As King Laurence waited for Kori to join him in his quarters, he leaned his cheek against his wall listlessly.
He was lost deep in thought.
Laurence was fathomlessly worried about the upcoming ball, and he prayed that Pollyanna would not bring about the end of his peaceful reign. The woman was an unholy terror, and he knew she would have no trouble killing everyone at the ball if she so wished. He had many plans in mind to try and detain the woman, and had finally decided on the only one that seemed viable.
He cursed the fact that he did not know the secrets to her immortality--knew of no chinks in her armor. Laurence didn’t know what to do, and so he wanted Kori’s counsel as he usually did when he was out of options.
Laurence walked over to the mirror on the desk, gazing at his reflection for a moment.
He was displeased at seeing fine wrinkles disgracing his otherwise fine and smooth skin and grimaced at seeing his black hair, plagued with many white strands. Soon, he was looking at himself in his earthy, brown eyes, the only things on his face that didn’t seem to be aging.
He nearly wept at them after a moment.
They look so damned much like Shirley’s… He thought to himself with unshed tears.
Whenever he was lonely, whenever he pined for Shirley’s company, he would ask Kori to bring her to life again. Kori had a magical power that few other waifs did; she could let Laurence--or whoever she pleased--relive memories as if they were happening to the person in the present. Kori had no choice over which memories he relived through her magic—it seemed to be random--but he didn’t care.
Even if it were the memory of Shirley getting killed, he didn’t care. He just wanted to see her again.
He turned from the mirror, facing his room with a heavy frown.
His eyes swept over its grand wealth. The blue, fur-trimmed carpet, the tapestries hung on the wall along with the expensive portraits of himself and his wife, and an elaborately embroidered quilt atop the covers on his bed. None of it made him happy. His eyes lingered there on the bed for a moment, guiltily and giddily thinking of Kori. He looked away in shame after a moment, back at the mirror. Something caught his eye—a movement in the reflection.
Laurence breathed in sharply, panting in fear when, in the reflection, a woman seemed to form out of nowhere.
Her features matched that of Shirley’s, but she was not the beautiful, blond-haired, brown-eyed girl he knew in life.
She was eyeless, armless--her neck was mostly severed as it was in death.
He glanced away from the window with a gasp--although he still saw the ghost in his peripheral vision.
“I must be seeing things… I must stop thinking of her.”
But he couldn’t. His mind was trapped in memories, and he got lost in them--reliving them--even without Kori’s help.
He and Shirley lived in a hamlet just three days from Castle Maribel. The people there were overworked and overtaxed by the Arrozans and often had the scars from whips to prove it.
Laurence remembered vividly how many of the children in Brambel were so skinny that he could see their ribs due to being overtaxed. He remembered having to take extensive time off from his job as a cook to assist in erecting a statue of the Arrozan king, which he was not paid for.
He could not say the king’s name without spitting it in a snarl of hateful rage.
“Herin.” Laurence said to himself out loud with his mouth twisting into a snarl.
Laurence remembered the statues of the human god, Renthas, being torn down and replaced by statues of the foreign, fairy goddesses; he remembered the Arrozans stamping out and extinguishing both the pride and identity of the humans, whose kingdom they had stolen.
He remembered his sister Shirley—finally fed up with toiling all day at making the fifty-foot tall statue of the Arrozan king until her hands were red and raw—turn on the fairy slave master overseeing her work.
Their youngest sibling—a boy of just twelve-years who Laurence couldn’t think about without turning into a sobbing mess—had fallen over from starvation, needing food and an apothecary. The slave master had cruelly shoved the boy to his feet, demanding he keep working. Shirley snapped launching herself at the man and hitting him in the head with a rock until he died.
Pollyanna saw the whole scene as she, too, was there to oversee their progress on the statue. She grabbed Shirley’s arm, dragging her off—promising to punish her and make her regret her actions.
When she returned, she had no eyes. She only had bloody splotches where her eyes had been.
That was when Laurence decided that, no matter what, he would overthrow the king. Even if it cost him his own life and whole family he would—because he wished to see no more families suffer the way his did.
The problem was Pollyanna.
There had been so many slave revolts made up of hundreds of humans during the two-hundred-year fairy reign, and yet she had put them all down effortlessly and seemingly without a scratch on her. She was unstoppable.
Long ago, there was a theory that Pollyanna's life was inextricably woven in with the Arrozan who had stolen the human throne in the first place, Fjorn, but that theory was put to rest when the king died of old age and Pollyanna lived.
There was a knock at the door.
“Laurence? Did you want to see me?” Kori’s voice rang from beyond the door.
__
Eory was glad when Kori told him that he was allowed to take Gershom with him to the ball. The dog seemed to have a calming effect on him, and Eory would need that desperately at the ball.
"Laurence said it was fine to bring him." She had told him.
"That's... So kind of him." Eory had replied in shock.
Eory, Pollyanna, and Kori all bathed and dressed for the ball, meeting each other in front of the big, ornate double-doors to where the ball was being held.
Kori wore a floor-length, three-layered pink dress that poofed out from her waste. She wore a pair of black gloves that smartly complimented the look.
Pollyanna’s dress, being picked out at the last moment from the servants in the castle, was a dress meant for a five-foot-tall woman and not a seven-foot-tall woman; it was also a dress that was only fit for a peasant girl. It had a plain brown bodice and was otherwise an unremarkable white dress underneath the bodice. At Kori’s request, they also provided Pollyanna with a robe that would cover her hair and cloak her identity.
The servants had attempted to tame her wild, gray hair and had, against all odds, managed to make it smooth and shiny. They had fashioned it into a tight bun on the top of her head and smoothed out some of her wrinkles with the use of makeup.
Eory wore the expensive, golden headdress that Kori had given him along with a short, blue capelet embroidered with yellow circles at the bottom. To compliment this, he wore a burgundy, open-necked shirt with laces at the neck and ruffles at the end of his sleeves. To match the suns embroidered on his capelet, there were suns embroidered on the bottom of the shirt to match. He wore simple black breeches and long boots to, as Kori put it, “Keep the outfit simple.”
The black night outside had swept away the red dusk light as the trio entered the ballroom. Eory took a deep breath before nodding to Pollyanna to open the door.
The fairy’s senses were aroused by what he experienced within.
His eyes were enthralled by the brightly colored, beautiful outfits worn by fairies and humans alike as they danced. A woman spun away from her dancing partner—her ballgown dress twisting and then untwisting like a flower blooming and subsequently wilting.
Eory’s ears were enraptured by the sweet sound of a violin through the air, accompanied by the flute and piano, creating a euphoric symphony of sound.
His nose took in the smell of good food being offered on platters by the servants; chocolates, cheese, and little slices of meat, attractively arranged and presented.
He smiled gaily,absorbing the sight of the many lords and ladies on the brightly lit, warm-colored room dancing on the reflective-tile floor.
In a moment, with Gershom in his arms, he joined them.
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