I WATCHED YOU
DIE
The words escaped her tongue like fleeting arrows as the vagabond polished the edge of his curved dagger over his shirt.
“Did ye?” he smiled venomously.
“I put a dagger in your chest,” she asserted.
“What dagger?”
Arowyn quickly reached down to ensure the blade was still with her. It was. She drew it with her shaking hand. “This one. This is the knife I killed you with.”
The vagabond let out a chuckle before raising his blade. “Ye’ sure about that,
Princess?”
“I’m sure,” she swallowed her breath, hoping she was doing a better job of convincing him than herself. The vagabond began to approach the Princess.
“But what if that’s not what happened though, Princess?”
“It is!"
“But what if it wasn't?
What if it was only a lie ye mind told you in death to accept the monstrosities that I commit against that pretty little bird body?”
In that moment, Arowyn’s mind leapt back to the moment where she first encountered the vagabond. She suddenly recalled him pinning her to the ground as she screamed helplessly in his grasp!
Arowyn jumped out of the memory as quickly as she dove into it. “
Stop! That’s not what happened!”
“No?” The vagabond cracked a stick with his boot as he crept closer.
“Take another look, Princess. What do you remember?”
The Princess recalled the attack again, this time remembering the feel of the vagabond’s blade slicing through her as blood spilled from her neck.
“NO!” The Princess raised both hands to her neck. “That’s a lie! You’re not real.
None of this is real.”
With a calm but sinister tone, the vagabond replied, “
If I’m not real m’lady, then why’re ye backing away?”
"You can’t harm me,” Arowyn declared.
“Then hold still and let’s test that theory.”
Arowyn suddenly stopped backing away giving the vagabond the right moment to lunge forward and swipe his dagger against her shoulder. Arowyn fell back and looked to her wound. There was blood.
“That's not real. You're not supposed to hurt me.”
“I didn’t.” The vagabond smiled and raised both hands in the air. The dagger he had was GONE. Arowyn looked back down to discover blood covering the end of her own dagger. Panicked, Arowyn tossed the blade away and ran.
The vagabond stood in his tracks and called after, “O come on, Princess. Our game’s almost come to an end!”
Arowyn darted away from the echoes of his laughter.
Arowyn sought any means to escape before she arrived at the edge of a cliff that, had she not had a tree to grab onto she would have fallen right off into the rocky river so very far below.
“So this is where it ends for my sweet girl?”
A voice spoke over Arowyn’s shoulder but it wasn’t her attacker. She spun around and her frightened eyes melted to despair as she saw her very own father, the
King of Esterwick. “Come here, my child.”
“
Father,” Arowyn’s lip quivered as she started toward him but stopped herself.
"What are you doing, sweet girl?
Give your father a hug.”
Arowyn’s eyes welled with tears as one trickled over the dirt covering her face. “I can’t…”
“Of course you can.
I am the
King.
Listen to your King.”
“You’re not real,” the words pained Arowyn to say.
Finally the King dropped his arms. “I should have known better than to think you would listen.”
“I want to,
Father. I want to so bad.”
“What you want and what you do are two very different things, Arowyn.”
“I’m sorry, Father. I made a terrible mistake.”
“
I’m the one that made the mistake.”
Arowyn raised her tear ridden eyes from the ground as her father slowly approached. “I should have thrown you from the tower the moment you escaped out of your mother’s womb.”
“You don’t mean that.”
"You are a disgrace to this
Kingdom. You are a disgrace to this family. You are a disgrace to me.”
By then the King was towering over the Princess at the edge of that beckoning cliff.
“Father, please. I can fix my mistakes, I swear.”
“No. You cannot,”
The King said with a sullen tone before he put a hand on Arowyn’s shoulder and leaned in close, “But I can.”
Arowyn was so devastated she didn’t even feel the dagger as the King stabbed it into her stomach. The impact startled her as her eyes went wide and suddenly her father was nowhere in sight.
“
Father?”
Arowyn choked out the words as her eyes lowered to see blood pooling around the dagger she had just stabbed herself with.
Arowyn kept both hands grasped on the handle of the blade as she stepped back and the ground gave away beneath her, causing Arowyn to slip and fall over the edge of that rocky cliff down to the river below.
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- published: 21 May 2016
- views: 11100