Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Inspired by my recent delving into archives I sat down on 10/18/23 at approximately 8pm and decided to write two words and see where they went. I declared it done in 30 minutes. Then went back and messed with it and declared an extended version done after 2 hours, with distractions. It still isn’t really done, but that is the fun part, TBH. This is an occasional joy of writing. I wanted to know what might come unbidden. This did. And so I share it with you.

If someone wants to use this as a prompt, or continue the story as they wish, they have my permission to do so, provided I am credited for the portion I share below.

The Viper

Incarnadine… Incarnadine…

So little time after such a long life, what a bitter irony. If I still had teeth to smile with I would, instead I compress lips and feel my tongue slide over gum and hit the few remaining stumps. Thankfully I have more brains left to me than teeth, and know what this letter means, passed to me after it has been through five pairs of younger hands, hands that lack the eyes to see the warning between the lines of idle script.

Why else would they have let the letter come to me?

Unless… Unless they did see the warning, and want to see my reaction, where I try go, who I try to reach. Do they have such wit? I have always judged the young harshly, have they perhaps returned the compliment, and actually learned the lessons I thought they had signally failed to absorb?

Pah, and bah. I am too old for anything else but dying. I keep secrets older than the current emperor, once so important, now meaningless when everyone involved is dead, and their poor children too. Dynastic struggle is cruel, and so was I: my family won after all. I should have taken the throne, but I had not the best claim in my own family. Clad in scales of black I was glad to be the power behind the throne, the dark eyed viper everyone feared.

Age has drawn my fangs, so some think. Those who think of me at all. I am an irrelevance, kept in my apartments and humored, kept available in case something obscure should arise and younger minds think to mine what remains of my memory. I should have pretended to addlement, but then I’d have been strangled in my bedding long since. Wit has always served me, and shall serve me still. I wish I had a decade before me!

But I lack a future. Every morning a miracle, a week a blessing, a month a jubilee.

The letter. Through five pairs of hands it has passed to me. Because it mentioned Eriskea, where once long ago I was vital, coiled in strength. Because Eriskea has been lost, far on the edges of our so-called empire. It was I who created our imperial ambitions, I who flung our borders wider than ever before seen, who welded thirty languages into one to worship our gods, our weapons, our laws, the ones I wrote to ensure I could never be overthrown.

Age overthrew me. Age and a sharp elbowed youth whose intelligence I underestimated. He mirrored me, I thought mimicked, but no, in the dark spaces between the shining surfaces designed to distract he moved and struck true, and knocked me and all my adherents aside, a true God-emperor for all to adore. Incarnadine is his knife.

Pity he’s a bastard and doesn’t know it. But that secret is worthless now, he ensured that. I hate to admire him, a creature so like myself. He must know I loathe him and would seek his destruction, but keeps me alive, to demonstrate his complete power over me, and the old order of which I am the last living example.

I live to spite him. And for this moment.

The young, the middle-aged, they don’t believe they will grow old. I didn’t, even as age creaked in my knees, cracked my knuckles, sank my cheeks, pulled the color from my hair. I remember the day I acknowledged to myself I would die. I stood among dark cedars and beheld the sea. I had been a child and seen something so very similar, a pale blue sea beneath a paler sky, and I realized then that I would not live the years forward that separated me from the child I had been, and I wept, privately, in my soul.

To outward eyes nothing would have been betrayed. I stood as the marble in that garden, and portrayed the same indomitable timelessness even as I wept, and stole a look at my hands, to see how far from youth they were, betrayers.

Eriskea has fallen. The empire does not care, an island lost in a sea that leads nowhere. The empire controls the long coast, the deep interior. What cares it for an island?

They do not comprehend who, what, has taken my home. Are the cedars burning? Would they be so petty? Would I have been? Yes. I was, and now perhaps I regret it. But if I had not, would my family rule in glory? Would he, my bastard apprentice? I doubt it. Pettiness and ruthlessness and the desire to send unmistakable messages, are they not part of me, and the qualities I forged in this empire that I have lived too long within?

What to do then? Can I play the game of mirrors now, show many images and movements while hiding my actual purpose? I have three letters to write, two in code, one easy to break, one so hard as to seem impenetrable to all but the cleverest. The last will be written without guile to my great grandchild, a simple farewell with warm wishes, and that one will hold a truth I have hidden and that my carefully tutored scion shall recognize. The five hands will miss it, and a new dynastic war shall burn, and my true child shall overcome my bastard creation and sit in the throne I forwent, and face the enemy I knew would come, for I bargained with them once, and promised them this day.

Wine is lifted to my lips. Its warmth suffuses me, dulls my mind. Faces shine before me, their smiles so obviously false. I hate them, but lack the strength to scratch new expressions in their faces: my wrists are caught tight. They stand, their false smiles chilling into sneers, and I know again, again and again, that I have lost. He thinks he has won.

That letter that passed through five pairs of hands, it might never have been real. It might be a wine-drugged dream. Maybe I gave myself away. Maybe my great grandchild is dead. I would sob but for the things I know are real.

Eriskea, and the people I long ago bargained with. They will come before I die. The young dull schemers will choke on my incarnadine dreams then. I swim in warm delusion. Did I give my heir away? Among so many useless secrets, did I yield up that secret gem? I cannot imagine so. Even drugged I know to play the game, to move and confuse, never give away the still center. But how long have I lain here?

The ceiling is painted with sky and sea, cedars in between.

Wine is lifted to my lips. I spit it out. A viper knows when it tastes poison.