Work Text:
There are a lot of children in Pixandria.
They run through alleyways and gardens, over shallow walls and around household wells, playing incomprehensible games with sticks and stones and cardboard crowns. They play while mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, stand in doorways and at windows, hanging washing and talking amongst themselves. There are yells as children get caught in sheets hung from doorways to dry or stumble over loose cobbles, and even louder shouts as sword fights are staged with sticks in tucked-away courtyards hidden down not-so-secret alleys.
The children squeal and laugh long past sunset, when lamps are lit and the air becomes a blanket of warming bread and spices, running into kitchens and giggling as they escape with full mouths and pockets back under the stars and the drooping leaves of the willow trees. Their families stand in doorways and call them back half-heartedly, laughing with one another and shaking their heads at the desperate joy of youth.
The king cannot walk among them. The children bow their heads and dodge around him like a river around an island, their big eyes curious and their whispers loud with inexperience. Their parents speak softer, voices hidden with hands and behind corners, but he still knows they talk. It’s just in their nature; an outsider is always something to be gossiped about, and who is more worthy of gossip than a king?
He is scared. He is a stranger in his own home, in the empire he built from the ground, among the citizens he has built it for. They are his people, the ones he wants to prove himself to more than anyone, and now he is scared that it has cost him his soul and his sanity.
He sees an old man, hair white like the snow of Rivendell that the king remembers, step up onto a crate in the market beside the vigil. His face is etched with age and the noise of his bangles rings like a bell, calling out to the people around him, pulling at their idle attention. Around him the market is bustling and loud with afternoon energy, but the old man speaks just loud enough to be heard to his closest listeners and the king finds himself drawing closer to hear.
The man regales the people who start to gather around him with stories of demons and dragons, of might and heroism and betrayal. There are big, dramatic tragedies and enduring love and great escapes, and every one earns breathless laughter or desperate cries from the assembled crowds.
His stories are eerily similar to the visions the king sees when he collapses, sometimes, and the king wonders what it is to be a prophet without a crown.
The copper and glass wind chime hanging from his ear swings as he walks away, and he wants nothing more than to tear it out to stop the incessant ringing. He won’t, of course. It is unsightly for a king, a paragon of grace and strength, to bleed like a commoner. Sometimes he takes out a knife and wonders what they would think of him if he pulled it over his skin.
The king, sitting as he is now on the low wall of the vigil, turns his crown over in his hands and wishes it was anything else.
He casts an eye to the stones of his kingdom beneath his feet, and wishes they belonged to anyone but him.