Lisa Bortiforte
She/Her
31
August 30
Camphrier Town, Kalos
Bi/Heteroromantic
Bioterrorist
Underboss
Bury me in the roses and rot; I'll come back thorned.
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Elisabeth Fiorelli
TALES BENEATH THE DYNA TREE (ROCKET)
POSTED ON Feb 24, 2024 19:52:26 GMT
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(TW: Allusions to Suicide/Murder.) [break] In an island kingdom far across the sea, there was a selfish and unfeeling prince who learned to be a cold and cruel king.[break][break]
He had been taught, from his father before him, that the greatest weakness a king could know was to entrust his heart to another. "Do not be weak," his father had demanded on his deathbed, "for you must never give another the power to harm you, not in any way that matters." The prince took this lesson to heart, trusting nothing and no one.[break][break]
He abandoned the friends he'd made in the court. He broke the heart of his betrothed, dismissing her and caring nothing for where her grief might take her. He steeled himself against the world and all its earthly pleasures, ruling without offering others a glimpse of his own vulnerability and humanity.[break][break]
But ruling is a lonely endeavor, and kings especially are not meant to rule alone.[break][break]
Unable to sleep one moonlit night, he wandered the shore outside his castle, where an eerie and sorrowful melody of a woman's singing greeted him. It was a song of love and loss, and though the king had known neither in his lifetime, the sound of it moved him deeply.[break][break]
If you did not trust others, you never knew what it was to love them. If you did not allow yourself to love, you did not understand the truest grief of loss. To hear of both felt like insight into a world he had never seen before.[break][break]
He could not find the source of the music, however, for a thick and powerful pink fog obscured his sight. The more he pursued the origin of the song, the more the night refused his advance. A splash in the waves signaled the abrupt end of the song, and mystified, he returned to his castle alone.[break][break]
When the moon waned in its brilliance and the song did not return, he thought it merely an odd, peculiar dream. But the next time the moon waxed to its fullest, the siren song returned in all its haunting tenor.[break][break]
Lost in the solitude of his unhappiness, he was helpless to its allure.[break][break]
This time, as he parted the strange pink mist that blocked his path, he saw a white-haired woman reclined against a rock on the shore, her skin damp and glistening as if she'd emerged from the water. She paused in her song, smiling up at him mournfully. "Ah, I see you cannot sleep," the maiden of the sea said, and her eyes conveyed a pity and a sadness the king didn't understand. "It has been some time since I have slept well, I am afraid. What do you search for on my shore, Your Highness?"[break][break]
It was a question he himself didn't know the answer to, except that the pull of her was irresistible to him. Without meaning to, he felt himself drawn all the more to the mystery of her -- as if they were the only two creatures on this island that existed at all.[break][break]
"I seek an escape from my thoughts," the king confessed, and when she smiled, he felt as if he'd been forgiven for all the faults he'd ever had. "And you?"[break][break]
"I bear the weight of being alone and unwanted. It has been many years since anyone asked for my company," she said. "I would gladly share yours."[break][break]
And so every full moon, he would retreat to this place on the shore, sharing the forbidden thoughts and anxieties he had forever locked away in the deepest recesses of his heart. Purged of such insecurity, and soothed by the gentle words of the stranger who disappeared like sea foam into the night, he found his heart greatly lightened.[break][break]
The mysterious woman never gave him her name, and never asked anything of him but his company. She was the first person who had never asked anything of the king at all, and that relieved him greatly.[break][break]
One day, however, a visiting princess had arrived in order to discuss the possibility of a marital agreement to bind their two island kingdoms. His uncaring nature made him an ideal suitor, she'd thought, for such a politically auspicious match.[break][break]
Yet within minutes of meeting with the king all had proclaimed to be distant and cold, she shrewdly deduced that his heart lied elsewhere, to her own astonishment and irritation.[break][break]
"Who is it that has enraptured you so, I wonder?" the sly princess prodded, but the king denied the allegations. Undeterred by this unknown obstacle, she hatched a plan during her stay to follow the king and discover the rival to her wealth and her kingdom's glory.[break][break]
Bribing the servants revealed that trails of sand had been known to dirty the hallways after nights of the full moon, and that many suspected the king to be haunted by sleepwalking. He sang odd songs that no one recognized when he thought himself to be alone, sorrowful songs of loss and love that didn't match the hardened man they'd served.[break][break]
A full moon happened to fall that night, and when she saw the king slip away, the princess followed him like a shadow in the night.[break][break]
What she saw defied all understanding and reason, for the king spoke to no one at all that night. No woman sat reclined against the rock that was their meeting place; no sorrowful, lilting song summoned the princess here as it had summoned him.[break][break]
"The king is mad," the princess whispered to herself in horror, and she stepped forward then, made bold by this discovery. "Your Majesty," she called, "come back to the castle, for it is dark, and the sea is dangerous at night."[break][break]
"You followed me?" The king blinked at her in confusion, and at this, her greatest fears were confirmed. He was, indeed, mad with moonlight, and in this moment the madness turned to rage. "What audacity! How dare you intrude on what we have?"[break][break]
He gestured to the strange white-haired woman beside him, and the princess looked blankly upon him, choosing her words carefully.[break][break]
"We? You must be dreaming, Your Majesty, for only you and I are here. I see no one here at all in the water." She turned to go, saying softly, "I will call for the royal physician, and he will tend to you. The night plays tricks on us, sometimes."[break][break]
It was then that he heard a splash in the water, and a sinking dread accompanied it, knowing that his companion had fled them both at this intruder's presence.[break][break]
To have this small joy denied to him early, when the full moon was so fleeting a thing, infuriated him.[break][break]
"You think I do not know what you are after?" The words bellowed out with a fury that startled his foreign visitor, and without a moment's warning, he reached forward to yank her back by the shoulders. "You miserable wretch! You have coveted my kingdom since you darkened my doorstep. You would turn my own people against me, with your poisonous lies!"[break][break]
He did not realize the force with which he grabbed her, or the sheer brutality of his own emotion as he dragged her back. The waves crashed and churned around them as the princess struggled to escape, but the vindictive nature of the sea itself whispered to him that all he desired was within reach, if he merely gave in to that temptation.[break][break]
Her head of golden hair disappeared beneath the black water as he held her thrashing body down, until the bubbles that betrayed her frantic breathing were silenced entirely. He said nothing to the servants upon his return, and feigned shock at her disappearance as much as anyone else. It was determined, finally, that she had grieved the king's indifference so much she had drowned herself in the waves.[break][break]
The king was content with this explanation, and felt no remorse at all. For indeed, as this story first promised you, he was a cold and cruel man.[break][break]
When the full moon returned at last, he practically leapt to the beach in his eagerness to reunite with his mysterious maiden. Her song sounded different, however, as he raced through the labyrinth of pink mist towards the shore. There was a new, discordant note in its melody; there was an anger intermingled with the sorrow.[break][break]
It was not one, but two mist-wreathed maidens who greeted him upon his arrival.[break][break]
The white-haired woman turned her back to him, denying him the view of her lunar beauty as tears streamed silently down her cheeks. Beside her, the fair-haired princess smiled bitterly, her ghostly skin shimmering with an otherworldly, sea-kissed radiance.[break][break]
"How can this be?" the king exclaimed in horror, and the drowned princess laughed with a spitefulness that sent chills down his spine. "You're dead. I watched you die. I..."[break][break]
"Killed you," he almost finished, but couldn't.[break][break]
"You poor, deluded fool," the dead princess cackled, and the gleam in her eyes echoed the madness she'd seen in his own. "What a fitting fate. Your cold and unfeeling heart feared giving itself to the living, so you consorted with the dead instead."[break][break]
"I must be dreaming," he whispered, denying her words, even as she laughed and laughed again. "She is alive, is she not? You alone are the ghost! You alone are the hellish nightmare that plagues me!"[break][break]
"Oh, my foolish king, did you ever wonder why her siren's song beckoned you and you alone?" How he yearned for her to cease in her laughter. "The woman whose love you denied so long ago drowned herself here. You ended her life as much as you ended mine. You chase the ghost felled by your own cruelty."[break][break]
Unable to fathom this, he shook his head vigorously, turning to see if the other maiden would rebuke this princess's claims. When she did not, he did what he had always silently longed to do but feared ever doing -- he reached through the mist for her, as if the touch of her hand would reassure him that all this was a cruel lie spouted by a jealous and wicked interloper.[break][break]
But when he reached for her hand, he felt nothing at all but empty air and then the touch of cold and unfeeling stone.[break][break]
What happened to the king afterwards is a subject of great debate. Some say he ended his existence to be with his beloved forever more; others say that he drowned himself out of guilt and horror at what his own cruelty had wrought. Some say the siren's song drove him to madness and he followed it blindly into the sea. And others still say that he was killed by both sirens, gleeful in their watery triumph, as punishment for his own sins against them.[break][break]
No one can say, in truth. For the sea is a fickle and vindictive creature, and its moods change like the tides.[break][break]
I leave you with this wisdom: we create our own nightmares, with the power of our own fears.
[attr="class","ooc"] A TALE OF NIGHTMARES AND FEARS [attr="class","pkmn"]
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