Chapter Text
One of my loves has asked me to kill a king.
Theophania warns me away from him, says to give up my nights spent dancing. She tries to bring me closer to her when he appears, asks me to help her when bringing in the sheep, presses a kiss to my neck where she thinks he will bite it. She is kind, but she cannot win. I do not want her to.
Aegeus watches his fire crackle each time I sit with him in his smithy. I have not needed new armor from him in a year or more, but he is comfortable to have nearby. Zoe checks the horseshoe on the door before she enters each day, making sure the luck hasn't spilled out. The farrier that made it has been dead for years, blood drained from his veins until he became something shriveled and insectile, twitching mandibles made of his broken jawbone failing to speak his last words.
They orbit me, pressing him back. But each night, far after dark, he comes to my window and raps on the pane with chitinous nails, and we begin a new dance in the witching hour.
He wants me to kill a king. Not mine, for I think even he knows the loss I would feel at the betrayal. His own. He claims his king is mad, cruel and vicious and with a thirst only sated by blood. He has shown me a scar tracing across his neck, as though I don't know any cut made to that vein would be fatal. His laugh sounded like the buzzing of a thousand flies when I asked him of it.
He says the iron of my armor will let me escape unscathed. He says his king lives under a hill in a decadent lair. He says he cannot tell me his true name, for I could use it to wrap him around my finger. He says I may call him October, to match my Augustus.
I say he reminds me of the stories I've heard from Europa. He says I put too much stock in stories, and I should put more trust in myself. All I know from myself is fear and love in equal measure.
I have done it, or come close. His throat is cut, but he lives still. October said I would need an ashwood stake, that I must drive it into his heart. He doesn't look mad. He looks scared, eyes wild, but far from mad. His crown stays on his head until the moment the stake goes through, the wet crunching of muscle parting around something sharp and cruel.
October is king now. He asked if I wanted to be his consort. I agreed. I haven't told any of my loves. I asked if I could still visit them, and he replied that I could, if only at night.
He didn't tell me they wouldn't recognize me. He didn't tell me how much I would need to change to be his. He didn't tell me that it would feel like this, emptiness and hunger. He didn't tell me I would be weak beneath the hill and monstrous above it.
I think that I would still make this choice if he did.