The Shadow Riddle

The Shadow Riddle

I was staring dully at the wall. It’s bare stone, unremarkable. Yet, I stare at it every day for at least three hours, waiting for orders. Now its dinner time and I’m just standing here with my serving tray, standing at the elbow of the Bone Queen. It was supposed to be some big honor to serve her and wait on her but no one ever mentioned how BORING it would be.

“MARIN!”

My head snapped up suddenly at the sound of my name. Cursing silently to myself, as I had not been paying attention to my duties and was probably going to get a beating for it later, I quickly bent down, bowing over my serving tray so my ear was near the Queen’s mouth.

“Would you prefer to serve the crown with only one hand, my little troglodyte? Hmm?" she purred in my direction with a razor smile, never quite turning her head away from the table.

"No, your Highness."

"You really are more useless than sunscreen, aren't you?" she murmured, idly twirling a lock of her silken, blonde hair around her slender fingers.

“Yes, my Queen” I muttered, keeping my eyes downcast to avoid further ire.

I felt her gaze suddenly scorching my face with disdain and a momentary flash of rage. I held my breath and stilled all motion. I was briefly the mouse caught in the cat's glare. Any movement would trigger a terrible retribution.

"Hmm, very well. Fetch a new pitcher for the table, and be quick about it before I change my mind." she said airily, finally turning back to the conversation and dismissing me.

I heaved a silent sigh of relief and quickly stepped backwards toward the corridor.

“Right away, your Highness.”

Still bowing and slinking backwards, I risked a glance up at her expression to see how badly this would be later or if I could still recover her favor. That’s when a metal sheen caught my eye, glinting in the candle light on the Queen’s crown.

Her normal headdress was there, a tall halo of rib bones filed to sharp points in the shape of a headband, the tallest sitting over the middle of her forehead curving away from her face and soldered together with tarnished, steel fittings. But just in the front, draped across the three tallest ribs, was a silver circlet resting on her forehead. It was a heart with a small diamond set into the middle. It was very strange to see something so...surfacy, resting on the forehead of the befeared Bone Queen. Yet it looked…familiar to me, almost...nostalgic.

I had now stepped backwards out of her peripheral view, so I abruptly stood and turned around to go fetch a full pitcher. Thinking distractedly about the new bit of adornment the queen had acquired. Where had she gotten it?

We didn’t see many items like that down here anymore. After the Great Burning fifteen years ago and the Blood Wars that followed three years later, most of us survivors had moved underground into the Caves. No one knows where the Caves came from, who made them or how far they stretch and we still haven’t been able to map all of them, even after 12 years.

When the Blood War survivors started appearing, it was anarchy and was devolving quickly into battles of strength for food and resources as only the strongest and most vicious had survived. There were no rules, no peace, not anywhere.

Those that had found the Caves, the first wave of refugees after the Great Burning, chose the best convergence of location, accessibility and resources to begin curating our new habitat. They were angry and resentful that the Blood War refugees were here at all. Why couldn’t they inhabit the other sections of the caves? Two neo-factions had formed from this dispute. Here we still have access to the surface, fresh water from the Old River and are deep enough to benefit from the dying heat of the Earth, a very rare combination in this sunless home, which makes this section of the Caves the most coveted. It now houses more than half of the remaining de-surfaced population.

Down here there wasn’t much trade, as no one really surfaced anymore, and especially not for jewelry as all metals had been collected and melted down during the blood wars for prosthetics and weaponry. Surface trades were simply too dangerous and not worth risking the scavengers, half mad and crazed with war, hunger and isolation. So how would the Queen have found a trinket like that? And why did it look so familiar to me? A memory flickered at the back of my mind, just out of reach.

I arrived at the kitchen and quickly beggared our cook, Myrna, for a new draft of wine for the pitcher.

“Don’t crack it like the last one, or you’ll be trekking to the surface to get me a new one!”

“Yes, Myrna. Just hurry and fill it please, the Queen isn’t very happy with me at the moment”.

“Daydreaming again, eh Marin?” Myrna snorted “well that serves you for slacking off time and again. You watch it or she won’t put up with you any longer”.

I sighed, trying not to roll my eyes, “I know, thanks” and hurried back down the corridor with the pitcher on my tray, frowning in concentration.

Really though, the Bone Queen. She isn't as scary as all that and such an awfully wicked name for someone who used go by Laci. She used to be the most beautiful girl in my surface village and she sat right next to me in our lessons. We were friends until we, well, weren’t. I am one of the only people left who knows who she used to be and one of the only people who knows how smart she actually is.

She arrived in the Caves dragging a massive battle axe, drenched in blood, blonde hair in filthy dreadlocks and snarling like a beast and then proceeded to negotiate her way into what passed as the new government. She was a bit insane when she came down and took out two fully armed guards in a gruesome and messy event. In reality, it was a complete accident but rumors spread like wild fire and no one wants to hear the truth when the rumors are so much more interesting. Ever since, everyone has been very effectively terrified of her and she has used it to her advantage. That’s how she frightened and convinced everyone into submission and support of her throne ascension.

The only problem is, I know what really happened just before she arrived and that axe wasn’t even hers. But I keep quiet, that’s how I got to be in the oh-so-special position that I’m in at the moment. Hand servant to the Queen. Its fine and all, warm bed, food, water, wages and protection from the leering eyes and violent hands that follow and beset the unclaimed women in the Caves. I shuddered thinking of the terror of my first night here and that narrow escape.

I shook myself back into the present and my duties, focusing on not spilling or cracking the pitcher.

“On your right, My Queen”.

I leaned over to fill the Queen’s goblet, dipping closer to her to reach the table. As I did so my eyes were once again level with the heart shaped circlet dangling from the crown of ribs on Laci’s head and that’s when it hit me. That fuzzy little memory flickering in the back of my mind roared up in front of my eyes.

My mother, her soft voice, her warm scent and green eyes. The brush of her finger stroking my cheek and the heavy weight of a silver locket in my hands. My mother’s voice echoed in my head as if she spoke through water, garbled and barely memorable, but comforting none the less. A silly rhyme she used to make me repeat, floated unbidden into my mind, “Beware the nothing that has a name, for it lurks in every doorway and will not hide behind the flame. To find the light and embrace the power, look inside and find comfort in the sea. For in the darkness without sight, you will find me.”

My mother gave it to me when I was six and she died shortly after in the Great Burning. I thought I had lost that locket when our village was raided and burned, our small home with it. I hadn’t thought of that nightly chanting ritual for a very long time.

Frowning and distracted, I squinted at it, searching, and on the left side of the locket where it hinged, was the dent I had made with my teeth the first time I tried to open it. I hadn’t seen that necklace in more than fifteen years. I scowled, doubting. How would Laci have MY locket, HERE of all places? After all this time? I would be able to tell for certain if I could see the back. My initials had been engraved in it, MM.

As I leaned closer, squinting, there was a sudden gasp and the Bone Queen jumped up out of her seat as red wine poured over the edge of the goblet, down the lip of the table, ran onto her lap and then the floor. In collective horror, the entirety of the banquet hall turned to stare at me in pure terror and hushed silence.

Eyes wide and hands shaking in rage, Laci the Bone Queen turned to face me and, with my chintzy childhood locket hanging from her forehead, snarled, “Now you die, Cave Rat”.

As I stood there with my mouth gaping open, wine flooding the floor and the whole parliament staring at me, all I could think was, she couldn’t come up with anything more creative than Cave Rat?