Flash Fiction Fridays (late) post 6

[rainstardragon]

 This one is a longer flash fiction centering around Empress Raikou and Emperor Horin long after their political marriage to unite the peoples of their empire and stop civil war. This land has had some long running problems with imbalance and in their world is a seat of the struggle between the forces of Wisdom and Ignorance.

Obsession

Candles cast their glow around the room and dripped into the platters beneath them. Her quill scratched at the silence with a fury that left the palace servants scurrying back out after making sure she still had enough light to work by. What she created with her tools none ever knew and even her mate had ceased asking. Every morning she was found paler, the crystals in the room darker and more cracked.

No one but She ever touched The Book. No one but She must turn the pages until it was finished. Eventually Ibexia turned to spring and still she worked. Now she looked young, driven, and ate more whenever she was at Table. She went out on surveys of the land bringing sheaves of maps and notations with her. The guards that were sent out with her always seemed to lose her.

Still onward time flowed like the waters of the Chie into the sea. She was fuller now, older. The land sang audibly wherever she trod in her searches in restoring Balance. The Empress moved more slowly and kept her wings holding her sides. Wherever the light of Knowledge had begun to dim she would soon follow to address the issue. The Imperial Guards had less scampering to do whenever she left her chambers.

The Emperor watched every year pass and a little more of the kirin become something more ephemeral than either of them had ever expected. He often thought back to the day that they had discovered the crystal key and the beginning of her descent into Obsession. Every year he grew older and more at a loss as to how to help her the way a younger Raikou had saved him.

Fall came and went with her usual disappearance into the Cave of Origin suspiciously plump and emergence once more slender but somehow older. He held her on the rare times she came to his chambers after and hoped that this would be the year she would explain what her binding to the Land had done to her. This year was not that year. It was another year of silent tears and a bit more of the crystals slowly hardening her scales. Another year of furious scribblings that he would hear through the door of her office while he waited on her bed in her chambers hoping that she would come rest.

Restoring that fountain may have solved The Drought, but in bringing the Fountain of Knowledge back perhaps they also should have expected the darker sides of Knowledge. How much time did he have left, and how much was left in him?

----

Chie is translated as Wisdom. The Chiegawa emerges first from the Cave of Origin below the royal palace and flows through the land, often plunging underground again and through mountain ranges, then flows into the Chie Sea. Ibexia is home to the dragon, ibex, and kirin races.