According to Kori and the rest of the usurpers who overthrew the Arrozan Royal Family, it was deemed too cruel to simply kill him like they did his family. At the time, he was six-years-old and the youngest member of his family.

In his darkest moments, Eory wished that they hadn’t saved him.

Eory had no friends, no family, and no one to love in his cell.

He thought Kori was someone to love at one time, but that, evidently, was untrue.

Eory chewed his arm and imagined he was chewing hers instead. When he recognized how evil and wrong that was with a flash of fear, he made his mind turn elsewhere—although the place it turned was no better. They were turned to a place where he recognized that he may very well die in his tower, and one would remember him as anything other than a monster. 

In fact, no one would ever truly understand who he was but Kori.

I’m wasting away. I wonder if they’ll all cheer when I’m dead? Eory thought as he stared at his walls unblinkingly. 

They seemed to be getting closer by the second.

___

Drip, drip, drip…

He gritted his teeth.

Drip, drip, drip…

He clenched his fists.

Drip, drip, drip…

He threw his most recent drawing at the wall, tasting something foul rising in his throat and feeling something black and ugly sizzling in his stomach. He clenched his head in his hands, suddenly feeling nothing but bitterness for his caretaker.

He kept thinking of it. The exact moment he found out that Kori would never barter with the king for his freedom like she had been promising she would for eighteen long years.

The last time she had brought him a present, he, as usual, had been overly polite and kind in thanking her for it. Normally, she would have smiled at how well he received his presents and would have praised him.

Not that day.

He had done something wrong while he received that present. Perhaps he hadn’t bowed low enough or long enough for her tastes; perhaps he forgot to say thank you, or perhaps he had said thank you with the wrong tone of voice.

Or maybe his face had twitched in a way that displeased her. 

Regardless, she had no praise for him when he received the present, and had been downright distant and quiet throughout the day.

She had read him a story, and when she thought he had fallen asleep, she had whispered ugly and malicious words in his ear. “I can’t ever free you.”

He must have done something to make her think that. But no matter how long he had combed over that day with her, he couldn’t think of what it was.

Or maybe she’s just a bitch. He thought to himself in anger. She’s been with me all this time and she feels nothing toward me.

He lay his head down on his desk in frustration, trying to fight the contagious thoughts infecting his mind. He could escape easily if he could tap into the poisonous magic buried deep in his veins--the absolute destructive power gifted to him by his parents and ancestors--and blow a hole in the wall with it—but he needed the word and the perfect emotion to match it to manifest those powers.

He hated Kori so much for those evil words she whispered in his ear, and he loved her at the same time for saving his life and taking care of him, too. And it all terrified him.

He stood up from his desk—hunched over and miserable—and then picked up the picture he had drawn of Pollyanna. He looked at it with a sick feeling in his rotten stomach. He sniffled.

The young man was coming to terms with the fact that he would never meet her.

He continued laying his head on the desk, having nothing else to do with himself.