Mere Madness

Daughter of the Dark King II

She awoke to the first inklings of the dawn’s morning chill, shivered, and this was new to her. All that was around her was deserted; and the village, though it looked no different than before, was empty of light and life and curiosity. She remembered now only the confusion and the fleeing people. She felt naked now, as she had not before, and cold, and looked away from the village now for warmth and freedom from the nakedness.
She turned her gaze to the horizon, turning slowly as the distant view passed first the first then the second point of the compass, settling on the third as a place to reach, as there was a sign there in the distance with arrows that could barely be discerned; one to the left and one to the right, and from her very feet a path that traveled there. And the shadow that followed slipped from the well’s rock side to the dust that fell from her heels as she walked, and the curling wind made no sound as it carried it along behind her – waiting.

His words came to her on the morning mist as she walked, whispers, it seemed at first, that grew more clear as she approached. She liked the voice she heard, not hearing so much the words as the kindness in it; her light grew in the mist as her heart quickened to the sound of it.
“Mere madness, it must be, that this single droplet of a tear could be not more, nor less, water than the sea,” the jester said, for a jester he appeared, with peaked hat and leotard, sitting at the crossroad with the arrows and the branching of the road.
“How should I live for the moment it remains in the midst of my cup hands.”
And indeed there was a tear whose light shimmered with a glow that lit his face ever so slightly, and lent it kindness.
“How so?” said the Dark King’s daughter, “except with the kindness that I see and hear!”
And the jester looked through the shimmer of his madness and saw her, and her light, and her nakedness; and he felt his madness fall just a little from his eyes. At this he whimpered and clutched closer to him his tear and let it take him once more to comfort and safe blindness.
And the jester heard her say, “My nakedness does not become me, will you help me?” and he could not refrain. He arose and danced round about her waving hands in weaving motions, faster and faster he danced and the fabric of his moving hands made silk of the morning breeze and he clothed her with it.
“Even clothed with the morning breeze you cannot pass. I hold these crossroads by madness as the village holds the gate by sin.”
“I saw no sin in the village as I passed,” she said, “and it is empty now. I left because I was cold and naked and alone, and am much safer and warmer here.”
She smoothed the silk in the sunlight and delighted in it. She smiled at the jester now standing before her and his madness slipped once again at the light of it, and he clutched all the more his tear as she asked. “To whence do these crossroads go, of these two which do I choose?”
“I do not know,” said the jester, “none come here to the village and none leave.”
“I will take the left way then because it leads toward the sun.”
He looked at the way she choose and at the way his madness stood in her way. He looked at his tear and its light from which the spell came. And as he looked she bent and kissed his pale cheek in return for the silk and the kindness in his voice. She did not see his tear wash away in his outstretched hands, nor his gentle sadness turn to fear as his madness passed, and his eyes cleared, and his mind became as it once had been – thin and shallow like a child’s.
And the Dark King saw him and his spell dispelled, his tear washed away, and took him, and the wing covered and the desert wind dried and blew away all that had ever been there. The Dark King rested then at the crossroad where there was no one and there were no arrows to show the way, King now of this unknown crossroad…
His daughter did not look back, but walked onward letting the sunlight wash the cold from her cheeks, warming the silk made from the morning breeze, smiling at the kindness she remembered.