Dreams Apart

Half

Marcus

8 years ago

I gasped at the sight of the metal planted in my hand, the metal given to me by the boy I had met in a dream. The boy who had said he was my brother.

A brother.

"How could I believe it?"

"It couldn't be true."

"It was simply a dream." No matter how hard I tried to convince myself, I couldn't. The split metal was sorely evidence that it was anything but a dream.

No photo albums, no story of any royal member to loyal servants, and villagers tell the story of a brother. I continuously found myself sinking into the cold bathroom floor with agonizing pain in my head.

I was hit by the same image endlessly and the familiar voice of the boy I had encountered through the 'dream'

I'd sit and sketch whatever struck my mind. I'd let my hand mark paper each day, and so all the papers in my room were from a family of four.

My two late parents and I, with a brother...

I believe there are countless stages to acceptance, and they're all of me avoiding sleep till it finds a way to grasp me. I yearned for grief, but it was a king's job to take his illness to his death.

My weeps and exclamations were loud enough for my aunt to suggest that my dreams evolved around the trauma of losing my parents to traitors who were found almost immediately after their sins.

They stared back as though they didn't know anything, and so did I as I lay besides the lifeless bodies of my parents. I couldn't speak; I could only weep and scream.

"They all say the same thing, your majesty." My father's trusted regent stood before fragile me, who sat above my father's throne.

"They have no memory of their actions."

I knew just that much before I declared death for each man or woman who had stood before my dead parents.

I wandered to the scene where my parents' blood had been shed just to seek what I had forgotten. I held the metal flower to my hand in hopes of getting an answer, but all it did was quiver and burn into the palm of my hand.

☆

"You aren't coping." My aunt, Samantha, who was my mother's sister, reminded me as though I hadn't known.

I believe I died with my parents the night their lives were taken away. I was lifeless; I was the walking dead without emotion or acts of kindness. I was bitter and careless, and I hated it.

I remember huffing into my new rightful seat. We were having dinner, and I sat further away from my aunt as the table required until she pulled her seat a lot closer to mine. She didn't abide by royalty; she despised it.

"You know you can cry, right? "I actually cry as a little boy who just lost both his parents." She pinched her lips together, a habit she had whenever she was bound to cry.

"I choose not to." I was sixteen at the time.

"You're a kid..." She said it in sorrow, brushing away the tears in her eyes.

Her and my mother were as ordinary as any other villager before my mother married into royalty. Samantha never cared enough to adapt to it.

She went on with her life as though she were still ordinary.

"I'm king." I uttered back. I believed I had no right to feel what I had felt. I had no right to be sad and slow. There was no time to cry or die in the pits of grief. They died, and that was it. The people await a ruler, not an orphan.

"You don't have to be. You don't need this on you!" She cried out, finally surrendering to the pain that she had bitterly let sink into her fragile heart.

"Then. Who. Will." I remember the image that stuck with me at that moment; it's as though my conscious had answered me with a man who almost looked identical to my father.

I couldn't help but fear what my mind had presented to me. My heart began to quiver, pounding out of my chest with my palms left to drench in sweat.

"I knew your mother shouldn't have married into this family!!" She winced at her own words, just like a thorn in her skin.

"Well, so she did; she did, and she's dead!"

☆

I told no one about the metal flower, not even my trusted regent, Felix.

"I give you my word. I shall bow before you till my very last breath." He had promised only at the age of 6, while his father, who was also my father's regent, held onto him.

On many nights, I'd rest with the metal in my palm. I'd hoped for it to show me something, and so it did.

I escaped into the richness of the unknown. It was enchanted as though it were an illusion. A scream creaked the silence within a second, and I hoped to find the sorrowful source that exclaimed in pain.

I was eager to find the scream that may have held answers to my questions, but I was more eager to embrace the source that exclaimed so much. The scream was disheartening so much that I hoped to break the cycle that pulled me away from it.