Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king-Chapter 996: Father and prince(5)

Overwhelmed from what he had done, the prince collapsed forward, his hands sinking into the puddle of bile and spilled wine. He retched again, a violent, agonizing spasm that tore through his chest, but there was nothing left to give. His stomach was as empty as a soldier’s purse in a brothel. He tried to settle his thoughts, to find the cold logic to calm his fears, but the world was a spinning vortex of nausea.

He tried to lift his head, to find the boy’s eyes and beg, but his neck felt like a rusted hinge. Shame, heavier than any crown, forced his gaze back down to the filth on the floor.

What have I become?

He was a man who struck his own blood. He had become the very monster he had spent a lifetime hating and loathin, the ghost of his own father, reaching out from the red sands of Arlania to claim him at last, twenty years too late. He had survived the lash, the chains, and the sands, only to be defeated by a silver cup and his own rotting heart. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

He felt hollowed out, as if a great hook had been dragged through his center, leaving him a gutted shell all of his organs outside his reach. The shards of the stone heart he had carefully constructed to survive the world were now turning inward, piercing his lungs, making every breath a labor of a thousands poem.

He could see the future in the dark pool on the floor: Basil would forever carry the phantom heat of this strike. Every time Alpheo reached out to him, the boy would flinch. Every word of love would be measured against the weight of this hand. Basil was right; Egil had died for a drunkard. He had died for a man who could no longer distinguish his enemies from his own kin.

A cold, visceral panic seized him. It was the frantic, animal terror of a man watching his last lifeline fray. I have to fix it. I have to stop the rot before it sets.

"I’m... sorr—"

He tried to push himself up, his palm slipping in the mess. He needed to crawl to the boy, to fix this. He needed to show Basil that there was still a father beneath the filth before the shadow of what happened consumned his every thought.

But the room tilted violently. The nausea surged back like a tidal wave, and his strength simply evaporated. He fell again.

His cheek struck the hard stone floor with a dull, heavy thud. His senses were so mangled, that he didn’t even feel the impact. He only felt the cold, solid surface of the earth, the same earth that held Egil, the same earth that the prince felt was now reaching up to claim him.

Fear, mingled with regret and disgust, took hold along with the weakness he felt in not even being capable of rising to confront his son....

"FATHER!"

An impossible voice rose, slicing through the ringing in Alpheo’s ears. Hands, small, trembling, yet firm with purpose, grabbed at his chest and the side of his forehead. Alpheo felt the sudden, shocking warmth of his son’s skin, and in that same heartbeat, Basil felt the warmth of his father’s blood.

"You’re bleeding. Father, you’re bleeding!" He repeated anxiously ’’There is blood!’’

Alpheo’s forehead remained pressed against the stone. His vision was blurred, but he could see Basil’s small knees sinking directly into the puddle of vomit to get to him.

For all his life, Alpheo had walked with the bitter conviction that life only shat all over him. But now, as he lay broken in the dark, he realized that a singular, blinding bundle of light had been gifted to him.....a light he had just tried to extinguish.

He forced his face up from the floor, his neck muscles screaming and tightening in pain....was he having an heart attack? He saw Basil’s eyes, wide and glassy, fixed on the smear of red on his own fingers. The boy was beginning to hyperventilate, his chest hitching in the throes of a panic attack born of pure, unadulterated terror.

He is terrified for me, Alpheo thought, and the realization was an uplift so violent it felt like his soul was being hauled out of the dirt.

"VROSK!"

Basil’s voice tore through the chamber, sounding more mature than any he had ever heard.. The sound echoed off the cold stone walls, and in less than a second, the heavy oak doors burst open, light flooding the room like an intrusion.

"Your Grace!"

Vrosk, the man who had pulled Alpheo from the blood-soaked fields of Aracina when they were nothing but starving mercenaries, took in the state of the room in a single, practiced sweep of his eyes. He saw the shattered urn, the filth, the bleeding Prince, and the trembling heir.

"Call for a doctor! NOW!" Basil commanded.

The head of the guards didn’t hesitate; he nodded once and sprinted back into the hallway, his heavy boots thundering into the distance. Father and son were left in the sudden, ringing silence of the tomb once more.

Alpheo reached out, his fingers catching Basil’s hand. He felt the life thrumming in the boy’s flesh, a heat that made his own skin feel like ice.

"For all that is true in this world... I am sorry, my boy," Alpheo choked out. The words were thick with the iron taste of blood and the bitter tang of bile. "I don’t know what took hold of me."

But he did know.

The monster had looked out through his eyes, and the knowledge filled him with a self-loathing so profound he felt his heart drumming against his ribs as if trying to break free from a chest it no longer wished to inhabit. How could he have done something so vile? How could he have become the shadow that would make his own blood flinch?

He looked at the red mark on Basil’s cheek and a sob finally broke from his throat. He knew he had ruined it. He knew the bridge was burned, that the boy would always see the blow whenever Alpheo reached for him. It was his fault. All of it.

But the Prince, so many a time master of strategy and human nature, was wrong.

Basil did not flinch. He did not pull away. He never feared his father, nor at any point in his life would he ever.

It was in that room, dirtied by his own regret, puke, and fears, that Alpheo for the first time glimpsed, truly glimpsed, at the greatest gift life had ever given him.

Watching the first droplet of an immense lake.

"It isn’t your fault, Father."

A gentle voice. As if he was speaking to a scared animal. As if he were the one who needed pity. The boy who was struck caressing the artifact of his own pain.

He did not blame nor hate him. How could he, after all? How could he hate looking at the very man blind to the light he had brought to so many, and yet so engulfed in the shadow of its’ making , to be bling and unable to see anything outside of it.

"It is all right," Basil whispered, throwing his arms around his father’s neck in a fierce, crushing embrace. He held on as if he feared he would vanish into a cloud of ash if he let go for even a second. "You are just in need of help, Father. Please... let us help you. That is all," the boy sobbed into his father’s shoulder. "We just wish to help. We just want you back." he added in a smaller voice

At those words, the last of the prince’s defenses crumbled, faster than the walls of the Fingers he had brought down with the aid of thousands.

He buried his face in his son’s small shoulder, his entire frame racking with sobs. He clung to the boy, his hands shaking like leaves in winter as he wept for Egil, for his lost years in the sand, and for the man he had almost become, whom just one glimpse of had been enough to terrify his very own soul.

"I’m sorry," he wailed, the sound muffled by Basil’s tunic. "I’m so sorry. I love you... Please, I am so sorry.You are the best thing life has ever given to your father. Forgive him."

In the middle of the filth and the broken glass, the Prince of Yarzat finally stopped fighting the world, and for the first time in twenty-five years of life, he allowed himself to be saved.

Long for the rest of his life he would look back at this image of himself: a prince reduced to a ruin, dirtied by his own filth, wailing like a broken child in the small, steady hands of his son half his age.

Yet, as much as it burned, he had never for the remainder of his own life, wished to forget it.

He kept the memory not to punish himself, but to honor the light that had pierced his darkest hour. For above the suffocating clouds of disgust and self-loathing, standing atop the highest peak of his soul, was a fierce and towering pride.

The first step of a man whose achievements would one day overtake those of his own father.