The Forgotten Throne

by Elliot Burns

  When his mind exploded out of the ground and met with the cool air outside, he brought the earth up with him. He surged up into the air as high as he could, but with every inch the weight dragged him back. He felt himself weaken. His temples pounded, the color drained from him.

  Just when he knew he could do no more, Zylan opened his eyes. He was still stood next to the carriage. Niena was talking to him, but he couldn’t make words from the sounds. In front of him, the creature was gone. Instead, his view was taken up by the twelve-foot wall of mud, rock and clay that his power had dragged up from the earth. The road behind it would be ruined, and a crater would be in its place.

  That didn’t matter. If he’d done enough, that was all that mattered. His chest ached, and his lungs wheezed as if he’d been running for days. He heard a pounding in his head, and a splitting pain shook his skull. Using the power had drained him. He had mere seconds of consciousness left now.

  In his last seconds, Zylan prayed he’d done enough. The monster would claw through the wall eventually, but he hoped that Niena would be long gone by then.

  The return of the Withering meant only thing – Lord Halberd was coming back. It would be a new lord, of course. He hoped this one was up to the task. Royaume depended on it.

  Chapter One

  Two hours before Royaume

  Program initializing…

  Royaume interface loading…

  Subject: Jack Halberd

  Transition odds: 99.78%

  Notes: Transition odds indicate death during Royaume entrance is unlikely. However, precautions must be taken. Alert level #2 is recommended.

  Subject’s genetic match to previous Lord Halberds is less than anticipated. Subject shows evidence of high loyalty and bravery rates, indicating a leaning toward ‘good’ side of the chaos scale. His mind is strong, but willpower need significant boosts. Recommend 2 mentors are assigned.

  The old thief and the Tacher will be perfect. Introductions in Royaume must seem natural, so as not to alert subject. Scenario #5 will suffice. Updates will be given as they happen, and subject will be monitored.

  End transmission.

  ~

  He sometimes felt like he was trapped in a game. Or a dream. Like even though he was awake, he wasn’t really awake. Maybe he just needed more sleep. He’d been working a lot lately.

  The phone was ringing. Whenever the shrill tone broke the silence of his house, there was always a few seconds where he’d cycle through their list of bills in his head and try to remember which ones he’d paid. His job was meant to be part time so he could still study around it, but lately he’d been pulling 12-hour shifts. Added to that, there were always new bills that Mum didn’t tell him about. Clothes catalogues and stuff like that.

  He lifted the phone to his ear. He didn’t speak first. Mum had found online retail therapy as a way of making her feel better during the tough times. That meant they got a lot of calls from new catalogue companies fishing for business. He didn’t speak to them unless he had to. As soon as he gave one of them the time of day, he’d get dozens of calls from pushy telemarketers.

  This time, he couldn’t hear the chatter of an office on the end of the line. Nobody spoke. He almost put down the phone, when he heard a voice.

  “Is this Jack Halberd? World famous explorer, rebellion leader, all round action hero?”

  “The very same,” he answered. “but I’m actually taking the day off. Adventures will have to wait. I don’t care if the president has lost his wallet in Guantanamo again.”

  Sarah laughed. “You dope.”

  A smile grew on his face. Funny that Sarah could do that even in the worst circumstances. She could ring to tell him he owed the IRS a lifetime of debt, and he’d still grin like an idiot.

  “How are you doing?” he said.

  “You’re still coming to collect your uncle’s things today, right? There’s something I need to tell you.”

  It was actually his great uncle Alfie, and yeah, Jack would have to be the one to go down there. It was a damn certainty nobody else would. They had, once. There was a time when Alfie’s name was the most spoken one in town. Not anymore.

  Twelve years ago, his uncle Alfie had popped back into existence after four decades missing. At first, a hive of reporters crawled out looking for stories. After that, relatives from distant branches of the family tree had come to see him. His room was crammed with visitors eager for a story or money, or both. When they learned that Jack’s great uncle was a) completely mute and b) unbelievably broke, the visits dried up. How strange.

  He moved the phone away from his ear. “I’m just stepping out of the door,” he called behind him, not expecting an answer. Mum was in bed.

  He opened the front door to be met with a torrential downpour. The rain lashed onto the overgrown lawn outside his house. The garden was becoming wilder since he and Mum were in a stalemate over who was supposed to mow it. Jack knew he’d give in eventually, but it was good to play the game. Besides, he was starting to enjoy gardening. He was learning what to plant and when, and it was beginning to take shape.

  “You might wanna take a taxi,” said Sarah, on the phone. “And then one day, you know, get yourself a car.”

  “I’m saving for college. I can barely afford new shoes. I’ll be right down. Listen, I won’t be able to collect all his stuff today, but I need to see what there is. Hopefully I can borrow a van to pick it all up.”

  Despite the circumstances, he was looking forward to seeing her. There was nothing romantic about his relationship with Sarah, but she made him laugh. She’d worked at the nursing home for 5 years, and every time Jack went to see his great uncle, they always had a chat. He wondered what would happen now that Alfie was gone. Would their talks dry up? Maybe he’d ask for her number. They’d always meant to go to one of the midnight sci-fi marathons at the multiplex.

  “Listen,” said Sarah. “When you get here, there’s something you should see. I didn’t know if I should say something at the funeral, it didn’t seem right.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s still alive,” said Jack. “Mum will have a fit. And cremating him would have been a big mistake.”

  “You’re lucky I’m one of the only people in the world who find you funny. I’ll show you when you get here. It’s a little scary.”

  He was always one to let curiosity get hold of him, and he spent the rest of his walk thinking about what Sarah had said. What could she have meant? Sarah liked practical jokes, but even this subject would be off limits to her. Jack thought about it so much that he finished the 20-minute walk on autopilot.

  By the time the nursing home loomed into view, he was nowhere nearer to an answer. He walked down the stone path, ignoring the smell of stale smoke, and reached the door. As he opened it and went to go inside, he heard a noise behind him.

  Sarah was walking his way. She smiled, and Jack saw that she had a coffee holder in her right hand with four cups nestled in it. She wore a white coat, but her nurse uniform was underneath, and Jack saw that she’d spilt something on it. As a single-mum, it was rare she didn’t turn up sporting a food stain.

  “Decided to go on a coffee break while I waited,” she said.

  As she held up the coffee cups for Jack to see, a figure loomed behind her. It was a man, 6-foot-2, with stern eyes. He wore a black business suit. He looked too big for it, as though he’d started working out but hadn’t updated his wardrobe yet. It had the effect of making him seem like a monster about to burst out of his attire. The man walked forward. Before Jack could warn her, he shoved into Sarah as if he hadn’t seen her.

  Sarah lurched forward. She shouted out as one of the lids broke off a cup and the steaming liquid burned her wrist. She gave a sharp cry, then instinctively held her hand up to her face. The coffee stained the ground like a blood splatter.

  The man, rather than apologize, rounded on her. “You should watch where you’re going,” he said. He held a coffee cup of his own, but it had gotten through th
e incident intact.

  He turned away from her and walked toward Jack. He was probably here to visit a relative, but Jack hadn’t seen him before. He got to know all the regulars over the years, and this guy was a stranger.

  Sarah set her cups down and held her wrist in her hand. Jack hoped she wasn’t badly burned. As the man walked toward him, Jack wanted to do something. There wasn’t much he could do, but there was something.

  He looked at the man. He flashed him a smile and held the door open for him. Then, as the man walked through it, Jack stuck his foot out and made sure to catch his leg. The man stumbled forward and put his hand out, letting go of the coffee cup. He completely lost his balance and fell. The coffee splashed out onto the white flooring of the reception area.

  “You should be more careful,” said Jack.

  The man looked up at him, and his angry glare was payback enough.

  As the man left and grumbled through to the resident area, Jack looked at the coffee stain. He couldn’t leave it there for someone else to clean up, so he went to the bathroom and came back with some tissue. After it was mopped up, he and Sarah walked way.

  “My hero,” said Sarah, not bothering to hide her sarcasm.

  They walked through the lobby and toward Alfie’s old room. Jack took the twists and turns on autopilot, he’d been here so often. The further into the home he got, the darker it seemed. It was as though when they built it, they ran out of money for windows. They had made sure the entrance had enough light but had skimped everywhere else.

  “Have you applied yet, Hal?” asked Sarah.

  Hal. Not the worst nickname a guy could get, but there were better. He’d gotten it when he and Sarah watched a copy of Space Odyssey in the staffroom one afternoon. Sarah found great amusement in how his surname ‘Halberd’ could be shortened to the name of the computer in the film. After that, she loved to call him Hal.

  He knew what she meant by asking if he’d applied yet. It was a touchy subject, but he was getting around to it.

  “I started it.”

  “Come on. You don’t have long. Term is only a couple of months away.”

  It might have been a couple of months away, but it might as well have been a decade. When Jack was in school, he’d shown promise. A lot of promise, a couple of teachers said. But mum was away a lot, and that derailed him. She’d leave Jack home alone and go to work. Problem was, she’d never tell him what her ‘work’ actually was. A couple of times, she’d told him she was a landscape gardener, but he’d never seen her with a spade. All he knew was that she’d leave him on his own for days on end.

  When she wasn’t working, she was often shut in her room. Lights off, curtains drawn. She’d tell him that there was no point to anything. He’d hear her crying on the worst days, and those were the times where he’d decide to miss school to look after her.

  On occasions like that, he had only one escape. He had a games console. It was about 5 years older than the latest models, but he treasured it. He spent his precious free time roaming fantasy lands. He loved them because games like that were so simple; your path was set out for you. In order to get stronger and earn money, all you had to do was complete quests and kill things. It all made sense, and it gave him relief from everything that was going on.

  The problem was that with everything happening with Mum, he couldn’t concentrate in school. His grades slipped, and his promise counted for little. After all, promise wouldn’t finish a 5000-word essay for you. Before he knew it, he’d graduated with grades, but not the ones he needed. His friends went to college, but he decided to get a job and help pay the bills. Now, though, he had changed his mind. He decided he’d try and do something with the promise people said he had.

  It wouldn’t be easy, but he could do it. He had a mantra that he repeated to himself when he was drained after a shift but still needed to do the housework and study. Strength through pain. That’s what he always used to repeat to himself. It was a family motto he’d discovered when looking through his uncle Alfie’s things and seeing his diary. Strength through pain. To Jack, it meant that anything that was worth having was tough to get.

  The two of them came to a set of double doors. Sarah looked at Jack as they stopped. He didn’t look back, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw her grinning.

  “Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” she said.

  “I can’t do that Dave,” he answered, repeating the quote from the film.

  Sarah opened the doors and they walked on. The corridors of the nursing home smelled of bleach.

  “You’re covering up your birthmark again,” said Sarah, as they took another turn. Their footsteps echoed off the floors.

  He hadn’t realized it, but he’d been holding his hand against his neck. He moved it away. Contrary to what most people assumed, he didn’t give a crap about the birthmark. So what if it was shaped like a sickle? So what if it was on his neck and couldn’t be covered up? People could stare, he didn’t give a damn.

  As they walked through the corridors, Jack realized that he knew every inch of the place. He’d been here almost every day for the last dozen years. In all that time, he’d never heard his uncle say a word. He’d rarely even seen him move. Instead, he just stared blankly at the ceiling, trapped inside his own head. Sometimes Jack felt like Alfie was aware he was in the room with him. At other times it was like he was somewhere else, watching a scene that Jack couldn’t see.

  They stopped walking when they reached room number 12. He’d seen this doorway at least once a day for the last decade. He knew the spots on the wall where the paint needed refreshing. He knew the sound of the handle when he turned it. He knew what the room would smell like when he stepped into it. Dust with a hint of bleach.

  “You okay?” said Sarah, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  He nodded. “It’s better for him, this way. Can’t have been easy, just lying there. You want to speak, but you can’t. I wonder how it felt.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Sarah. “The night he-”

  As Sarah spoke to him, Jack turned the handle. He pushed open the door and took a step forward. When he saw his uncle’s room, he stopped dead. He couldn’t focus on what Sarah said. He just stared in disbelief.

  The room was bare. The bookcase had been cleared out, the wardrobe emptied, the bed completely stripped. There were even marks on the walls from where Alfie’s paintings had been taken down. Someone had removed every trace of his uncle, as if his 12 years here had never happened.

  Sarah walked ahead of him and looked around.

  “Is this what you wanted to tell me?” said Jack. “That they moved all his stuff?”

  She shook her head. “I had no idea. Just give me a sec, and I’ll find out what’s going on.”

  Jack looked around. He’d spent so much time in this room. He’d probably spent more hours in it than even the nurses had. He sure as hell had been here more than the rest of the family – in the last decade, only mum had been to visit. The gold diggers had given up when they learned Alfie was broke. It was only through a city grant that they’d been able to afford to keep him here to get care.

  There was a chair beside the bed. That was where Jack would sit. He’d read to Alfie and try to update him on all the novels he’d missed in his mysterious disappearance. They’d started with the Dune series and then worked all the way through to Game of Thrones. Although Alfie never moved, the nurses assured Jack that he was aware of things. They told him that Alfie appreciated Jack reading to him.

  He stared at the walls, and he still couldn’t believe they’d emptied it so quickly. The walls were marked in places from where paintings had hung. The paintings were ones Alfie had done when he was around Jack’s age. They were mostly watercolors showing fantasy landscapes of castles and monsters. He’d even drawn a crest for the Halberd family. The paintings, although products of Alfie’s mind, seemed so realistic. It was the little details, like the faded stone walls with dents from where they�
��d been hit with something. It was like Alfie had actually been there.

  Nobody knew where he’d been for most of his life, of course. Forties years missing, and nobody had a damn clue. What Jack would have given to have known. It was the mystery of it – it was a question that burrowed deep into his brain and wrapped around it. A nagging yearning that he could never shake off. Where had his uncle been? What had seen? And why had his mind shut down when he came back?

  The door opened, and Sarah stood there. Her cheeks were red as though she’d recently lost her temper. “I’m sorry about this, Jack,” she said. “I’ve found his things. Come on.”

  She led him along the corridors to a section he’d never had reason to visit before. They stopped outside a door with a faded sign that read ‘storeroom.’

  “I keep telling you, Sarah. If you wanna get me somewhere private and cozy, you just have to ask.”

  Sarah grinned, but he could tell she didn’t really feel like smiling. She took a key out of her pocket and put it in the lock. It resisted for a second, then gave way with a whine. When Sarah grabbed the handle, turned it, and opened the door, Jack was hit with the smell of dust. It was so bad he couldn’t help but cough. When he’d gotten control of himself, he stepped into the room. He couldn’t believe what was in front of him.

  “Like I said, I’m so sorry about this,” said Sarah.

  He was angry at what he saw, but it wasn’t her fault. “Come on, Sarah. Don’t blame yourself. If anything, it’s me. I should have come down earlier to pick his stuff up.”

  “They had to make room for a new guest,” said Sarah. “You know how it is. This place is a cycle. One guest…leaves… another arrives. Don’t take it personally. Listen, I’ll leave you alone for a while.”

  He turned to face her. “Thanks, Sarah. I mean it. You’re a good friend. Give me a couple of days to get my stuff together, then I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Jack looked around. Most of the stockroom was filled with broken furniture, and bed linen that was a decade overdue a wash. Then, crammed onto a shelf on the right side of the room, were his uncle’s things. Someone had just dumped them there. The most annoying thing was that one of Alfie's paintings had a crack running across the frame.