nathanialroyale: (Nathan)
 



Title: Unrepentant Hopes Chapter 4 (Novelization First Draft)
Rating: (PG-13)
Content Notes:
No paragraph indentations due to Dreamwidth limitations.

Please everyone, take a moment and give it a read and comment! Constructive Criticism only!




Four

Nathanael


I was terrified of the sky. I had only ever seen it through windows and it seemed endless like a sea one could drown in. I would lay in the sun of the window but face away from the outside so I would not have to look up into the sky. Due to this I laid like a cat, stretched out on a green fainting couch in front of the largest window in the cabin, drowsy and comfortable. 

A day had passed since I learned that I was going to die. A day had passed since my father, grieved with my anger, chastised me. Anger was no emotion for a prince or a King to display, that was allowing the emotion to control you instead of you controlling it. I was not to show such feelings at my fate.

Today Drefan came home from a nearly yearlong trip north. I did not know why or how, but that he had gone north and came home. Why did he have to come back? It wasn’t that I disliked him, but the house was much more peaceful without him here. I could remember yelling and arguing at all hours of the night. I remembered Thom distraught one evening, coming to me, keeping me from going into the basement. I learned later from overhearing that Drefan had cut himself, deep this time, and had been bleeding in his room until his mother had bound the wounds. 

But I shouldn’t think bad things about Drefan. His family was that much happier when he was around, especially Thom. I just didn’t understand why Drefan did the things he did. Why did he cut himself? Wouldn’t that just hurt and nothing more? What did he see in pain? What did he want from it? 

I looked through the window at the Sovereign Guard who sat on the front porch steps. There were always at least two guards on duty at the cabin, but both of them stuck close to the front and back doors. Two from Royale, and two from Camar’a. The two from Camar’a were part of the Sovereign Guard, they protected the royal family and could be recognized by their uniforms. A gold, black, and aqua brocade coat over a gold and aqua vest beneath, layered over the aqua tights that slipped into black knee-high leather boots.

My eyes strayed to the kitchen which was the second door to my right. The kitchen knives were all held in a wooden holder. Standing, shaking, my blanket fell to my feet as I looked around our living room at the wooden furniture and coffee table. The walls were covered in small paintings of my ancestors. I walked into the kitchen, the un-shaded windows providing the only light. Taking a large knife from the holder, I curiously stared at it, and then my forearm. 

Laying it against the skin of my lower left arm I chewed on my lip letting it slice. All thought left my body; I gasped a whine also escaping my lips, finding at that moment that I drew pleasure from pain. I found out later that my eyes would be blood-red as they are every time I experience pain. I could see nothing but a haze of red, but I could hear.

A knock at the front door.

Fumbling, the kitchen knife slid through my blood-soaked fingers to clatter to the kitchen floor. Blood sprayed from the blade over the tile as my eyes came into focus, to stare at what I had done. Then in slow motion, my eyes moved from the blade to the bubbling red froth upon my arm. It began to flow thick like syrup, rolling off my pale flesh to drop to the floor below.

         Drip…Drip…Drip….

More writing behind the Cut )
nathanialroyale: (Default)
 



Title: Unrepentant Hopes Chapter 3 (Novelization First Draft)
Rating: (PG-13)
Content Notes:
No paragraph indentations due to Dreamwidth limitations.

Please everyone, take a moment and give it a read and comment! Constructive Criticism only!




Three

Drefan



 

 

I crumpled against the wall of the spiral staircase. Thank the Gods I was alone while I wheezed, a hand grasping at my tunic, right over my breast bone. The tightness in my chest was crippling as I sank onto the stone step. I couldn’t even manage the stairs without my lungs giving out on me? Was this from the dredge? From the opium? I had been gone for a little over a year and my time on the mat was the majority of those hours. I hung my head between my knees, coughing. I just needed time...

No one could see me like this. But if this was what would happen when I climbed a set of damned stairs… This body was starting to fail me, wasn’t it? But that was no one’s fault but my own. I wasn’t dying...was I? The door overhead opened and I surged to my feet. Hacking another cough I stuffed my hands back into my pockets. Taking on that uncaring demeanor that I was known for. No one was allowed to know how bad off I was. No one. 

I acknowledged the servant that passed by with a quick bow of my head, the respectful greeting was given regardless of rank. This also afforded me the chance to keep my face concealed so any pain that was written on my features would not be seen. Coming to a stop at the higher exit to the stairs, I took in a deep whistling breath before stepping into another long hallway. Black Guards blended into the dark stone walls in measured intervals on both sides. 

Ignoring everything but why I was even in this hallway, I knocked on the door to my brother’s bed-chamber. There was the scratch of a wooden chair on the floor before the door was opened and green eyes peered out at me. Seeing me for who I was, Thom fully opened the door with a smile and invited me in. But as soon as that door closed I was backed up against it and arms encircled my middle. I puffed out a startled breath, stiffening at first, not expecting Thom to immediately embrace me.

“Thom,” I managed before I was coughing again. 

“You sound awful,” Thom began and his green eyes widened, “You sound as bad as Nate sounds!” 

Hands pressed against my chest to hold me where I was and he leans his ear against me. There was no way to hide the wheezing and the tightness in my chest. Thom looked up at me with dawning horror in his eyes while his freckled cheeks lost their color. 

“We have to talk to a healer!” 

“No,” I grasped one of my brother’s hands in mine, “I don’t need any of this to get back to father. You know how much he hates weakness.” 

“But-,” sorrow clouded those bright green eyes, “What if you die?!” 

“It’s not that bad,” I lied as I needed time to figure out what I could do if it was as bad as that. 

“How can you be so sure? You were away for months, smoking that stuff for so long. Who knows what it did to you! Dref, you can’t just brush me off like this. I saw you half-dead in the back of that cart. I won’t ever forget seeing that.”

“He has a point.”

I grabbed at the hands that held me to that door. If I was going to say anything else it was not going to be so easily heard by the Black Guards in the hallway. Thom released me now and I made for the bed. Sweeping a look at my brother’s room, it hardly looked lived in. The desk was the only spot that looked used, with stacked books on Royalian laws and discourse on top of various pieces of paper. So Thom was spending that much more time at the cabin, was he sleeping there too?

I settled on the edge of the bed, waiting for my brother to sit beside me. 

“Nath’s gotten worse, hasn’t he?” Pivoting myself, our knees just touched.

Thom gave me a look at the change in conversation, but his shoulders let go and he crumbled beside me, “Yes…” 

Shit. 

Thom shakes his head hard and he takes in a deep breath, “I’m not stupid, I know you won't tell me why you left and that’s fine, but I am going to demand to know what’s wrong with you!” 

I couldn’t look him in the eyes, I never could. I had promised when I first saw him in that cradle that I would protect him from whatever Robert threw at the both of us. I took my victories from the way that Thom could still smile like nothing in the world was wrong and how his eyes still lit up like rays of sunshine. I could not have failed him that badly then or so I told myself. 

But I should never have gone into the deserts without him. I had promised to protect him and for the first time in my life, I had left him unprotected, for months. I had to hold myself back from asking if there was anything wrong with him. But father would have made Thom forget any hurtful words or grasping hands. Thom was his heir. The only way to know if anything untoward had happened was to demand to see any marks or new scars on him and such an order would come across as insane and invasive. So I stewed and I concentrated on what had Thom worried about in this present moment. My health, my well-being. Neither my father nor I deserved him.

Continue Reading Chapter Three Here... )
nathanialroyale: (Nathan)




A ramble… The death of Queen Frigga in Thor Dark World angered me so much I did not watch the movie. Ever.

I loathed the idea that she had been used only as a source of motivation for Loki, a character who lies, hurts, and betrays people.

The idea of, “…the familiar trope of the death of a female providing source of motivation for the hero.”

Welp… shit. I may have done the thing :<

-

Aidna Royale. Drefan’s mother, a woman who has been abused and largely silenced by the King who she is the concubine to, a woman who promised to care for the child of the Queen dying in childbirth.

“She was my friend.”

There wasn’t jealousy between the two, and the Queen had helped the woman her husband loved, to understand and speak better, the language of the foreign land Aidna found herself residing inside. Concubines were normal in Royale, and so were political marriages. Being in Royale meant that Aidna was cut off from her people, from her father by thousands of miles and an arctic mountain range, which all aided Robert in his maltreatment of her.

Drefan finally having the power to do so, murders Robert for the years of abuse. Aidna finds herself free, but even more alone. She misses Robert, and she cannot tell her son, as she knows he will look down on her for it, after all, Robert was a villain. But love does not always make sense.

Thom, the son of the Queen falls ill, begins to waste away and he asks for his death to not be meddled with, abnormal in a land where necromancy was the norm and often royals become undead. But Thom wants to pass on, hoping against all hope that he can find his love again, another boy, Nathanael, in their next life. Nathanael has been dying of illness too. But they were of antagonizing Gods, there would be no way… The afterlife did not work that way for them.

Originally in the novel- Unrepentant Hopes, Aidna kills herself only a month or two before Thom finishes his wasting in bed. Another piece of sanity lost for Drefan. Drefan goes mad, free falling into the Abyss at the end of Unrepentant Hopes. The God who took up space inside his mind, snapping away from its own tenuous sanity too. They go on to butcher millions.

But is it not that I am taking her personal agency and using her for the same plot device?

It is true she is suffering emotionally and mentally, awfully by the near end of the First book. But she made a promise and even if Thom was dying and she felt that she had failed, would she leave him to die alone?? No. She would be a wraith, lifeless but still there, waiting, unable to leave until Thom is gone. Thinking perhaps that she can find the strength to stay after Thom is gone, as Drefan is her son and she should not leave him alone. Drefan was suffering as well, it is easy to see it upon his face as they wait for Thom to pass. She has to stay for her children even if suicide would be the easy way out.

It makes much more sense that she is by Thom’s side as he breathes his last, with Drefan and Nathanael. That she sees at that moment Drefan losing to the madness and the Void rolling off of him, licking at the walls and floors. Aidna raised by a people who worshipped the Void, realizes her son is gone. That the laughter is not Drefan’s alone, multiple voices are inside that madness.

It is Aidna who pushes Nathanael under Thom’s infirmary bed, surging to her feet and shoving the boy Thom had loved safely undercover and away from the fell magic.

Does she still die? Yes. Is it still another death on Drefan’s concious? Yes. Does he blame himself still? Hell yes. But her death is not just another motivation on the path of one of the main male characters. She chooses to protect Nathanael in the same way she has always chosen to protect Thom and Drefan: with her body & her life.
nathanialroyale: (Nilec)

“You will do this, Dryden if you love us.”


Protect the Prince. Protect our son.

But that meant the Commandant of the Sovereign Guard would be turning his back on protecting them.
His King and his Queen. The loves of his life.




Dryden Atrious had loved his Sovereign (King) for half a decade when his adoptive son asks him why he takes Peter off and away at night. Away from his wife, the Queen, who often ends those nights with her pre-pubescent son wrapped in her arms in efforts to ward off the loneliness.

Elaina never showed an ounce of malice or jealousy. Atrious had wished to show his Queen the same love that he felt for his King but he knew politically, it would just cause more problems than offer up any solutions. Graciously has Elaina said time and time again that she does not mind. It has never done anything to lessen his guilt.

To the mind of a child, matters of the heart were simple. If Sir Atrious was Nathanael’s father too, as his father, Peter had decided that Atrious could be considered, then why did not all three of his parents love one-another? Why must his mother be lonely? It just was not right!



The three of them being together does not change the central plot points, including the deaths of all three at Drefan’s hands. But it does allow Elaina to be happy. Why did she have to remain alone while Peter loved another?

Elaina is already treated poorly by the Arch-Deacon, and even though she knows being divorced by the King would see her be unable to face the court, she begs for Peter to leave her and take another wife. She cannot have another child, Nathanael a miracle, and Peter must have an heir that is not ill and dying. But Peter is a weak man, and he knows it. He depends on her for gods’ near everything.

Yet, I have come to realize that this was not about her strength of character, but a token tragedy of a woman loving someone who could not love her back the way she loved him. Peter is gay but he is King, and he is easily manipulated. Elaina marries him, her childhood friend, to give him an heir and someone strong to lean upon for support. But screw that trope that a Queen, a powerful woman is stronger alone and that as a woman, she must sacrifice her happiness for the greater good.

That she must graciously hide her bitterness and spend countless nights alone.

Peter, Atrious, and Elaina may only have 2 years together before they meet their end, but let it be two years not of loneliness. 

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