The Executioner's Wife

The King's God

A low fire crackled in the room, filling the darkened space with wavering fingers of orange light. The shadows of the depressed furniture leaked across the floor like dark, heavy oil spills. Clothes lay unattended, unwanted, and unkempt about the room. Many of them were dresses, ripped apart at the seams and left to rot like flayed butterflies. In the center of it all knelt the king, facing the fireplace with the silent, humble defeat of a man forfeiting to his enemy.

Lily gripped the small knife, hardly bigger than her palm. The king's back was to her- she could lunge forward and plunge the blade into the back of his neck. She saw it as clearly as the sputtering blaze of the fire, and her feet followed her mind surely. One step, then another, and the king had yet to turn- did he even know she was there? All the easier- it was perfect. She wouldn't have to look at him when she ended his miserable life.

The knife was out, now, just inches away from the king and his deserved, bleeding death, on the other side of which lay her reunion with Alois. She planted her feet and choked the knife with her fist, rearing back to give the final blow.

The king stood, and Lily stumbled back. In his hands, he gripped a sword. The blade dripped blood from where the king tightly clutched it. Lily sheathed the knife in her hand, looking up at the king as he regarded her with a dazed, haunted face.

His voice heaved out of him like the last breath of a dying man. "It's time for you to meet God."

Lily stepped back from what she perceived to be the king's threat. He slid the tip of the sword into a crack between the fireplace and the wall, and yelled as he pushed all of his weight on it. To Lily's surprise, the fireplace eased open, revealing a dark spiral of stairs.

"After you," the king insisted. Lily eyed him wearily, then glanced down at the sword. Her little knife would be no match against it, and she wondered if the king was finally going to kill her.

He read her thoughts effortlessly. "This isn't for you," he promised her genuinely. "Unless, it must be."

She understood him perfectly.

Lily hesitantly approached the stairs, thankful that the king still had no idea of the knife she had slipped back into her closed hand. She felt the king's footsteps just behind her, following her up the mossy stairs. The staircase was damp, the stones glistening with water and some other dark substance, insects scattering between the cracks. She heard the loud scrape of the fireplace closing behind them, stealing the last of the light and sealing them into the stone tomb. Lily caught her breath, and yelped as the king nudged her with the blunt end of his sword.

"Just a few more steps," he encouraged her, but she couldn't see them. In the dark, she was forced to hold her hands out, to feel for what was coming next. She didn't want to risk dropping the knife and never finding it again, so she tucked it back into the bosom of her dress and reached out with open hands as she stepped up, up and again.

Her hands landed solidly on a wet, wooden door.

"Push it."

She did.

The room inside was small and dark. But something sat in the middle of it, an odd, inhuman shape that tortured Lily's anxious imagination. She could almost hear it breathing, a low, eerie whistle, rattling like dead branches in the wind.

The king closed the door behind them.

Lily pulled away from him, ready to fight, ready to scream, ready to ram the little knife in the king's neck until it broke. But the king pushed himself in front of her, and sparked a lantern to life. Lily gasped as the figure was revealed- but it was not a figure at all.