No Man is an Island
by Kellyann Ye
It's not the silence that tells the prince something's wrong when he wakes up.
He's used to that, startling awake in the middle of the night to noise only in his head, lying alone in the darkness for hours and hours until the murmuring of the emotions of the castle residents around him calm him enough to sleep. He doesn't even notice the difference in the emotions he senses around him -- more raw, more instinctive, more wild than the ones usually in the castle-- until he feels for his younger brother's mind in the chamber next to his (as he always does -- goblin tales exist for a reason) and it's not there.
And all at once it's obvious why the emotions he's feeling are so strong (human emotions are more tamped down, always too quiet, too careful compared to the raw emotions of animals).
There are no humans.
The brightness is startling, when at last the worry (not quite fear, not quite yet) pulls him outside his room, a flicker of sunlight in the colored glass windows shrouding him in the deep blues and purples of the royal crest, and he searches for any sign that can explain the lack of humanity. The kitchens are empty, fires burnt to embers, air tinged with the smell of bread and woodsmoke. He trudges out in the snow to the stables, and the horses are there, they nuzzle at his hands, but he has no sugar for them, and doesn't go off to find them any because all of a sudden, he's hit by a wave of his own fear.
He falls to his knees in the snow-damp stable straw, reaches out for a human mind, somewhere, anywhere, but he's not pulled together, not grounded, not concentrating hard enough to shift his mind across planes, and his grasp on the mind plane flickers and fails, leaving him crumpled on the muddy ground with horse spit in his hair.
Alone.
He searches the servants' chambers next, knowing there is nothing from his brief foray into the mind plane, but needing to look -- at least once -- to prove it to himself. They are all empty, sheets and blankets crumpled like they had been left in a hurry. The library, four flights of stairs further, is empty, and there is a thin layer of dust on the books that makes him wonder wildly how long everyone else has been missing, but then he remembers hardly anybody visits the library, and the frantic thudding of his heartbeat slows a little. But only a little.
There's no blood, no smell of decay or fire or gunpowder. No bodies. Around noon that first day, seven hours with no other human contact, he catches himself wishing there were bodies, because then he would have evidence that there at least were -- had been -- humans other than him.
The thought worries him, a little. So he goes back to sleep, fully clothed, and for the first time in years keeps a gun under his pillow. In two hours, he wakes again after a fitful mockery of sleep, to silence.
It's more or less alright until the sun sets, because the silence is stifling in darkness. He doesn't sleep, that first night (too afraid, he refuses to admit to himself), and sits in the shadows of the kitchen, reflecting that the castle had never seemed so cold before. He shivers and holds a lit fire-jar in his palms, staring into the not-quite-red flames until blue stars flash behind his eyes when he blinks, and he has to look away.
The next morning, the flower wreaths that had been put up a week ago to celebrate the coming of spring have started falling apart, scattering golden poppies and pink carnations underfoot as he paces the castle again, footsteps loud in the emptiness.
Still, the castle is empty.
He tries to cut bread later that day, when he's hungry, but the knife nicks the palm of his hand when he's not paying attention, and the blood drips quietly onto the grey stone floor for a moment before he notices, dark crimson like the roses partners exchanged on Saint Valentine's Day. He wipes it up, ties a strip of cloth to his hand, and eats an apple and a few strips of smoked meat instead. The knife is left hilt-up in the loaf, like a sword in a stone from some long-ago story.
When his hand stops bleeding enough to be used, he goes and shovels hay for the horses, a task that takes him twice as long as it took Peter the stable boy, and leaves his arms and lower back aching. The horses appreciate the gesture, though, and nicker softly at him when he leaves again. The stable door doesn't swing shut all the way, doesn't lock, but he leaves it. There's nobody around to steal his horses, even if he wanted them to.
After the first week, when he has water and food and hay for the horses, he wonders why it was him that was left alone, and loses himself in the library, pouring through the old books nobody read to find out why. He comes out to find that the bread has gone stale, that the meat in the kitchen is infested with maggots, and that the horses' hay is dusty and smells of mold. He throws it out, fetches them fresh hay from the barn, and spends the next three weeks bringing hay up from the farmers' fields.
He doesn't go to the library again.
In the second week, he tries to kill himself only once, thinking maybe it had been a mistake that he had been left behind, and deciding to remedy that, sitting in between the castle and the stables, pressing the edge of a knife to the bloodlines in his wrist.The horses stop him, neighing wildly, throwing their hooves against the wood of the stable wall in what he reads as fear. He drops the knife and runs to them, stroking their manes, whispering in their silky ears to calm them. There are only bruises on his wrist afterwards, which fade, and he doesn't try again. He wonders if he wasn't really trying, and decides that was a good thing.
Weeks go by, marked by daily notches on the wooden windowsills of the throne room, made with the knife he found in the kitchen. He uses a different knife to cut bread, one with a serrated edge that breaks through the hard crust of slightly-stale bread, loaves misshapen because he made them himself. He finds himself thinking about potatoes and grilled meat, and goes out with his bow to hunt deer. He returns three days later having watched a fawn take its first steps in the spring sunlight and resigns himself to being a vegetarian.
The day-marking notches spread to the oak dais of the throne.
Suddenly, nearly five months in, he realizes he doesn't remember his younger brother's voice, or how his mother wore her hair. He spends the day looking for family portraits, but finds nothing. So he puts pen to paper, and tries first to draw the people he knew, and when that fails (he never had any skill as an artist), he writes, scribbling whatever he remembers onto paper. His father's long nose, his brother's chewed fingernails, Peter's ability to tie a cherry stem into knots with his tongue.
The world is silent, but for the weak summer wind outside, the scratch of quill on paper, and his own shallow breathing.
The hay runs out, the hay in the fields won't be ripe for another six months or so, and even the farmers' stables are empty, having never been well-stocked after a trying winter. He lets the horses go into the fallow fields with a lump of sugar and a soft pat on the shoulder for each, and he doesn't cry as he watches them go. They will do better without him, he knows.
That night, he cries himself to sleep for the first time in months.
He loses count of the days somewhere around 200, surrounded by far too many lines in the throne room, and he can't even be sure of that number, not knowing how many days and nights he's slept through, when he finally gathered the courage to sleep at night, after nearly a month of isolation.
Every time he wakes, he sits down in the center of the throne room, legs crossed, bracing himself with his arms, and reaches out with his mind, skimming the castle, the lower city, and, as he grows stronger and his reach broadens, the villages that line the edge of the river, hidden by the shadows of the distant mountains.
They are all abandoned, some with the embers of long-dead fires still littering the fire pits, the gates that once kept goats in weathered and worn through with time, the goats wandering wild along the riverbank amid hardy winter flowers.
I am an island of humanity in the sea of the wilderness, he thinks one day, and spends the rest of that day staring at the empty stables, his hand pressed to the pulsepoint on his wrist though he doesn't know what good that will do.
He glimpses the horses occasionally, first watching them go in the summer, making their way into the abandoned villages and through them, past his sight, then watching them return, well-fed on wild grasses and frolicking, dancing into the castle grounds once more in winter. He runs out to greet them, laughing for the first time in a while, and shovels them hay he cut from the fields that had been planted a year and a half ago. They settle into the stables like they never left, and he is pleased when they don't seem to want to go again.
Today, like any day, he wakes with the sun, and stretches, and notices how his trousers are above his ankles now, how his boots pinch a little, how his shirt (borrowed from his father's ebony wardrobe) is still a bit too broad in the shoulders (but the shoulders of his own finely tailored shirts are too narrow), but doesn't try to change them. There is no reason to fix them yet, it's spring again, and he's not uncomfortable.
He seats himself on the stone floor in the middle of the throne room, like every day, amid lines and lines and lines in the dawn and throws his awareness out into the world, stretching it past the castle gates and the surrounding city, to now-barren fields past the river, to the far edges of the forests, stretching farther (farther than he's gone before, just to test himself) to the base of the mountains, farther and farther until his consciousness is flickering from the distance, and right when he thinks he's going to black out, he feels it -- a tiny speck of fear, fear so raw that it snags his consciousness, but so obviously driven by intelligence it could be human.
He saddles one of the horses.
by Kellyann Ye
It's not the silence that tells the prince something's wrong when he wakes up.
He's used to that, startling awake in the middle of the night to noise only in his head, lying alone in the darkness for hours and hours until the murmuring of the emotions of the castle residents around him calm him enough to sleep. He doesn't even notice the difference in the emotions he senses around him -- more raw, more instinctive, more wild than the ones usually in the castle-- until he feels for his younger brother's mind in the chamber next to his (as he always does -- goblin tales exist for a reason) and it's not there.
And all at once it's obvious why the emotions he's feeling are so strong (human emotions are more tamped down, always too quiet, too careful compared to the raw emotions of animals).
There are no humans.
The brightness is startling, when at last the worry (not quite fear, not quite yet) pulls him outside his room, a flicker of sunlight in the colored glass windows shrouding him in the deep blues and purples of the royal crest, and he searches for any sign that can explain the lack of humanity. The kitchens are empty, fires burnt to embers, air tinged with the smell of bread and woodsmoke. He trudges out in the snow to the stables, and the horses are there, they nuzzle at his hands, but he has no sugar for them, and doesn't go off to find them any because all of a sudden, he's hit by a wave of his own fear.
He falls to his knees in the snow-damp stable straw, reaches out for a human mind, somewhere, anywhere, but he's not pulled together, not grounded, not concentrating hard enough to shift his mind across planes, and his grasp on the mind plane flickers and fails, leaving him crumpled on the muddy ground with horse spit in his hair.
Alone.
He searches the servants' chambers next, knowing there is nothing from his brief foray into the mind plane, but needing to look -- at least once -- to prove it to himself. They are all empty, sheets and blankets crumpled like they had been left in a hurry. The library, four flights of stairs further, is empty, and there is a thin layer of dust on the books that makes him wonder wildly how long everyone else has been missing, but then he remembers hardly anybody visits the library, and the frantic thudding of his heartbeat slows a little. But only a little.
There's no blood, no smell of decay or fire or gunpowder. No bodies. Around noon that first day, seven hours with no other human contact, he catches himself wishing there were bodies, because then he would have evidence that there at least were -- had been -- humans other than him.
The thought worries him, a little. So he goes back to sleep, fully clothed, and for the first time in years keeps a gun under his pillow. In two hours, he wakes again after a fitful mockery of sleep, to silence.
It's more or less alright until the sun sets, because the silence is stifling in darkness. He doesn't sleep, that first night (too afraid, he refuses to admit to himself), and sits in the shadows of the kitchen, reflecting that the castle had never seemed so cold before. He shivers and holds a lit fire-jar in his palms, staring into the not-quite-red flames until blue stars flash behind his eyes when he blinks, and he has to look away.
The next morning, the flower wreaths that had been put up a week ago to celebrate the coming of spring have started falling apart, scattering golden poppies and pink carnations underfoot as he paces the castle again, footsteps loud in the emptiness.
Still, the castle is empty.
He tries to cut bread later that day, when he's hungry, but the knife nicks the palm of his hand when he's not paying attention, and the blood drips quietly onto the grey stone floor for a moment before he notices, dark crimson like the roses partners exchanged on Saint Valentine's Day. He wipes it up, ties a strip of cloth to his hand, and eats an apple and a few strips of smoked meat instead. The knife is left hilt-up in the loaf, like a sword in a stone from some long-ago story.
When his hand stops bleeding enough to be used, he goes and shovels hay for the horses, a task that takes him twice as long as it took Peter the stable boy, and leaves his arms and lower back aching. The horses appreciate the gesture, though, and nicker softly at him when he leaves again. The stable door doesn't swing shut all the way, doesn't lock, but he leaves it. There's nobody around to steal his horses, even if he wanted them to.
After the first week, when he has water and food and hay for the horses, he wonders why it was him that was left alone, and loses himself in the library, pouring through the old books nobody read to find out why. He comes out to find that the bread has gone stale, that the meat in the kitchen is infested with maggots, and that the horses' hay is dusty and smells of mold. He throws it out, fetches them fresh hay from the barn, and spends the next three weeks bringing hay up from the farmers' fields.
He doesn't go to the library again.
In the second week, he tries to kill himself only once, thinking maybe it had been a mistake that he had been left behind, and deciding to remedy that, sitting in between the castle and the stables, pressing the edge of a knife to the bloodlines in his wrist.The horses stop him, neighing wildly, throwing their hooves against the wood of the stable wall in what he reads as fear. He drops the knife and runs to them, stroking their manes, whispering in their silky ears to calm them. There are only bruises on his wrist afterwards, which fade, and he doesn't try again. He wonders if he wasn't really trying, and decides that was a good thing.
Weeks go by, marked by daily notches on the wooden windowsills of the throne room, made with the knife he found in the kitchen. He uses a different knife to cut bread, one with a serrated edge that breaks through the hard crust of slightly-stale bread, loaves misshapen because he made them himself. He finds himself thinking about potatoes and grilled meat, and goes out with his bow to hunt deer. He returns three days later having watched a fawn take its first steps in the spring sunlight and resigns himself to being a vegetarian.
The day-marking notches spread to the oak dais of the throne.
Suddenly, nearly five months in, he realizes he doesn't remember his younger brother's voice, or how his mother wore her hair. He spends the day looking for family portraits, but finds nothing. So he puts pen to paper, and tries first to draw the people he knew, and when that fails (he never had any skill as an artist), he writes, scribbling whatever he remembers onto paper. His father's long nose, his brother's chewed fingernails, Peter's ability to tie a cherry stem into knots with his tongue.
The world is silent, but for the weak summer wind outside, the scratch of quill on paper, and his own shallow breathing.
The hay runs out, the hay in the fields won't be ripe for another six months or so, and even the farmers' stables are empty, having never been well-stocked after a trying winter. He lets the horses go into the fallow fields with a lump of sugar and a soft pat on the shoulder for each, and he doesn't cry as he watches them go. They will do better without him, he knows.
That night, he cries himself to sleep for the first time in months.
He loses count of the days somewhere around 200, surrounded by far too many lines in the throne room, and he can't even be sure of that number, not knowing how many days and nights he's slept through, when he finally gathered the courage to sleep at night, after nearly a month of isolation.
Every time he wakes, he sits down in the center of the throne room, legs crossed, bracing himself with his arms, and reaches out with his mind, skimming the castle, the lower city, and, as he grows stronger and his reach broadens, the villages that line the edge of the river, hidden by the shadows of the distant mountains.
They are all abandoned, some with the embers of long-dead fires still littering the fire pits, the gates that once kept goats in weathered and worn through with time, the goats wandering wild along the riverbank amid hardy winter flowers.
I am an island of humanity in the sea of the wilderness, he thinks one day, and spends the rest of that day staring at the empty stables, his hand pressed to the pulsepoint on his wrist though he doesn't know what good that will do.
He glimpses the horses occasionally, first watching them go in the summer, making their way into the abandoned villages and through them, past his sight, then watching them return, well-fed on wild grasses and frolicking, dancing into the castle grounds once more in winter. He runs out to greet them, laughing for the first time in a while, and shovels them hay he cut from the fields that had been planted a year and a half ago. They settle into the stables like they never left, and he is pleased when they don't seem to want to go again.
Today, like any day, he wakes with the sun, and stretches, and notices how his trousers are above his ankles now, how his boots pinch a little, how his shirt (borrowed from his father's ebony wardrobe) is still a bit too broad in the shoulders (but the shoulders of his own finely tailored shirts are too narrow), but doesn't try to change them. There is no reason to fix them yet, it's spring again, and he's not uncomfortable.
He seats himself on the stone floor in the middle of the throne room, like every day, amid lines and lines and lines in the dawn and throws his awareness out into the world, stretching it past the castle gates and the surrounding city, to now-barren fields past the river, to the far edges of the forests, stretching farther (farther than he's gone before, just to test himself) to the base of the mountains, farther and farther until his consciousness is flickering from the distance, and right when he thinks he's going to black out, he feels it -- a tiny speck of fear, fear so raw that it snags his consciousness, but so obviously driven by intelligence it could be human.
He saddles one of the horses.