A Fool & A Wishing Well

Verse I: A Long Time Ago

The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished.

Although, things change when I tell you that sentence is subjective.

Things change even more when I tell you a certain word in that introductory sentence is entirely subjective.

The word in question is… vanished.

At what point is the word vanished no longer applicable if the subject of its context is gone?

Dead and gone.

Gone with the wind.

Does someone vanishing become a moot point when there is no one left who knows they have vanished? When there is no one left around to look for them? To accidentally stumble upon their fitting final resting place? When the remnants of their existence erodes with time? When no one is even privy to Her Majesty’s disappearance in the first place?

Enough is enough. I wouldn’t spend too much brain power pondering these questions, lest you enjoy metaphorically running around in circles in your head. Or losing your mind. Typically, that’s how rhetorical questions work.

And once you lose your mind, you’d be hard-pressed to find it once again, like a Queen who vanished on a day when some river ran backwards.

…

Right?

…

The protagonist of this tale—not yet introduced—will have far more pressing concerns than a vanished Queen. When he arrives at the location of her corpse, the body will have decomposed and decayed far beyond recognition. For all of eternity, the Queen’s soul will remain vacant, vanished, and despite Her crown resting gracefully atop her skeletal head, she will be long gone to a place that more likely than not, cares naught, for trifling status symbols. Her crown will be of no concern to our hero, if you can call him that, because if you haven’t picked up on the themes of this fragment of our tale, I shall regale you with a hint.

The word hero is also subjective.

…

Right?

…

In a land forever scarred by the vicissitudes of fate, at an entirely insignificant point of a river known as Chi, an ominous tower sprung from its depths which formed a dam blockading the flow of water. This world, like most other worlds—subjectively, or not—functions with fundamental, unchanging properties like gravity, demanding water flow downhill, typically into another body of water.

Speaking of bodies…

This dam was not created by any creature, animal, nor force of nature.

It was ‘man-made.’

However, objectively, it was also not ‘man-made,’ since those responsible for its creation had no intentions of creating a dam. Its formation came about as a byproduct of the events on the day our Queen in question had… vanished.

Verse II: The Day Before A Long Time Ago

The Sun rises. The Sun falls.

The full Moon rises. The full Moon falls.

Zoom in. Zoom in more.

More. And more, still.

From every angle, direction, and perspective, there is darkness.

Zoom out, just a little.

‘Twas merely the blackest of eyes. Not those of a demon, nor of a human, but of an Artic tern, sterna paradisaea, a bird called Vida, part of a species known for its legendary feats of migration. The magnificence of its looks was—shall we say—subjective. The black fur atop its head drowned out the location of its eyes from any outside observer.

Thus, naturally, we shall not take on the role of an outside observer.

We shall travel inside the mind Vida—a lonely, lost, and forsaken bird, though it didn’t know it—as insignificant as a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of a World.

From inside, we look out.

Through trails, passes, and trees galore.

Above mountains, below valleys, and parallel to the seashore.

The rain. Some snow. Obstacles.

Dead-ends... With no end.

The Queen and Her army marched with an ever-increasing fervor into foreign lands, chasing a legend. A myth. A treasure. Fool’s gold. The end of the rainbow. The beginning of a new dynasty. The end of an era.

And at long last, her prize lay before her. Subconsciously, she brought a hand up to fiddle with her crown, unable to tame the inferno that caused her heart to hammer away inside her chest, beating furiously and so boisterously it sounded like a drum.

Up above, Vida watched curiously. Without the company of its family, it relied upon the scraps thrown away from the menacing army to survive. Seeking refuge in crude, quickly constructed shelters allowed it to stay alive as long as it did.

A shame, it was, for just when the bird began feeling safe…

Just as it was starting to feel some modicum of comfort…

Right after its simplistic bird brain felt the rest of its life was going to be ok..

It would die.

The Queen’s army roared in unison louder than thunder. They were well versed in battle and composed of several unique battalion groups specializing in several forms of offensive tactics. It was said the ten strongest individual warriors in all the land were a part of this great army. Little did She know, the tall tales, the hubris, the unmitigated gall in believing the world revolved around Her, would all contribute to her doom.

Well, on second thought, even the humblest of leaders would fall to the opponent she would soon face. There’s a word I can’t quite think of describing the impending doom of every living soul within the vicinity of Violy Tower. What is it again? Oh, right.

Subjective.

Stones sharpening steel echoed around the treacherous ground in which the structure containing the penultimate prize of all prizes swayed to and fro. One of the Queen’s men blinked, and the tower stopped swaying. How strange, he thought, yet kept the observation to himself.

He wasn’t the only one experiencing things that reached far beyond the paralyzing grip of an uncanny fear. The only thing scarier than a known enemy of ultimate power is an unknown enemy of ultimate power. Battle after battle had been won with such ease and such little casualties, their tenacity grew into complacence. Their patience and cunning turned into a blatant disregard of caution and overconfidence. To make matters worse, the journey here had turned their once beloved and assertive Queen into a hollowed version of herself, always searching for that place on the other side where the grass was greener that she could never find. And now that she had, well, you already know the outcome to this part of the tale.

The river ran backwards on the day the Queen vanished.

All that’s left is to fill you in on the details that happened just before.

Verse III: The River Flows Backwards

Vida thought nothing of flying from branch to branch, exploring this new territory. Beautiful as it was, this new land did not mesmerize by fields of green, crystal clear waters, or bristling life. It was hauntingly beautiful. The kind that makes your heart skip a beat. The kind that is capable of manifesting a cursed infatuation possessing a lover to destroy the person, place, or thing which embodies the seed from whence that love grows.

After crossing some invisible threshold, one split second the artic tern was alive, and the next split second it wasn't. An arrow pierced through Vida's left eye, pinning it to a tree.

The army below lingered well within earshot, clearly hearing the whizzing of the death arrow flying through the sky and the thump it made when colliding with the trunk of a tree, pinning the innocent dead creature to the tree like a wanted poster.

Already on edge from the eerie ambience of the place, goosebumps lining their arms and fear of ridicule preventing any of them to speak up, those that heard it chose not to aknoledge it. To ignore the potential problem and proceed ahead, a rather common, mortal reaction to danger when that 6th sense of impending doom infiltrates the psyche. Not like it would have mattered much if they did speak up, anyway.

The battle, if you could call it that, was over before it started.

Just as Vida had done moments earlier, the army and the Queen made their way towards the Tower looming in the foreground, prepared to siege it. The Queen rubbed her hands together as the moment she had been waiting for would soon arrive.

Two unseen figures appeared seemingly out of nowhere on top of the tower. Arrows leveled into the army like the pouring rain, massacring every single living soul in a matter of minutes.

There was no where to run.

There was no where to hide.

Thousands upon thousands of soldiers fell, literally and figuratively, their bodies tumbling down an embankment and into the river Chi. Eventually, the bodies stacked up so high and wide, it caused a dam in the river. Heads began to roll. Bodies and body parts mixed in with the water and mud, plugging every gap. The mass of the dead reached levels so insane, the decline the river flowed down reversed, subsequently causing the river to flow backwards.

Jumbled somewhere in the piles of the forsaken, the Queen and her crown were no more.

Verse IV: Jinn and the Tower

Jinn heard singing before he opened his eyes. The word singing was subjective, considering the melodic voice he heard belonged to a bird, chirping away, probably a nightingale.

Some days he found the songs of the birds to be the most calming, peaceful sound to ever exist. On other days, the incessant blaspheme of silence drove him to the brink of madness.

If you’ve been following along closely to this tale and paying attention to every word, or at the very least, the most important ones, you can probably guess what I’m going to say next, so I'll keep it short and sweet.

Madness is like a black hole. Once you get sucked in, you can't get out, and once you've crossed over, only those who have also penetrated the brink can see you in it.

Our protagonist Jinn opened his eyes. He had no recollection of how he got here. The first thing he saw caused a visceral reaction in his body so violent he screamed at the top of his lungs.

A tower. Another tower. Two towers?

"Wait. That isn't a tower..."

Although he too crossed the invisible threshold, death did not come for him. He walked slowly towards the tower and stepped inside. The front door existed no more. Some force of nature, or maybe some force of the supernatural, had destroyed the tower before he had gotten there.

On the top floor, which didn't take him long to reach, he found two dead lovers, locked in death's embrace. Two broken bows along with a seemingly infinite amount of arrows littered the surrounding area.

At first he couldn't see what the dead lovers were slumped up against, so he cautiously made his way closer.

A well. A wishing well. A cursed wishing well. And it was all dried up. Not a single...

Just then, before he could finish his thought, the well began to fill.