The Hellborn King by Christopher Brenning

Author:Christopher Brenning [Brenning, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-03T22:00:00+00:00

Lucetta IV

Have I gone mad? Has the unbearable weight of stress and isolation driven all sanity from me? Or am I becoming more like father with each passing day?

Lucetta was frightened, so much so that she had become paralyzed because of it. She was too afraid to be alone in her chamber, and too afraid to sit in the courtyard. Merely walking down the halls of her estate was dreadful enough. There was no telling when the woman in black might return.

It was unimaginable to have to come to terms with the idea that she was truly seeing an apparition. It wasn’t some hallucination, no, the woman in black reached out and touched her, and Lucetta would never forget the entity’s icy cold hand upon her face. She felt crazy, as if her grip on reality was slowly slipping away by the day. Much more of this and she might be shuffled off to the tower for the insane.

This can’t be happening. Not to me. Of all the Bethards, why does this curse have to afflict me? Why me and not Gareth? He certainly deserves it more than I do.

But not every day was terrible. There were times when the fear and anxiety had loosened their grip, and slowly she started to feel normal again. It was the moments of relative calm that made Lucetta wonder if she was truly crazy, and if the blow to her head had something more to do with it than the physicians had said.

One day while walking throughout the estate’s grounds, she began to sense that unmistakable dread creeping back into her mind. Even though Aldred had instructed the guards and servants to keep an extra close eye on her, she still felt alone and vulnerable. Not even being outside seemed to be enough to stave off the dread of the woman in black’s presence.

That night, her dreams were dark and fragmented. The one thing she could remember was the sight of the woman in black strung up on the gallows, her lifeless body swaying ever so slightly at the end of a hangman’s noose. It was a dreadful sight, yet sad and tragic at the same time.

Moments before waking, she heard the apparition’s voice call out.

“Maybe, just maybe, the fate of your family’s kingdom lies not with its princes, but with its princesses.”

Lucetta sat up in bed suddenly, the entity’s words still echoing in her ears. It was an exhilarating thought, to be certain, that she might be the salvation of Betanthia. But if the woman in black was not malicious, then why was she so frightening? It made no sense. She had never believed in spirits or even the gods, but truly a benevolent being would be a little less foreboding?

The thought began to gnaw at her mind like an insect burrowing into a tree. For days afterwards, she paced the outer grounds of the estate, completely consumed by the woman in black’s prophecy. The servants had to remind her on a

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