responded with nothing; instead allowing his sunny hair, reflecting the crackling heat of a burning wagon, to fall from his eyes so they might find confirmation. Schorl pearls.

A second soldier, in the troop of three vanguard now encircling the boy, outstretched a pinch to turn Hephaestion’s cheek. ‘There’s not a chance. Someone else would’ve claimed him if it were.’ That one’s voice was stern. An aurochs.

The first was sharp to rebut, ‘and what if they all missed him? We were all told to siege first and find later. I ain’t so stupid, kept my eyes searching, and I got him. And for it, I’ll be called Margrave by the end of the year,’ the bear chuckled.

The third thrust a rough-seeming dirk out and in the aurochs’ neck twice before Hephaestion could close eyelids. Blood and phlegm sullied his left-eye. Not since his first visit to Apollonius’ Blue Chamber had he felt truly quivering fear.

That third one was a shadow cat. A panther that stalked the darkness of doggindales upon hillside moors until ready was it, to claim power above the rest.

‘You…’ the first’s voice lost its intimidating pitch.

‘Now the reward’s not split,’ the panther interjected. Spite told of their next move.

Hephaestion was lugged to a roofless tavern, wherein he was forced to his knees against coarse straw in the adjacent stable. Terror overpowered whence his senses were once so attuned; anosmic now, deaf, half-blind. Even his intuition dulled. Above him both suits of armour stood brooding.

The bear’s final act: he swung upon a pivot, drawing his arming sword to aim at third’s chest, but it was not enough. For third had already a claymore outstretched. Length determined the outcome, but precision finished it: where the panther missed a killing thrust, the bear’s closing slash ensured they both died beside their prize.

Hephaestion raised himself. Ambition and ideas killed three beasts and left the lame free, back into his realm of anarchy, wandering and wondering again. Hephaestion greeted the moon in the smoke-tainted ink above.