The Dark Issue 50 by Tlotlo Tsamaase

Author:Tlotlo Tsamaase [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2019-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Dead Kings

by Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría

(translated by David Bowles)

“The first time I saw my parents cry in silence, I knew that I was now an adult.

“They didn’t see me, of course. They hid in order to weep. But when you’re six years old, you tend to discover everything your parents try to keep from you.

“They had built a beautiful life for me out of fantasies and true happiness, but it was impossible to hide the bones scattered in the streets and the smell of rot curdling in the alleys.

“They could not protect me from my schoolmates, who boasted of their writs of safe-conduct (although in reality they were lying or only had provisional permits of such a low category that they meant nothing to the specters that hunted the young with impunity).

“They could not protect me from the green centipedes that crossed the cobblestones with their eyeless riders, skittering silently and killing silently.

“They could much less protect me from my nightmares, which arrived inexorably each night, though I tried to stay awake by reading as long as possible, hidden under the sheets with a lamp. As if the light of an oil lamp could stave off those living shadows!

“Every midnight those shadows randomly entered some of my neighbors’ houses to twist their foundations, their walls, even their furniture and their residents, and leave everything turned in on itself, like horrifying and hypnotic statues, nothing more than columns of spiraled flesh, brick and wood.

“Had not seen, with my own eyes, night turn into day? The black clouds covering the sun? The lightning that thundered, dark and ungleaming, until the ground itself trembled?

“And the terrified people. More terrified than I had never seen my parents, who had never looked away from the passage of the centipedes or from the curving monoliths left by the shadows or from the threat of the flying specters.

“Until that day, when I saw them weep in silence.

“Their crime, like that of all who had been branded, was simply thinking differently (was it ever not so?).

“My mother was born a ‘witch,’ according to the Codex of Kings, or ‘intuitor,’ as the peasants reverently called her kind. And she was wise, very wise.

“My father, well, he was simply a brave man in a world of cowards.

“That day they had burned the old grimoires in secret, as well as the dangerous papers, those that spoke of alchemy, or of other kingdoms with living kings or even without kings. Then they had buried the ashes at the four corners of the farm, almost as if the power released from those old spells could protect our family more than the very disappearance of the forbidden texts.

“If caught with those texts in our possession, we could have been sent to the other side, without trial or possibility of any defense.

“And sooner or later, someone would have reported us.

“Our town was small, but with metropolitan ambitions. That meant too much fear and too much mediocrity gathered in a single enclave. We called it The Column, a place where swords were forged and chickens raised.

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