There was something missing, something lost.
Elinor felt its absence in every breath, sought its shape in every shadow. She had been so long without healthy sleep that her body and mind were taking turns failing her, and tonight seemed to be a fatal combination of the two. Her maid and her near-brother were gone, leaving her to stare at the near-empty bottle and its milk-white potion within, which promised violent, aching dreams and a sore heart in the morning. She did not drink of it, choosing exhaustion over that opiate nightmare. Her mind turned and twisted as she sat in her little room and focused on that thing she had lost, hours passing before she finally stood and began to walk through the empty house, trying to remember what she’d lost. And once she had searched the house, her feet had carried her unbidden into the streets to begin her search anew.
The moon lit her path, pulling her toward the sound of running water. The river…something…something caught in her heart at the sound and sight of it, pain and pleasure all at once. Her breath caught, and she reached to bring a shaking hand to the water’s surface, the cool touch bringing light to a part of her mind that felt long dormant. A light, or perhaps a shadow…but either way, it was awakened, and just like the rest of her, could not sleep. There! It was there, somewhere just out of reach beneath the water! Somewhere further down the shore!
Her feet were light and graceful over the cobblestones and bridges, her eyes desperate and anguished as she kept them on the river. It was there, in the river…she’d lost it to the river, somewhere deep below. What was it? What had the water taken from her?
The path ended as the river was released into the sea, and Elinor hardly felt the change of stone to sand beneath her slippered feet. The darkness and the light of the moon stole the gold of her hair and the pink of her cheeks and made her a wilted figure of grey and silver, haggard with lack of sleep. She clutched her shawl tighter around her and swayed on her feet as she watched the river become the sea and wondered just how mad she had become.
But then, a voice. Her eyes slowly tracked to the imposing figure of the Balor king, though she hardly saw him at all in the odd half-consciousness she lived in. “I see…” A face, in the river. A face, that she’d… She swallowed, shuddering and shutting her eyes as tears fell down her silver cheeks. “I see n-nothing.” Her voice was so faint that it could have been the whisper of the grass on the dunes, or the wind rushing over the sand.
Iapetus did not mind, sparing a glance to her tear-stained, moon-pale cheeks. The wetness on them glimmered in the moonlight and he extended a hand to her, calm when he otherwise would have been harsh. She saw something, just as he saw something; she saw, she saw, she saw--------
The throne truly was a magnificent thing, even as it glimmered like death-glossy eyes in his mind. No real shine to it, just a glaze of---lack. A lack of something. What had given it its crack, he wondered? Had it been the swing of a hammer? Had royal brain and bone scattered over the golden expanse of it and gotten caught in its splintered surface? Had blood splattered until it grew sticky and cold?
Who’d sat in it? Who’d broken it?
“What do you see?” he repeated without heat, wrapping a wide palm around the slightness of her arm. His touch was careful, warm in the night’s chill, but his eyes were a thousand miles away. He stared straight through her at the vision in his mind, haunting in a way he couldn’t touch.
