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XERXES

The human mind is the most terrifying thing in existence.

It’s a powerful marvel capable of altering the heavens and the earth, yet it believes lies.

Therefore, it’s easily manipulated and controlled.

After hearing just a few words, a single mind can tear apart another, influence a hundred souls, or burn a kingdom to the ground.

One mind can be the difference between peace and war, between truth and a whole nation falling at the feet of deception, between a great future and sudden death.

Therefore, the state of one’s mind is everything .

He should have never gone outside.

Xerxes slammed his palms over his ears, hot moisture pooling into his eyes as he stumbled down the hidden staircase to the palace basement. Had anyone seen? Would reports arise of a rampaging beast in the courtyard? He knew better than to walk through the gardens this close to his hour of hunger.

His pulse pounded against his mind, muting out the many voices that told him to do terrible, unthinkable things. Voices he refused to obey, ever since…

Since…

Xerxes swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut. His boots scraped over the basement floor from uneven strides as he rubbed his temples, willing himself to think about anything else.

He stopped short at the arched entrance to the oval room. He blinked twice, forgetting where he was for a moment as he beheld movement.

Someone was in there.

Who would dare take a step into this place?

Xerxes’s hand came against his belt before he realized he hadn’t brought his sword.

He eyed the middle-aged man in a worn vest examining golden pears dangling from the great, crooked tree in the centre of the room.

After a moment, Xerxes shook the clouds from his mind and pulled his eyes shut again.

When he opened them, the man was still there.

Xerxes tilted his head. If this man wasn’t a figment of his imagination, he’d be the first person in almost ten years to set foot in the oval room apart from Xerxes himself.

“You should kill him,” one of the voices said, and Xerxes smacked his temple.

“Quiet!” he whispered, demanded, begged .

The middle-aged man in the vest reached for a fat pear hanging from the nearest branch. His fingers curled around it, turning it right and left. He tugged, and Xerxes’s stomach dropped. But the man’s fingers paused before they could do the unthinkable.

As if sensing he wasn’t alone, the man glanced over his shoulder into the shadows circling the room—the space where moonlight from the oval skylight didn’t quite reach—and Xerxes ducked behind the arch. The pear held to the tree by a mere thread.

A second passed by. Two. Three.

The man turned back to his task.

Xerxes slipped into the room, his boots a whisper over the floor, his black cloak transforming him into a shadow himself. He came up behind the thieving intruder, and he spoke in a voice low and dreadful, “Entering this room is forbidden.”

“Kill the trespasser!” all the voices in his mind pleaded at once.

The man’s hand went still on the pear. When he spun around, his wide gaze drew up Xerxes’s body, stopping on Xerxes’s face several inches above his and mostly obscured by darkness. The man’s eyes grew rounder, his thieving hands sliding behind his back.

Crumbs littered the man’s chest, making it obvious this thief had helped himself to the baking in the dining room on his way down too.

He wasn’t dressed as a servant or a guard, or even a noble.

In fact, grass stains covered his clothes and the salty scent of his skin indicated he hadn’t bathed in a while, which was practically a crime for anyone who belonged in the palace.

“You’ve entered the palace grounds, you’ve trespassed into a forbidden room, and you’ve stolen from the King,” Xerxes informed the man. “I’ll have you killed.”

“Yes, let’s kill him!” the voices agreed.

The man dropped to his knees. “Please!” he begged.

“I… I came here only because…” He glanced around and scratched his head.

“Because I promised my daughter I would find her a midnight rose!” he shouted with a clap.

“It’s her fault, really. If she wasn’t so greedy for a flower, I never would have come here! ”

Two seconds of strange silence rang through the room.

Xerxes was used to overhearing the murmuring taunts of the palace dwellers: “ crazy , lunatic … evil ” they’d say. But as he looked upon this man, Xerxes recognized a different sort of evil. A duller, less exciting one, maybe. But evil, all the same.

“How old is your daughter?” he asked. The sensation of cold water tickled over his flesh, creeping along his fingers, prickling behind his ears, and threatening to take the rest of him and bring his mind to another state. Xerxes shook it off.

The man looked Xerxes up and down. “She’s about your age, I think,” he guessed.

“Then what does she want with a midnight rose? Aren’t flowers for little girls?” Xerxes didn’t know why he was asking. This man should die. Any moment now.

“Well,” the man huffed an odd laugh, “it’s been a while since I left to find her a rose…” he admitted, and Xerxes raised a brow.

“How long? Hours? Days?” Xerxes folded his arms, imagining a father vanishing for days on end for a silly flower. “Weeks?”

“Years.” The man clasped his hands behind his back and dropped his gaze to the floor.

Xerxes blinked.

He blinked again. “Years?!”

“Seven years. My daughter was… uh, let me see…” The man looked off and scratched his head.

“Don’t say twelve.” Xerxes thought he said it in his mind, but when the man snapped his fingers and pointed at Xerxes, he realized he’d said the strange plea aloud.

“Yes, that’s it! She was twelve!” The man made a face after. “How did you know?”

Xerxes stared at this man who had a daughter exactly his age. Who left the same year Xerxes’s own father had, only this man left his child by choice. Also, he’d clearly made up a cowardly tale for his daughter about going to find her a rose so he could flee from her forever.

No wonder Xerxes sensed this man was evil.

“Never mind. Let’s make a deal,” Xerxes said. “Give your daughter to me and I’ll let you leave this room alive and unscathed. I swear it by the Celestial Divinities.”

It was a shallow deal no man would accept, Xerxes knew. Because what sort of father would trade his own daughter for—

“Deal! She’s beautiful! And a noble —” the man emphasised the word ‘noble’ too strongly “—and she’d be a great prize for a distinguished palace guard like yourself!

You can have her if you’d like!” The man’s expression changed, his eyes going wild as he nodded and smiled.

“If you let me go free, I will happily give her to you!”

Xerxes’s mouth tipped down at the corners. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt like the least crazy person in a room. He’d nearly killed men for lesser crimes than this man’s impulsive self-preservation.

At the thought, his flesh turned cool and moist, and this time, when the voices took over, he found it more difficult to stop them. He perhaps didn’t want to.

“Fine. Write her name on this stone.” Xerxes tapped a cobblestone with his foot.

The man nodded quickly and grabbed a nearby pebble to scrape the information at Xerxes’s feet.

And as the man handed over his daughter, the thing that should have been his most precious possession, Xerxes began to laugh.

“You fool,” he whispered as the man finished, tossed the pebble aside, and glanced up in question. Though Xerxes didn’t have his sword, he was sure he wouldn’t need it. The man’s face fell at Xerxes’s expression.

“Don’t you know who I am?” Xerxes asked the most foolish father in the kingdom.

The man looked hard at him and squinted. And so, of Xerxes’s two identities, he decided to admit the worst one.

“Haven’t you heard of the manic beast that’s been spotted in the palace gardens?” Though his faulty evenings were rare, Xerxes knew rumours had trickled out of the palace and into the city streets these last years; all of Per-Siana must have heard by now.

Across the room a shattered mirror was pegged to the wall at exactly Xerxes’s height, and in it, Xerxes saw his vilest self: his flesh sinking to ashen purple-gray, slick and damp, and dark crescents forming beneath his eyes, stealing away his handsome, youthful face.

His muscles grew tighter, his body, colder.

The man took a shaky step backward toward one of the arch exits, his own face paling at the sight of the creature before him. “You said you’d let me leave this room!” he reminded. His throat bobbed. “You made me a deal bound by the Divinities!”

“I did. And now your precious daughter is mine,” Xerxes agreed. He inhaled, ignoring the scent of the golden pears just an arm’s reach away. “So, go ahead and leave this room untouched. And then start running.”

Soil and dust puffed over the feast table where Xerxes dropped the unearthed cobblestone with a loud thud .

The renowned sages of the Intelligentsia looked up, their long navy hoods casting shadows over their repulsed faces as they eyed the dust breathing over their dinner plates from the dirty stone.

Flames spurted to life over charmed candles at Xerxes’s end of the table, as though the candles expected he was there to eat, and a cloth lifted from its folded state to polish Xerxes’s dinner plate before fluttering through the air and folding itself in its place again.

Xerxes dropped into his chair and slouched back against it. A second later, he kicked his boots high up onto the table and crossed his legs, ensuring even more dirt spoiled the tablecloth. And his freshly cleaned plate.