but somewhere here in between the city walls of dyin' dreams

He crumbled.

The ghosts in his head were loud, and heavy; they pressed on his mind with sadistic urgency, they shrieked in his ears with bitter glee, and they pressed painfully against the back of his eyes. The past, the present, the future—it blended, grew into a blur, spinning revoltingly, focused around a single, cursed point in time.

Blood soaked the sands of a foreign island, a body laid to waste by the miseries of greed and anger and hate and hurt; and in the blood-soaked, tear-stained sand lay that metaphorical crown, at the large feet of a shadowed, hooded creature.

But it hadn't been a crown—it had been his heart.

His frozen, frosty heart.

(Blue eyes wide, unseeing—)

The Edge had been his everything. The Edge had been his world. It had been his legacy, his present, his past. But the death of Snö had torn it straight out of his chest—

No—

He had torn it out, overcome with its stinging, lashing pain, overwhelmed by the fury of his grief; without a heart, how could he feel? Because he hadn't wanted to feel—he had wanted to disappear, to sink into the sands, into the underworld, into the embrace of the warm, blue waters. Anything, but to lay on the beach cradling the dead, bloodied body of his daughter, knowing that he would have to rise in the glory of the dawn once again and pretend that he was fine—

—because he had been a Queen, and all Kings and Queens are heartless.

So he had cast it all aside, a reckless, thoughtless move, hoping it would cure him of all the pain he felt.

But that space where his heart used to be had filled up with pain anyway; sorrow, bitterness, envy, apathy. They were his four horsemen.

Navy eyes swum in the field of his vision, blotting out the edge, the ocean, the world. They were blurry, set in a light face but aptly cast in dark stripes—black running down his throat, covering his chest, covering the scar where his heart had been ripped out because he was a King now—

“What are you doing, my friend?”

The staff dropped by his feet, forgotten, as his jaws moved to reply.

"I killed you," he whispered, his wide, unfocused gaze staring straight through the ghost of Tembovu, "when I gave you this. I took your heart. I took your right to live." And his horn waved drunkenly to the scenery about them, at the bodies gathered, at the trees, the wind, the sky itself. "I wanted to die, but I couldn't, and you can't—you can't—" But the words lodged in his throat and refused to come out. Miserable, he let his gaze sweep the area once again, before coming back to the stallion standing in front of him.

"Kill me," he finally said, softly, the words drifting gently into Tembovu's black ears—and his only, for they were light as the breath he wished to be denied. "I want to feel what it's like to die."

Mauja

the white queen