To Kill A King
a short story by Annika Sage Ellis
The king was approaching.
The Prophet, of course, was unsurprised. Nothing could surprise her. The king was approaching with his newborn son, so said the Messengers of Fate that swirled behind her eyes. And the Messengers never lied. Still, she didn’t need divination to know that the queen had recently given birth, or that tradition demanded a swift arrival from the royal family at her door. It was as commonplace among the powerful as crowns and wealth and war.
At first, she had detested how the rich and noble flocked to her. How they pretended to grant her respect out of fear and curiosity. She saw the consequences of their actions. She saw everyone’s. But it had been so many years since she had the energy to hate them. Now, she only found them amusing, as a wolf finds a rabbit amusing. As a goddess finds the mortal amusing.
They will not last. She will.
The Prophet sat on the floor of her non-descript cottage. Not that she could see it. The Messengers came with a price – one she gladly accepted. Sight was a small price to pay for the gift they offered her. Of course, it was not the only thing they took from her. Her own memories were now scrambled, blurred, missing altogether. They even took her name.
A small price to pay.
The door creaked open. She heard it. The Messengers whispered, It is the King Domenic of the Seven Stars. He is here for you. He is here for you.
She saw everything he was, then. His past, his present, his future. She saw it all as if it were placed before her – as if her eyes could see.
“Mistress—″ Domenic’s winded voice began.
“You rode here,” the Prophet said. It was not a question. “All the way from the palace. The babe was born as the sun began to set.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said, though he needn’t have bothered with pleasantries. He was just the same as the rest, to her.
The Prophet tilted her head. “The queen named him Nevarth.”
Domenic shuffled. “She insisted.”
“I’m sure you worry about what your people will think of a human child with the name of a Fae.” She was sure. Quite sure.
“Like I said. She insisted.”
The Prophet’s lips curled into a smile. The Queen of the Seven Stars held a particular fondness for the People of the Sun. It would be her downfall, eventually. But that wasn’t what the king wanted to hear.
“Shall I read his fate?” she asked. It would be a waste of her time not to get it done as quickly as possible.
“Oh!” Domenic said, startled, as if he’d forgotten why he’d come. “Yes, please,” he added. Again. Needlessly.
The Prophet rose gracefully to her feet and held out her arms expectantly. She heard the clunk of heavy boots and the jangle of metal and soon a warm bundle of the babe swaddled in blankets was shifted into her arms. He was sleeping. Good. It was always easier when they were asleep.
She brushed one hand across Nevarth’s face, reaching deep into her mind. She beckoned the Messengers forth, not just to guide her, but to become her – to be her eyes, her hands, her mouth, her body. To envelop her soul and open her eyes.
The perpetual darkness she always saw was replaced with a blinding light -- brighter than the sun she never knew. Small blobs of color appeared and warped and twisted themselves like paint dancing in water. They grew into shapes. They grew into images.
And the Prophet could see.
Nevarth appears as a young boy. His skin like wet sand with a spray of freckles across his face. He plays in the mud with the joy only children can have with creating messes, until the queen’s scolding calls him away.
Nevarth comes to her next as a school-aged boy, his dark hair tied back with a red band. He sits at a desk looked bored over a roll of parchment, the end of a quill moving across the page.
Next, Nevarth has reached manhood. He and Domenic are arguing in a great study, and though the words of their grievances are lost, their faces are screwed up in frowns, red and splotchy with rage. The prince stabs a finger at his father accusingly, shouting something that makes the king freeze. He storms out of the room without another word.
Nevarth is sitting next to his sleeping father. He does nothing, but watch his father breathe. Then, he stands up. He paces the room for several minutes, glancing back and forth, checking outside the door. His face is agitated, his hands are fidgeting.
He returns to his father’s side, but he doesn’t sit. Instead, he takes a deep breath, and reaches into his tunic. He pulls out a sheathed hunting knife. Slowly, slowly, he unsheathes the blade.
And slits King Domenic’s throat.
There was more to see, but the Prophet did not bother to watch. She had seen what all rulers fear. She had seen the reason for this tradition – the reason so many show monarchs and aristocrats turn up at her door with newborns in tow.
“He will kill you,” she stated simply. She handed the babe back, dismissively.
“W-What?” Domenic stuttered, taking his son back.
“He will grow up. You will grow to despise each other. He will kill you in your sleep.”
“He is my son—”
“And I am the Prophet.”
She lowered herself back to the floor, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap.
“Leave me,” she ordered.
“No.”
The Prophet pressed her lips into a line. “If you do not believe me, then you should not have come here.”
“You—You can’t expect me to walk away with that knowledge! To return to my wife—”
“I do not expect you to do anything, Domenic, but if you insist on a course of action, most in your situation kill their children before the deed is done.”
“What?”
That was always the answer she received. Shock, outrage, denial. None believed they would commit an act so low. None believe they were capable of such a deed.
But the Prophet knew better than most the depths those in power were willing to stoop.
“You can submit yourself to death by his hand,” she said, “or you can continue to live without him. Your choice.”
“I…”
At any point, the Prophet could reach back for the Messengers, to see his choice with her own eyes. But this was so much more interesting.
“I will not do either.”
She startled. “What?”
Domenic’s boots thunked on the floor – she imagined he was drawing himself up. “I will not kill him, and I will not die. I will tell him of your prophecy as soon as he is old enough to understand it. And then he will ensure that this fate will never come to pass.”
Honorable. So very honorable.
She had seen it hundreds of times.
“As you wish,” she said.
The King of the Seven Stars left her, then, walking proudly out into the night with his murderer in his arms.
The king was approaching.
The Prophet, of course, was unsurprised. Nothing could surprise her. The king was approaching with his newborn daughter, so said the Messengers of Fate. And the Messengers never lied.
“Nevarth,” she said, as he entered.
“Prophet.”
The new king was odd in his manner of greeting her. He was strictly business. She liked him more than the others.
“You named her after your mother,” she observed, taking the babe from his arms.
“Indeed. At my father’s behest.”
The Prophet blinked once, searching his past. “An odd thing to tell a twelve-year-old.”
“He knew he would be dead in ten years’ time.”
“And you?”
“I knew I would be the one to do it. As you predicted, of course.”
“And if your daughter should share your fate?”
Nevarth was quiet. “I will do what my father did for me.”
“Which is?”
“Tell her the truth.”
Oh, she liked him much more than the others.
The Prophet shifted the sleeping girl in her arms. “Let us find out, shall we?”
Hit
a short story by Annika Sage Ellis
“You sure he’s dead?” Pete Wyman asked, wringing his hands as if it would squeeze out his anxiety. “Positive?”
Vivian de Fiore took a long drag of her cigarette, and tapped the ashes onto the ground with dark gloved fingers. “As sure as the day I was born, sugar.”
They were sitting out back on a motel porch in a town so small it barely had a name. The cheap wire chairs were just expensive enough to hold their respective weights, and two glasses of even cheaper bourbon were sitting on a matching wire table. The bottle itself was half empty – glowing with a near-ethereal light in the brown-orange color of the sun at dusk.
Vvian took another drag and surveyed her client. He still hadn’t touched his drink, but he probably would have spilled it with the way he was shaking like a leaf. He kept reaching up to adjust his perfectly tied Windsor knot, brown tweed jacket slung over the back of his chair. She knocked back the rest of her own bourbon, cigarette pinched between her fingers, and refilled the glass.
“Relax, Wyman,” she insisted, reaching into her purse and producing a package of Marlboro. “Have a smoke, you’ll feel better.”
“I don’t smoke,” he said, barely whispering. “And you’re absolutely sur e you got rid of the body? And the evidence of a break-in? And—”
“What, are you writing a book? Listen, sugar, I’m not the best hitwoman in the country for nothing.” She put the Marlboros away and popped the cigarette back into her mouth. “Have a little faith in the craft.”
This didn’t seem to comfort him, but she wasn’t trying to comfort him.
“What if they followed you here?” he asked.
She couldn’t count the number of times she’d rolled her eyes tonight, but this had to put it in the double-digits. “No one’s going to know he’s dead until the maids call him down for breakfast tomorrow morning.”
His already pale face flushed with a bit of green. “He was rich and powerful,” he said, like he was talking to himself. “People aren’t going to take this sitting down.”
“Oh, they never do.”
“This was such a bad idea.”
As much as watching a first-time client mutter nervously to himself was entertaining, it had been going on for fifteen minutes, and Vivian had more important things to do. Like get paid and skip town before anyone could trace her here.
Normally, meeting with clients at the end of a job was the easier part, but all this well-dressed loser had done so far was whine about how much he regretted paying for her services. And he hadn’t even paid her in full yet.
Vivian took one last drag of her cigarette and ground it out on the table. “Where’s my money, Wyman?”
He jumped like he’d completely forgotten she was there. “The…”
“Money. M-O-N-E-Y.”
“O-Oh yeah. Once second.”
Still shaking, Pete hefted his brown leather briefcase up from the ground and onto the table, scooting his untouched bourbon out of the way. He clicked it open, folding up the top so the contents were hidden from Vivian, but she wasn’t too worried. If he trued anything funny, her contract allowed for a “retaliation” of sorts. Fortunately, most of her clients didn’t read the fine-print.
While he rummaged through the contents of his luggage, eyes darting around nervously, she reached into the purse in her lap and gripped the cold metal of a handgun. Retaliation indeed.
Finally, he produced a thick yellow envelope from his briefcase, slapped in on the table and snapped the case shut. Vivian took the envelope, one hand still wrapped around the gun in her purse.
“Much obliged,” she said.
“Yep,” Pete said. The metal chair screeched as he stood up and shoving one arm through his jacket. He had his back to her.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Where do you think you’re going?”
He didn’t even look over his shoulder. “I paid you. That means I can—”
“Sit down.”
Pete whipped around. “But—”
Vivian pulled the gun out of her purse and cocked it. “Sit down, Wyman.”
He sat down. The barrel of her gun trailed his head the whole way.
“Don’t even think about trying anything funny,” she warned.
He shook his head frantically.
“Good.”
One-handed, Vivian ripped open the yellow envelope with her teeth, dumping the contents onto the table: a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. She took her time counting each one, out loud, gun hand not wavering for an instant.
“Thirteen hundred, fourteen hundred, fifteen hundred. Hm.” Vivian frowned as she placed the last bill on the stack.
“There. The amount we agreed on.”
“Not quite.” She flicked her gaze from the money to the man.
“W-what do you mean?”
“You’re five-hundred short.”
If possible, Pete grew even more panicked. “But you said fifteen.”
“I said two-thousand plus a five-hundred-dollar proof for me. That first five-hundred didn’t go toward the job, sugar.”
“But I have confirmation of you agreeing on fifteen.”
“And I have a business to run, Wyman.” She returned the stack of bills into the envelope. “So, what’s it going to be?”
Pete jumped out of his chair so fast he kicked it over, whipping a gun out of his jacket and shaking like a wet dog. “I—I’m through with this!”
“Well, well,” Vivian said, genuinely impressed. “I didn’t think you’d have the guts to pull one on me.”
He cocked the gun with his unsteady hand. “Think again.”
She snorted. “Oh, come off it, Wyman.”
“I—I’ll shoot!” He grasped the gun with both hands, his knuckles turning white. “I will!”
“Put the gun down, sugar. I’m a professional.”
“So?”
“So, no matter how good of a shot you think you are, I’ll be taking you down with me.”
His face paled, but he didn’t move.
Then, Vivian raised her free hand above her head, watching her jumpy client carefully. “I’m going to put the gun down, Wyman. You should do the same.”
“Wh-what?”
“There’s been a lot of death today. You want to contribute any more to that number?”
Inch by inch, she moved her gun hand toward the table, Pete watching her hand the whole time. Metal on metal clinked as the weapon was set down, and she folded both her hands in her lap.
“See?” she said. “Nothing to worry about.”
Pete swallowed, every muscle in his body jumping erratically.
“Put the gun down, sugar. No one else has to die today.”
His eye twitched. With jerky movements, he inched back toward the table and dropped his gun like it burned him. “There,” he wheezed.
Vivian smiled sweetly. “Pleasure doing business with you, Wyman.”
Before he could react, she snatched her gun off the table and fired two shots in to his head. Pete Wyman’s face was in a state of permanent shock as he dropped to the ground.
Blood pooled from the holes in his skull, and Vivian took care to step around it as she snuck her gun back into her purse, stood up, and unlocked her ex-client’s briefcase. It didn’t have much – messily organized papers, letters in sealed envelopes, and the case of a handgun. How cute.
Vivian picked up Pete’s gun gingerly, and crouched down to put it in his hand. The perfect alibi. She adjusted her gloves and returned to the inside of the motel room, picking up the landline phone and dialing.
It only rang once before a gruff voice answered, “Hello?”
“It’s V.”
“Did you do the job.”
“Sure did, sugar.”
There was a snort from the other line. “You really weren’t kidding about getting it done fast. I have your thirty-thousand waiting at my estate.”
Vivian smiled. “I’ll be by in an hour.”
How To Know You're Alive
a short story by Annika Sage Ellis
The first thing you should take note of is your breathing.
If you’re alive – and there is a high (though not entirely certain) chance you are, if you’re reading this right now – then you should be able to note the rise and fall of your chest (if applicable) as you breathe through your nose and mouth (if applicable). Feel the air rush through to your lungs (you get the idea), and note the rise of your shoulders. They tense, as if they fear the very act of being so full. Your back muscles tense, your chest freezes, and your whole body is taut with air, so much air, and then you release. Your body relaxes. It sags in relief. You are finally empty.
This is what breathing feels like, and it is the first step of being alive.
Complete this cycle over and over until you forget about it. Only remember it when absolutely necessary. Those who are determined to stay conscious of their breathing are driven insane with the responsibility. They tear out their own throats in their madness. They can’t stand being full. They can’t stand being empty. They can’t take it, don’t you understand?
With this in mind, here are some important tips to remember about breathing:
- Do not think about your breathing.
- Do not think about your lungs.
- Do not think about air.
- Do not think about it. Ever.
The second thing you should take note of, if you wish to make sure you’re alive, is your blood.
Is it inside of you? Most bodies require blood to remain on the inside. If your body is one such as this, please make sure that your blood is, in fact, contained within your flesh. Make sure it’s trapped there. Make sure your skin is sealed tight to your bones. Make sure you do not let it escape. Do not let your blood escape. This is an essential step in being alive.
When blood escapes a body it is meant to be trapped in, this is called “bleeding.” If you are bleeding, or if your blood supposed to be outside of you, take note of what color it is. Take note of how it smells, and how it tastes. Take note of how it feels between your fingers, sticky and thick and mesmerizing. Take note of what it says to you. Take note of the voice in your head, take note of the secrets it whispers in your ears.
Take note:
- Your blood is you.
- Cherish your blood.
- Thank your blood.
- Worship your blood.
- It is giving you the gift of life.
- It deserves a sacrifice every now and again.
- Sacrifice.
The next step of being alive is fear.
Are you afraid?
You should be.
There is nothing more terrifying than the ordeal of living. You are an impossibility – you should not exist. Yet here you stand. You are full – so full – of air and blood and secrets. At any minute, you could be ended. At any minute, the universe could decide that your impossibility is too impossible, and wipe you off the face of existence. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen right now.
To be alive, you must always be aware of this.
- Are you afraid?
- You should be.
- You should always be afraid.
- Why aren’t you afraid?
- There are so many things to fear.
- You are one of them.
To be alive, you must become a paradox.
You have to kill and hate the act of killing. You must drink blood and gag at the taste. You must be feared and fearful. You have to make enemies that are also your friends. You must be despised and loved by one person. You must love and despise that same person in return. You must have dreams that you don’t want to achieve. You must achieve dreams you never had.
You must fear.
You must be brave.
This is the definition of life.
The last step of life is to be ready.
Are you ready?
Of course you’re not.
No one is.
Heartbeat
a short story by Annika Sage Ellis
You’re alive, you think. You can still breathe and move and see and hear and bleed. You share all the signs of being alive as everyone else. You can laugh and cry and scream and get red and go pale. You’re exactly the same as everyone else…
Except your heartbeat is never as loud as you expect it to be.
Your whole life, people have told you that you should be able to hear the pulse of your blood in your ears when you run fast, or when you’re afraid, or when you feel yourself flush in embarrassment or rage. But it’s never as loud as you think it should be. It’s a background noise. You have to concentrate on to even notice it’s there. Sometimes, you forget you even have a heartbeat.
The doctor’s you’ve seen always marvel at you. “You shouldn’t be able to walk,” they say. “You shouldn’t even be awake.”
But you are alive. You’re fairly certain you’re alive.
Because some days it’s hard to tell.
Some days, almost every day, you wake up with a fog clouding your eyes and enveloping you like a soft blanket. Rest, it seems to say. Come back to bed. It traps you in its comforting embrace, dragging you down, down, down, into a deeper blackness than you’ve ever experienced. You want to stay there for a while, rest there, go still and hold your breath and quit fighting the act of sleep.
And then you hear your mother’s voice call you across the house for breakfast, and the trance leaves you. You sit up and stretch and you feel your lack-of-heartbeat by sticking two fingers under your jaw. You’ve gotten in the habit of checking your pulse every morning – it’s always faint, but it helps you remember it’s there.
It took you until high school to realize that not everyone has that same experience. No one knows what you’re talking about when you talk about the trance you experience every other day – the sinking feeling, like feeling your mind pulling away from your body, of wanting to let go. They all tell you to get a therapist. You never do.
You do research on your family’s medical history a few times. No history of any heart conditions, on either side. No history of memory loss, either. You have that, too.
Memories of your childhood are nonexistent. It was as if you skipped the first ten years of your life – no significant events that you can remember happened before your tenth birthday. Even though you would have been in school, you would have had friends, you would have had ten previous birthdays. You know not everyone remembers everything about being a kid, but to have nothing feels wrong to you. You know it’s wrong not to remember an entire decade of your life. But you don’t.
Your earliest memory – if it can even be called that – is also your clearest. As if it had just happened, you remember waking up on your tenth birthday, wrapped in blankets on the couch. You don’t remember how you got there. You parents tell you that you fell asleep playing video game. You’re not sure if you believe them, but you can’t remember the previous night. So, you don’t really have a choice.
You were damp, too, on that morning. Your hair was wet and your skin felt sticky. Your mom tells you that you took a shower. Your dad tells you that you must have been sweating under all those blankets. You’re not sure which excuse you believe.
From there, your life continued completely normally. Save for your barely-beating heart and persistent amnesia. You went to school, you made friends, you played games, you were bad at sports, you found out you like to create. You got a guitar for your twelfth birthday, and you learned to write music. A lot of your songs are morbid, but you enjoy them anyway.
You live your life. You have no heartbeat and every morning it’s harder to wake up than it should be, and you only remember half your life, but are alive.
You wake up and you’re eighteen today. Everything is just as normal as it always is – you shake off the haze, you check your pulse, you slide out of bed. It’s all perfectly average until you stand up and your foot hits the floor.
This wouldn’t be nearly as alarming if the rest of your body had gone with it.
Your foot sits on the floor and the longer you stare at it, the more you realize that it doesn’t hurt. Your empty ankle doesn’t hurt at all. It isn’t even bleeding. Nothing hurts, and that’s worse than if it did hurt.
You don’t scream. You don’t panic. You don’t do anything. You just sit on the edge of your bed and stare at it, lying there on the ground. Your heartbeat isn’t rushing like everyone told you it should. Nothing about your life is like people told you it should be.
There’s a knock at your bedroom door. “Honey,” says your mom, opening the door, and peeking in, “it’s time for break—”
She cuts herself off with a gasp, flinging the door open. In her eyes, you see fear and panic. But you also see dread – and to dread something, you have to anticipate it.
“Hi, Mom,” you say. Your voice is remarkably steady.
Before she can do anything, your dad appears over her shoulder – he shares the same look. Fear. Panic. Dread.
Recognition.
“What’s going on?” you ask. What else can you say?
Your parents look at each other. A new emotion joins the mix: regret.
Your dad pushes into the room, and sits down next to you on the bed. “You mother and I,” he says, “raised you, when you were a kid.”
That didn’t explain anything.
“I know,” you say. “You’re my parents.”
Your mom shakes her head, still standing by the door, clutching her chest. “No, honey. We raised you. From the dead.”
You can barely hear your heartbeat, but you know at that moment it skipped. “What?”
Your dad puts a hand on your shoulder. “You died in a car accident with your babysitter when you were ten years old.”
“We were devastated,” you mother adds.
He nods in agreement. “We were beyond heartbroken, so we looked for ways to bring you back to us.”
“I know a necromancer who lives out of state, and she offered to come down and perform a resurrection spell for your birthday.”
“We dug you out of your own grave to do it.”
Your mom finally moves from her spot at the door to kneel down in front of you, tears shining in her eyes. “When we finally got you back, it was a dream come true.”
“But,” your father continues, with a sigh, “she did say that most of the magic would be wearing off by now, unless we get your body revivified. We meant to tell you about it before this happened, but…” He trails off. It doesn’t matter – you’ve barely registered anything either of them have said.
“I called her down last week,” your mom says, nodding earnestly. “She should be here by this evening, and then you can be back to your normal self again, okay?”
You… you never had a “normal,” self. Everything about you had been abnormal from the day you were—since you were brought back from the dead.
“You’ll be okay again,” she reiterates.
You stare at your broken foot and say nothing.
You don’t move from your spot on the bed the rest of the day.
Once it’s clear you’re not going to be saying or doing much, your mom calls you in sick for school and your dad leaves a plate of food on your bedside table that you can’t bring yourself to eat. Do you even need to eat? Can a reanimated corpse starve to death? Would it even be dying?
You have no idea what time it is when your door creaks open again, but it’s late enough that the sun has already set outside your window. The light switch is flicked on, and you squint up at the offending party.
“Hi there,” says a woman you’ve never seen before. She’s dressed in pastels and skulls, with a black-leather-bound grimoire tucked in the crook of one arm. “You’re certainly looking better than I expected. You’ve been holding up alright?”
You look back down at your missing foot. She makes an offended noise in the back of her throat.
“They didn’t tell you, did they?” she grumbles. “Of course not. No one ever tells the raised.” She sits next to you on the bed, laying the book open on her lap, flipping through the pages. “I told her, too. I told her, I said, ‘Harper, you better talk about this with your kid before my next visit.’ Your mother’s always a stubborn one though, isn’t she?”
You don’t answer. She sighs. Not at you. Just in general. At the way of the world.
“The name’s Rory, by the way. Rory Maddox. Don’t suppose your parents have told you about me either?”
You shake your head.
“Of course not.”
She stops flipping through her book, landing on a page with detailed diagrams of the human body, instructions in a language you’ve never seen, and lots and lots of doodles of flowers and smiley faces.
“This’ll only take a bit,” Rory promises. “All I’m going to do is make sure your body can last you another decade – give or take a few years. You’ll be good as new.”
No, you won’t. You’ll never be “new.” You’ll always be an old thing polished up to look new. To act new.
“Oh, I know that look.” Rory put the book behind her, and folds her legs on the bed at your side. “There’s no shame in wanting to let it all go, if you don’t want to stay. This should be your choice before anyone else’s. They didn’t ask you before you were raised in the first place, but they could have cleared it with your spirit first. I hate when people do it without permission, but most people don’t care enough to ask.” She sighs. “They’re just so desperate and heartbroken – I can’t rightly say no to them. That’s my fault, though. Not theirs.” She puts out a hand to shake. “Suppose I should be apologizing to you, then.”
You take her hand carefully, and shake it. Her skin is almost painfully hot against your own, but it’s not her fault. Your skin has been getting colder and colder all day.
“Oh my,” Rory says once you let go. “You’re about to turn to dust right here.”
You decide that detail is important enough to ask about. “What do you mean?”
“When I revive people, they can only store the magic for a certain amount of time before their bodies forget how to stay alive. When time’s up, all the time they spent alive catches up with them. They can’t be brought back after that. But—” she pats the book, “—I can keep that magic alive with a revivify spell.”
“So, if I don’t want the spell,” you start, slowly, “I can just stay dead? Forever?”
She nods, a sad smile on her face. “I can leave right now without doing a thing if you’d rather. But you’ve got to make your choice quickly, love. You haven’t much time.”
You can either live or die again. You can give up your second chance at life and leave behind your parents and friends, or you can walk around in the shell of a body that hasn’t meant to be walked around in in nearly a decade. You can continue being an old thing polished to look new.
You only have one question.
“Can you give me a louder heartbeat?”
Rory’s brows curl in sympathy, and her smile turns lopsided. “You never had one to begin with, love. What you have now is as loud as I can make it.”
You nod. Swallow. And prepare yourself.
You’ve made your choice.
