A dead king gasped.

To him, it was as if he had only closed his eyes for a moment. And how sweet a moment it was, the deepest and most restful moment the king had experienced in ages. He had been so grateful for it. He had been waiting all his life to die.

Yet he was only granted that single, languorous moment before a voice ripped through the silence. Screaming in fury, it had called his name so abruptly and so thunderously that it dragged him back, back to his miserable consciousness to haunt the place he had so loathed in life.

The king was certainly a pitiful and stubborn old corpse, because he kept his eyes closed and willed himself back to sleep, trying in vain to keep his lungs from filling with air. He did not want to live again, even as a ghost. He only wanted to rest, to finally be free of this place and the memories that threatened to resurface with every living second.

He spent the last of his years silently wandering his prison, a lonesome tower at the center of a mist-blanketed bog. As the years passed, the earth seemed to claim it for its own with every falling brick and climbing vine, but the king could not leave it. Not even as it slowly crumbled beneath him.

He's gone mad, the soldiers would whisper, He searches for him.

The old king did not know who they spoke of, for whom he was supposed to be searching. He had buried the memory long ago, burned it out.

Still, he could not sleep without dreaming of a deep and lilting voice calling his name. He could not rest without being shaken awake by a vision of bright, sunlight-white hair disappearing beneath murky water. The Tower was filled with echoes of the voice and flitting, headless shadows.

The king's old eyes were sunken and distant, set in a web of deep lines carved by years of sleepless nights. It had been a relief when his vision had faded and he closed his tired eyes for the last time. Finally, finally, he was at peace.

But then the voice had called for him, and he'd been dragged back to the Tower it seemed he could never escape, even in death.

The ghost looked down and found that his body was caught in an embrace of briar. The thorny vines encircled his waist, his limbs, his neck, their tiny tendrils clinging to the fibers of his clothing. He turned his cheek against the cold stone beneath him and blinked miserably at his surroundings.

He was briefly surprised to find that he was not in his family's crypt, but was instead curled in a particularly ancient corner of the Tower, a ruin even when the king was alive.

Blankets of moss hung from stone walls like tapestries, and more briar twined their way up what remained of marble pillars. At the center of these was a small pool filled with dark water and covered in algae and lily pads, their pale flowers blooming in the weak beams of light that filtered in from cracks in the ceiling above. Although always a ruin, the chamber was even more overgrown and dilapidated than he remembered.

"How long have I...?" the king whispered, his voice hoarse from disuse. The strain on his throat caused him to cough.

He struggled against the branches as he moved to sit up, startling as he caught sight of his hands. They were not the hands of an old man; his skin was warm and tawny, unwrinkled, and glowing with youth. He brought them to his face, as smooth and beardless as it had been when he was young.

As he reeled, something disturbed the surface of the pool, the splash echoing too loud in the quiet room.

Slowly, hesitantly, the king turned to face the pool. A needle-sharp pain tugged at his heart as if caught on a fishhook. His body seemed to move on its own even as fear congealed in his chest, and he managed to loosen himself from the briar. Wobbling on weak and unsteady legs, he stood.

He longed to simply go back to sleep, to fall back into that dark nothingness, but that odd sensation pulled him by the chest towards the pool. He limped towards it, the tattered ends of his long, black cloak slipping after him along the mosaic-tiled floor. It felt as though he was walking through deep snow, or perhaps struggling through one of the watery pits in the bog that surrounded the Tower.

He had tried to escape it, once.

(Only once?)

He'd been a child when he'd run half-blind across the moor, the smoke from the burning pile of his mother's belongings stinging his eyes. Suddenly the moss under his feet had given away, and he was swallowed to his shoulders in the mud. Every movement he made only caused him to sink deeper, and he thought for certain that his fate was to join her. But one of the soldiers his father had sent after him heard his cries, and arrived just in time to pull him free.

He learned then that the bog was a greedy thing. It caught people and trapped them in deceptively deep pools, the mire thick and clinging. The soldier who rescued him told him of men disappearing as they fought, their bodies never recovered from the battlefield. They sank somewhere deep, resting bent and twisted underneath the peat.

(They wrapped what was left of him in tattered linen and took him into the mist, he heard the splash—)

He squeezed his eyes shut against the memory.

"Tr—"

A quiet voice, as if from very far away, echoed from the pool. Legs shaking, the king came to its edge and went to his knees to get a better look, his palms splayed flat against the floor. The tips of his fingers brushed something warm and tacky.

He looked down at his hands—they were red.

"Wh-what is—" he whispered in horror as he stared at the dark blood on his hands, a memory floating just below the surface of his mind.

(I forgive you.)

The ghost who had once been a king took a wet, shuddering breath, his spine folding until his forehead pressed into his knees. He curled beside the pool, a cutting of briar that escaped from the tangle.

"I didn't want this," he said, whimpering, "I was at peace. After everything, I had finally been at peace."

"Tr—"

He did not know whatever power compelled him to move, but at the sound of the voice, he turned back to the water and dipped his shaking, bloodied fingers beneath its surface.

Silent tears fell even as his hands searched mindlessly for something, reaching deeper and deeper until his nose nearly touched the surface. His desperate, twisted reflection stared back at him, the dark water distorting the image. In the dim light, his face seemed almost skeletal in appearance.

And then he realized that whatever was staring at him, it was not his reflection.

He cried out, but before he could rip his arms from the water, something—a hand—wrapped itself like a manacle around his wrist.

"Tr-tr-tr—"

A creature, a corpse, pulled itself from the water in desperate, jerking movements. Its jaw trembled as it rasped, its empty, blind sockets fixed on the king's face as it struggled towards him.

It was half atop him before it released his wrist only to wrap its thin, freezing arms around his neck.

"Tri-ssst—"

The man was overwhelmed by the smell of humification and rot as what was left of the wretched thing's hands clawed at him. It stuttered and hissed through a fleshless mouth, pressing its awful, ruined face closer and closer.