Halls Of His Own Making

Anhedonia did not greet him with torches or banners, but with walls that breathed like lungs, inhaling dust, exhaling echoes. Every step sent the flagstones shivering, waiting for the weight of his boots to remind them of their purpose.

His coat poured scarlet, trimmed with intricate gold, the patterns curled like scripture passages. The cuffs were vast and black, swallowing his wrists, while a white silk ruff rose at his throat. His head was draped by an amber red veil, his face hidden behind a rounded mask that hovered just in front of the fabric. Pale, expressionless, it had no features but the emptiness of eyes, two voids darker than shadow.

From his crown jutted thin gilt spires, radiating behind his head like a mockery of a saint’s halo. And his hands, gloved in white, their delicate nature could not be hidden. The real instrument of his kingdom would not be found there, but in the essence that flowed through him, poured out of him, surrounded him completely.

The Amber King, more resonance than man.

He passed corridors that stretched far, lengths of stone that bent like spines. Doorways that opened into other doorways into others, until they led to a room without doors, the center of the cyclone. Staring at his own retreating figure, he did not pause, he had grown used to chasing and being chased by himself.

The windows were stranger still. Some opened onto courtyards where leafless trees clawed upward into a colourless sky. Others showed beaches with oceans rolling under a black sun, and plains of salt where armies of statues leaned half buried. He knew these were not dreams but visions, worlds devoured, now stitched into the masonry of his fortress.

The corridor bent toward a chamber lined with mirrors. Dust lay thick on the floor, undisturbed by servants or Hourmen. No one else entered this place. The mirrors stood tall, racing to the ceiling, all framed in iron twisted into shapes of thorns and serpents, their surfaces dulled and fractured.

Shards caught the torchlight in sharp glimmers, like eyes opening and shutting in the dark.

Only one mirror remained whole.

The Amber King stood before it, though he’d stood there many times before, still not recognizing the man staring back. His reflection did not obey him. Instead it shifted, cycling through lives that weren’t his, every face retaining the same distorted expressions.

A boy with hollow cheeks, holding the hand of someone just out of frame.

A teenager, eyes too bright with hunger for what the world could give.

A man crowned, his hands stained red to the wrist.

An old figure, a crown rusted through, a throne empty behind him.

Each blink brought another.

He reached to touch the glass. Cold spread through his fingertips, seeping into the bone. The figure inside reached back, but when their hands met, the mirror surface rippled like water.

For a heartbeat the glass seemed to open, to pull him inward, into the boy’s fear, the teenager’s ambition, the king’s blood, the elder’s silence.

He tore his hand away. The reflection did not. The man in the glass pressed his palm against the surface long after the king had turned. He left without looking back.

The next hall was worse.

Paintings lined its length, shoulder to shoulder, stacked high, a gallery of canvases watching him pass. Their gilded frames were cracked, their varnish blackened with age, but the eyes remained sharp. Each canvas seemed to lean forward in its frame, eager to meet him, eager to speak.

As he moved on, the paintings continued to change. Landscapes turned to portraits, and people he did not know stared out from the walls. Abstract cubic shapes, impressionist stills of rooms left untouched, graffiti tags that dripped down over their frames. All morphing, all changing into something new. The same painting would never be seen again.

At the far end of the hall, he stopped. The last painting was immense, a mural swallowing the entire wall. At first glance it looked empty, a blank white field. But the longer he stared, the more it pulled him in.

The white wasn’t flat. It was built of strokes, thick on thin, a storm of brushwork that caught the light differently as he moved his eyes. Some strokes were jagged, angry. Others were smooth, almost tender. Together they didn’t form any clear thing, only the impression of violence smothered by silence, a white rabbit stuck in the midst of a snowstorm.

It was suffocating, like staring into a snowfield in a blizzard, where everything melts into one solid hue. The more he stared, the heavier it felt, until the whiteness itself looked infinite.

This painting never changed, and the king stood there for a long while.

When he turned away, the eyes of the hall turned with him.

He reached the great hall. Its ceiling was a cavern of chandeliers that did not glow but hummed, each crystal string vibrating with notes too high for most ears. The long table beneath them stretched out of sight, set with plates of silver that reflected distortions of human faces.

He did not sit. He never sat.

Instead, he climbed the stairs that spiraled along the edge of the hall and opened onto a balcony. From here he could see the heart of his domain, a vast atrium with no floor, only a void where fragments of architecture drifted, arches, columns, broken statues of gods no one prayed to. A whole city drowned in the air.

The king placed his hands on the railing and let his thoughts fall with the ruins.

Beyond the atrium, the corridors narrowed again, curling like veins into a part of the castle he rarely entered. The air thickened there, metallic and damp, until the walls themselves seemed to sweat with unseen condensation.

He passed through a gate of iron ribs and into a courtyard hemmed in by sheer walls so tall they cut away the sky.

In the center, stood the tree.

It rose crooked, its bark the colour of ash, cursed with a wound that continued to weep. Thick rivulets of crimson seeped from the split in its trunk, pooling dull and viscous at the roots like a blood stained mirror. The branches were bare, gaunt arms that clawed upward, their tips trembling though no wind moved.

The king stopped before it. The iron taste in the air clung to his tongue, and he felt the heat rise from the bleeding trunk as though it were a heart beating outside of it’s flesh. The roots sprawled outward like veins torn from the earth, binding stone to stone, refusing to die.

His mind returned to that day, long ago, when the tree wept for the first time. He no longer knew if the tree continued to weep for him, or for someone else. For someone just out of reach.

He placed his hand against the bark. Warm. Alive. The pulse beneath the surface matched his own, thudding in rhythm.

Withdrawing his hand and staring at the smear of red across his palm, the walls did not move, but the tree kept on bleeding.

“Soon. Very soon.”