By: Brianna Lee Hubler
Copyright © 2022 Brianna Lee Hubler. All rights reserved.
(Warning: This story contains sensitive content. Some readers may find the theme of madness, the subject of demon possession, and the other horror fantasy elements of this story unsettling. If concerned, please search for a lighter story within my collection.)
__________When a second son was born, the D’Nier household grew cold to its heir. Annias was more amicable than his elder brother. Edward closed himself off to the world, locked himself in his bedchamber with charcoal and parchment, and sketched haunting images from beyond the grave. Edward’s attendants recounted what they saw as the guise of demon possession. Lord Rastan D’Nier collected his son’s sickening sketches, tied the boy to a pillar in the ballroom, and set the sketches ablaze. Edward writhed against the ropes that bound him, shouted, and screamed.
__________Rastan assumed the boy begged for his release. He sighed and averted his eyes. He crossed the ballroom solemnly, and opened the massive, ornate, ballroom windows. Smoke streamed out the windows. Rastan left the ballroom; he abandoned Edward to watch his creations burn. Rastan ignored his wailing son, until the frightening sketches smoldered, and only cinders remained of Edward’s handiwork. Thrice this occurred before Edward wriggled free of the ropes that bound him.
__________Each time Rastan came and retrieved his troubled child, the child would stare back at his father with wild eyes. Edward’s crazed look distracted his father from the warnings he whispered. Though each time Rastan untied Edward, Edward whispered, “You’ve released them.”
__________Rastan crossed Edward’s arms over Edward’s chest. He wrapped his arms around Edward, restrained him, and guided him back to his bedchamber. Edward’s mother, Lady Cassandra D’Nier, snuck into Edward’s room, held him, rocked him, and hummed softly to him. She recognized something within Edward, which the strictness of maiden propriety lessons long ago snuffed out of her. Silently, she chastised herself for passing her peculiarity to her firstborn, while her kindness consoled him.
__________When Cassandra held him, Edward shut his eyes, shut out everything, except the warmth of her embrace and the softness of her tune. Once Cassandra soothed her son to sleep, she slipped out from under him, guided his back to the floor of his chamber, and snuck to the library. Cassandra browsed the bookshelves, selected a book, and settled in a chair. She lit a candle, opened the book, and then rang the bell to summon Edward’s attendants. Since Cassandra could not risk Rastan discovering that Edward’s condition stemmed from her seed, she pretended as though she disappeared only to read.
__________As the servants entered, Cassandra’s gaze traveled to the standing clock to her right. “Oh, look at the time!” she expressed. “Young Edward must be ever so sleepy. Do ready him for bed.”
__________The servants bowed and exited. They marched to Edward’s chamber and reluctantly lifted him from the floor. They placed him on his bed, undressed, and redressed him. Then they pulled the bedcovers over him, emptied his chamber pot, and fled the room as swiftly as they entered. Before the servants began another task, they scrubbed themselves from head to toe to cleanse themselves of any dark spirits, which they feared jumped from Edward’s skin to their own. Edward knew how his servants despised him, but whenever his mother left him, debilitating nightmares replaced her, and Edward lost the will to barter his sanity to his father’s staff.
__________The nightmares drew Edward from his bed. He retrieved a key he stashed in his pillowcase and unlocked his wardrobe. He snatched a roll of the parchment, which he stored behind his suits, and retrieved a charcoal stick from his sock drawer. He set both on the floor, relocked the wardrobe, and again, he hid the key in his pillowcase.
__________He scribbled the demons from his dreams onto the parchment. He trusted the parchment contained them, but the cycle repeated: He was caught, and the parchment was burned. Each time, a death followed, but none reconciled the murders to Edward’s ramblings, for they considered him stricken, maddened by demons housed within his body. Edward knew better, and deep beneath the repression of her maiden lessons, Cassandra also knew better, but distracted as she became with her secondborn, she ceased rushing to Edward’s aid. There was little time to sooth the eldest, since the youngest depended upon Cassandra for regular sustenance and care. Cassandra planned to return to Edward when Annias grew more independent, but she failed to return before Rastan pushed Edward out of reach.
__________As Annias grew, everyone rejoiced. Annias showed no signs of sharing Edward’s plight. Finally, Rastan called in an exorcist to cleanse Edward, but the exorcism failed. Rastan forsook rescuing Edward, declared his firstborn a lost cause, and invested Edward’s birthright in Annias, for the kingdom’s wellbeing. Edward freed himself from the pillar and escaped to his chamber.
__________Long had Edward concealed his talent, for dislocating and relocating his shoulders and hips, for escaping any and every trap. He collected the few things he considered worth keeping: a small portrait of his mother, an ordinary stone Annias gifted him a few years prior, the sword etched with his name, and the key to his wardrobe. He shattered his chamber window, climbed out, and dropped to the courtyard below. He slit his finger with a shard of glass and wrote a letter with his less dominant hand. Upon the letter he wrote: Your son is dead and your kingdom bleeds. Protect the next.
__________Edward squeezed the blood from his finger onto the corners of the letter and left the letter among the shards. He renamed himself: Crayzo. He hid his true self from all and adopted a knack for speaking in a private code, for always saying the opposite of what he meant, so as never to reveal himself. Edward played thief, most thought to fill his needs. His new, rapscallion moniker partnered with his title of madman, concealed his noble blood, and frightened away those otherwise curious enough to dig into his past. The many demons, whom Rastan freed when he burned his seer son’s capture sketches, plagued the land Rastan would one day pass to Annias. Edward worked silently—lockpicking, graverobbing, and dungeoneering—to recover the lost artifacts that funneled demons into his world and to destroy them. He spent a fair amount of time in prisons, allowed himself to be captured only to draw closer to his prizes.
__________None caged the escape artist longer than he allotted. Edward worked tirelessly to rescue the kingdom that had abandoned him. His greatest hope remained that Annias could live freer than he. He cared no longer for the approval of others or the vindication of his sanity, for though all despised him, Edward was truly the caretaker of his kingdom, noble not solely by birth, but also in action.
Endlesslore 