As King Laurence waited for Kori to join him in his quarters after sending a messenger to go fetch her, he leaned his cheek on the cold window listlessly.
He was lost deep in thought.
He was filled with fear about the upcoming ball and he prayed that Pollyanna would not bring about the end of his peaceful reign. The woman was an unholy terror and he knew she would have no trouble killing everyone at the ball if she so wished. He had many plans in mind to try and detain the woman, and had finally decided on the only one that seemed viable.
He cursed the fact that he did not know the secrets to her immortality and knew of no chinks in her armor. Laurence didn’t know what to do, and so he wanted Kori’s counsel as he usually did when he was upset and didn’t know what to do.
He faced the window head-on and looked at himself in the reflection.
He was displeased at seeing fine wrinkles disgracing his otherwise fine and clear skin; he grimaced at seeing his black hair which was plagued with many white strands. However, his eyes wandered from his hair, and soon enough, he was looking himself in his own earthy, brown eyes.
They were just as clear as ever, however much the rest of him was aging.
He nearly wept at them after a moment.
They look so damned much like Shirley’s…
He thought to himself with unshed tears.
Whenever he was lonely, whenever he pined for Shirley’s company, he would ask Kori to bring her to life again. Kori had a magical power that few other waifs did; she could let Laurence--or whoever she pleased--relive memories as if they were happening to the person in present time. Kori had no choice over which memories he relived through her magic—it seemed to be random--but he didn’t care.
Even if it were the memory of Shirley getting killed, he didn’t care. He just wanted to see her again.
He turned from the window and faced his room with a heavy frown.
It was empty and silent as his eyes explored its grandness. The blue, fur-trimmed carpet, the tapestries hung on the wall along with the expensive portraits of himself and his wife, and an elaborately embroidered quilt atop the covers on his bed. His eyes lingered there on the bed for a moment, and he guiltily and giddily thought of Kori. He looked away in shame after a moment and back at the window. Something caught his eye—a movement in the window.
He breathed sharply and panted in fear when, in the reflection, a woman seemed to form out of nowhere.
Her features matched that of Shirley’s, but she was not the beautiful, blond-haired, brown-eyed girl he knew in life.
She was eyeless, armless, and her neck was mostly severed as it was in death.
He looked away from the window--although he still saw the ghost in his peripheral vision.
“I must be seeing things… I must stop thinking of her.”
But he couldn’t. His thoughts relentlessly led him to memory after memory with Shirley, and soon enough, he got lost in those memories and began reliving them even without Kori’s help.
He was trapped in an ugly memory that he didn’t want to relive, but couldn’t help reliving.
He and Shirley lived in a city just three days from Castle Maribel. The people there were overworked and overtaxed by the Arrozans and often had the scars from whips to prove it.
Laurence remembered vividly how many of the children in his home city of Brambel were so skinny that he could see their ribs; he remembered having to take extensive time off from his job as a cook to help make and erect yet another statue of the Arrozan king whose name he could not say without spitting it in a snarl of hateful rage.
“Herin.” Laurence said to himself out loud with his mouth twisting into a snarl.
Laurence remembered the statues of the human gods being torn down and replaced by the foreign, fairy goddesses; he remembered the Arrozans stamping out and extinguishing both the pride and the identity of the humans whose kingdom they had stolen.
He remembered his sister Shirley—finally fed up with toiling all day at making the tall statue of the Arrozan king until her hands were red and raw—turn on the fairy slave master overseeing her work.
Their youngest sibling—a boy of just twelve-years who Laurence couldn’t think about without turning into a sobbing mess—had fallen over from starvation and needed food and an apothecary. The slave master had cruelly shoved the boy to his feet and demanded he keep working. Shirley snapped and shoved the man—causing him to trip and fall over.
She picked up a nearby rock and slammed it against the slave master’s head until he died.
Pollyanna saw the whole display as she, too, was there to oversee their progress on the statue. She grabbed Shirley’s arm and dragged her off—promising to punish her and make her regret her actions.
When she returned, she had no eyes. She only had bloody splotches where her eyes had been.
That was when Laurence decided that, no matter what, he would overthrow the king. Even if it costed him his whole family he would—because he wished to see no more families suffer the way his did.
The problem was Pollyanna.
There had been so many slave revolts made up of hundreds of humans, and yet she had put them all down effortlessly and seemingly without a scratch on her. She was unstoppable.
Long ago, there was a theory that Pollyanna's life was inextricably woven in with the Arrozan who had stolen the human throne in the first place, Fjorn, but that theory was put to rest when the king died of old age and Pollyanna lived.
There was a knock at the door.
“Laurence? Did you want to see me?” Kori’s voice rang from beyond the door.
__
Eory was glad when Kori told him that he was allowed to take Gershom with him to the ball. The dog seemed to have a calming effect on him, and Eory would need that desperately at the ball.
"Laurence said it was fine to bring him." She had told him.
"That's... So kind of him." Eory had replied in shock.
Eory, Pollyanna, and Kori all bathed and dressed for the ball and met each other in front of the big, ornate double-doors to the ballroom.
Kori wore a floor-length, three-layered pink dress which poofed out absurdly, but beautifully, from her waste along with a pair of black gloves which smartly complimented the look.
Pollyanna’s dress, being picked out at the last moment from the servants in the castle, was a dress meant for a six-foot-tall woman and not a seven-foot-tall woman; it was also a dress that was only fit for a peasant girl. It had a plain brown bodice and was otherwise an unremarkable white dress underneath the bodice.
The servants had attempted to tame her wild hair and had, against all odds, managed to make it smooth and shiny. They had fashioned it into a tight bun on the top of her head and smoothed out some of her wrinkles with the use of makeup.
Eory wore the expensive, golden headdress that Kori had given him along with a short, blue capelet embroidered with yellow circles at the bottom which was draped neatly on his back. He wore a burgundy, open-necked shirt with laces at the neck and ruffles at the end of his sleeves. To match the suns embroidered on his capelet, there were suns embroidered on the bottom of the shirt to match. He wore simple black breeches and long boots to, as Kori put it, ‘keep the outfit simple’.
Night fell as the trio entered the ballroom where Eory took a deep breath before nodding to Pollyanna to open the door.
His senses were captivated by what he experienced within.
His eyes were enthralled by the brightly colored, beautiful outfits worn by fairies and humans alike as they danced. A woman spun away from her dancing partner—her ballgown dress twisting and then untwisting like a flower blooming.
His ears were enraptured by the sweet sound of a violin singing mixed in an indescribably euphoric way with the sound of a flute and a piano accompanying it.
His nose took in the smell of good food being offered on platters by the servants; chocolates, cheese, and little slices of meat.
Gershom barked in excitement, and Eory thought he would never see such a beautiful sight in all his life again.
He smiled gaily as he watched the many lords and ladies on the brightly lit, orange scene step in time to the music on the glorious and grand wide-open ballroom with a reflective tile floor.
In a moment, with Gershom in his arms, he joined them.