"What is the ancient curse you mad old man?!"
The sorcerer lay on the ground with eyes opened, and lips unable to form words.
"Th-he th-he l-lif-fe, liv-ves-s, and-"
His eyes closed and he lay on the floor, unmoving.
"Useless." Vikram spat out.
He looked around to find anything that would lead him to know what the curse was. And how the Queen was connected to it.
The lonely building stared back at the man, and he tried to see every corner and inspect the room. The large bookshelves, with hundreds of books too old and too yellow, the golden lamp flickering due to the cold winds, and a single book open on a stand. A pen at its end.
He stepped forward to see what it was, and he saw the title, "How to understand curses".
He opened the book and hastily swapped from page to page, hungrily looking for anything, anything that would help him. For he lay way behind. The queen was snarky. The queen was a player. Everything was slipping away from his fingers and he had much less time than he could afford to lose.
But the pages yielded nothing. He sat breathless and looked up at the ceiling. The man continuously saw the ceiling from time to time, as if not wanting to let him know of it.
But what did he know about Vikram and his ability to read minds.
The only mind he could not decipher was the queen's. For it had suddenly started emitting a foreign language. He could not understand how the queen had changed. Ever since she had eloped off to the tower, her thoughts had changed. Her behavior changed.
Her fate changed.
Something sparked in his head as he remembered a poem he had read long ago. A poem he had seen written on stone in the castle. In the tower when he had followed a man into it.
Something about lives and fate and a sitar.
The Forbidden Sitar. And its curses.
It was not the tower that cursed a person. It was the sitar.
The Sitar imported from the lands of ice. The Himalayas.
He smiled at his victory.
He just had to get to that engraving. And the curse would come out in the open. Along with the queen.
The throne would be his and Lekha's.
He couldn't stop smiling.
No more teaching. No more dealing with obnoxious kids.
Only ruling.
Queen Jashoda. Get ready to wave goodbye.
Your seat is mine.
.
.
.
The Queen looked at the cold winds out into the sky. Her skin tingled and she felt something rush inside her. Something was wrong. She felt something was going wrong.
Before she came to this world, she had always wondered how the people of the past knew instinctively when something was wrong.
Well, now she felt it for herself. Before LED lights and smartphones, minds were connected instead of cables. People talked with their hearts and loved with their souls. Her body knew its end was near. She was going to be killed. Meet the same fate as her husband did.
Someone she trusted was going to betray her.
She felt gloomy, and dark and blue for the first time.
Something was crumbling, something was slipping away from her. And she knew it.
YOU ARE READING
The Forbidden Sitar
Historical Fiction[Under editing process] |18th Century CE| Queen Jashoda desperately wants to escape it all. With her ignorant husband liberated from the trap of life, her children fighting over his throne and the court officials already planning to get her off her...
