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Amber leans against the balustrade of the palace balcony, the warm light from their bedroom silhouetting her against the indigo sky. Crystals ornament her collarbone, glint like constellations on the bodice of her gown. A crown, intricate yet regal, adorns her hair, her head tilted gently skyward.
Wormwood’s hand rests on the slope of her waist. Her rose-colored lips are parted slightly, as if anticipating an answer to a question she has already asked.
He is speaking. He realizes this fact belatedly. “My Queen,” he is saying, “my dearest girl.” He is gazing into her honey eyes, the words flowing from his lips before they are constructed in his mind. “How I would love to spend an eternity with you.”
Her mouth flutters into a smile, but simultaneously the air stills, grows stale, he imagines, like the ambiance of a mortuary. Like the smell of rot days after a slaughter. Amber’s face cleaves with shadow, her body crumpled into the darkness. She looks withered, whittled away.
“Oh, that’s too bad.” Her lips, now stained bloody red, pinch together, enunciate each syllable mechanically. Her teeth, bone white, wink out of the obscurity. The voice is hers, yet it is incorrect. Something about it is wrong. Her voice creaks, splinters, like something corroded.
The words escape before he can think them. “Amber. What are you saying?” His voice tinges involuntarily with urgency, his desperation more evident than he wishes.
Amber’s eyes are extinguished, darkened. “Too bad,” her voice repeats, like a broken apparatus, “You’ve ruined it all.” Her cheekbones are too angular, eyes socketed too deeply into her skull. “Wormwood, I loved you, and you ruined me.”
With those words reverberating through his mind, Wormwood blinks. And just like that, she is gone, vanished. Wormwood opens his eyes to a foreign location, his body sprawled on cold stone, the blackness around him all-encompassing. His hands scrabble at air for the memory of her, frantic to reunite with her departed presence, but his fingers close on nothing, locate nothing but marble and grime. She is only a recollection, a fantasy, and he cannot find her.
As his eyes adjust to the gloom, Wormwood makes out the outline of an obsidian throne towering before him. The only light source is faint, reflecting the muntin bars of the windows onto the floor, where they enclose his body, like a cage. A chill travels through him. It occurs to him suddenly that he is not alone. That there is somebody behind him, and he knows this place.
“My pet,” comes a crooning voice, its cadence sickeningly familiar. His stomach pools with dread.
Wormwood turns toward the origin of the voice. Standing in the throne room once occupied by the former Enchancian royal family, Vor stands before him, solid, tangible, realer than any vision of Amber ever was.
“My master.” The reply is reflexive, even as Amber’s apparition still imprints itself in his vision.
His master stills, as though she can read his thoughts. “You were dreaming.” It is not a question. Her eyes gleam down at him. “Tell me, who exactly is your Queen?”
He does not recall kneeling, but then he is. “You. You are. My only Queen, my master.” The words are automatic; they escape him before he can think them. Wormwood bows his head, knee pressed into stone, but the sensation is distant. The only thoughts that pass through his mind are the puncture of an imagined laugh, a flash of golden curls, and Oh, Wormwood. Too bad, you’ve ruined it all.