Chapter 1 : The Marriage of Death and Silence
Prince Theodore James Sebastian Wellington
'Death is a thing that causes some to break or some to bloom, you have to choose'
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A strange kind of heaviness passes its cold fingers through my hair. "Mother?" I say as I roam through the empty halls of the palace. "Queen Elsie?" I desperately call in the midst of the soul-driving silence.
"Sebastian, son, come please," I hear the soothing voice of my father say behind me.
Papa? Where is mother?" I ask while turning to face him.
A great wide line of blood stretches across his wrinkled face.
"What's wrong, Papa ?" I cry out while I run towards him.
I don't reach far before he says, "That's none of your business! And you are always to address me as 'Your Highness', 'King Jeremiah', 'Sir' or 'Father', do you understand?" rather roughly.
He then proceeds to wipe the blood off with his white shirt sleeve and I see no skin wound. The strange transition of tone surprises me, but I co-operate anyway
"Yes sir," I reply while looking at the recently polished marble floor. His voice changes back to the smooth, kind tone I know it to be.
He places his hands on my small shoulders, kneels down and says to me, "You know that your mother tried her best, she was a fighter, but finally all fights must end and the world must be at peace, so must souls. She's sorry she couldn't say goodbye, but she wanted you to know that she loves you and she'll always live here."
With those words he gently rests his hand on my chest.
I don't cry, because I know that if I do he'll say that I'm not like my brothers, that I'm weak and that no one will want to serve a vulnerable man, so I nod and walk away in silence. My lonely, long walk to my bedroom chambers is one that I spend doing a lot of thinking.
I thought about the suspicious blood on my father's face-that was most probably not his. I thought about the fact that my mother didn't even call for her only son in her last moments, because I hadn't seen her since she'd gotten ill. I thought about the way my father shouted at me for the first time-over something petty. I thought about the way he always compared me to my half-brothers-who were not the best of role models.
I thought about every time when I was hurt he would say, "Weakness is what will kill you.", finally I thought about everything he ever told me and I decided he was wrong.
My mother always told me, "Tears, they do not define weakness." I always asked her if it didn't express weakness, then what did it express. She would say that I had to find out that on my own, because everyone sees it as something different. My mother and I shared our secrets, secrets my father will never find out. She died with my secrets and I will die with hers.
On my walk back I figured out what tears really were. They show that you understand your self-worth so much; that it breaks your heart to know that piece of it has been diminished. Tears hold secrets and passions and choices. The secret is that you know that everyone has secret and the passion is the willingness to love so deeply that you can't bear to see pain. The choice is that either you can stay in the place that causes the painful tears, or run away to a place where you can help someone who produces more painful tears than you ever did and when that's over the two of you can cry happily together in each other's arms.
All that thinking has led me the conclusion: my father, King Sicarius Jeremiah Wellington, can't be trusted so I let the tears flow. They drown my shirt in salty water. I have never felt so amazing in my life. A, strange, lovely warmth spreads across my chest and I smile because I figured out just what my mother said I would, what tears really are.
My father doesn't understand that tears are whatever you make it to be, your weakness or your weapon. You get to choose and he's going to learn that I'm overly happy with my choice.