Dawn arrived not with light, but with a deeper shade of grey at the barred window. My body ached, a symphony of dull pains from malnutrition and poison. But the distilled water from last night had settled in my stomach without a fight, a small oasis of purity in my contaminated system. It was hope, measured in mouthfuls.
The servant girl's words echoed. The old ice cellar… the spring there… it is clean.
A gift or a noose? In Prince Kieran's memories, the north kitchens had been abandoned years ago after a fire. The cellars beneath were considered unstable, haunted by the echoes of past servants' gossip. A perfect place for a sickly prince to have a tragic, "accidental" fall.
But the pull from the Star-Eater was insistent, a subtle gravity tugging at my bones towards that same northern wall. It wasn't a voice. It was a longing. A homesickness for a depth that wasn't my own.
First, I needed to get out.
The lock on my door was a simple iron bolt on the outside. The key would be with the guard, who made rounds at predictable intervals—morning, noon, evening, changing with a bored grunt. My window was barred with rusted iron, set in stone. No exit there.
My plan relied on my one weapon: their expectation of my weakness.
When the morning gruel and poisoned water arrived—brought by a silent, elderly servant this time—I enacted phase one. As the man set the tray down, I began to cough. Not a polite cough, but a wracking, convulsing, lung-tearing performance. I curled into a ball, trembling violently, letting drool spill onto my pillow.
The servant paused, a flicker of something—pity? annoyance?—in his eyes. He made no move to help. Just watched until the fit subsided, then left without a word. Good. The report would be: The prince is worse. He'll be gone by week's end.
Phase two began after he left. I forced myself to eat half the gruel. It tasted of nothing, but my body screamed for calories. The energy would be needed. I poured the poisoned water into the chamber pot, refilling the pitcher from my small, hidden reserve of condensation.
Then, I waited for the guard change.
At noon, the lock clanked. The door opened just enough for the departing guard to grunt a summary to his replacement. "Little rat's still breathing. Coughing up his guts. Nothing to report."
"Another quiet shift," the new guard, a man with a nasal voice, replied. The door shut. The bolt slid home.
Now.
I moved to the chamber pot and, fighting every gag reflex, smeared a small amount of its contents around my mouth and on the front of my thin sleeping tunic. The stench was immediate and revolting. Perfect.
Then, I began to moan. Loudly. Pitifully. I thrashed on the bed, making the frame creak.
"Ugh… help… stomach… burning…"
I kept it up for a full minute. Then, I slid to the floor with a solid thud and went silent.
I heard a muttered curse outside. A key fumbled in the lock. The door swung open.
"What in the seven hells…"
The guard stood in the doorway, his nose wrinkling in disgust. He saw me: a small, filthy form collapsed on the floor, reeking of sickness, motionless.
"Prince?" He took a reluctant step inside, peering. "Don't you die on my shift."
This was the moment. As he leaned over, his attention fully on checking for breath, I struck. Not with strength, but with precision.
My hand, clutching the tarnished copper buckle I'd used in my experiments, swung up and raked the sharp edge across his exposed ankle, just above his boot.
"Yow!" he yelped, jumping back more in surprise than pain. It was a shallow scratch. "You little bastard!"
He drew his foot back to kick me.
I looked up, letting my eyes roll back in my head, and vomited the half-digested gruel onto the floor between us. It was a masterpiece of timing.
The guard recoiled with a roar of disgust. "Filthy, maggot-ridden worm!" He backed out of the room, his desire to punish me utterly defeated by his revulsion. "Rot in here for all I care!"
The door slammed shut. The bolt shot home with finality.
But it didn't matter.
Because in that moment of his disgust and distraction, while he was focused on my face and the mess, my other hand had reached out and quietly, smoothly, pulled the large iron key from the ring on his belt.
It now lay cool and heavy beneath my trembling body.
I waited, counting to one hundred in my mind, listening to his fading curses down the hall. Then, I moved.
Wiping my face clean with a dry corner of the sheet, I crawled to the door. My heart hammered against my ribs. I fitted the key into the lock. It turned with a soft, oiled clunk that sounded like thunder to my ears.
I cracked the door. The corridor was empty, lit by distant, guttering torchlight. The air was colder here, smelling of dust and damp stone.
The pull from the Star-Eater surged, a compass needle swinging true north. Down.
I became a shadow. Prince Kieran's memories of these abandoned servant passages were fragmented but present—a child hiding from tutors, exploring forgotten corners. I used them now. I stuck to the darkest walls, avoiding the main arteries, moving toward the scent of ancient smoke and decay.
The north kitchens were a skeleton of a place. Charred beams reached like blackened bones toward a collapsed roof open to the grey sky. Snow dusted the rubble. And there, in a far corner, half-hidden by a fallen cabinet, was a dark, square opening in the flagstones. A chute, once used to haul ice blocks, now a yawning mouth.
The wooden hatch was rotted, sagging inward. The pull from within was a physical force now, a hum in my teeth.
This was it. The point of no return.
I listened. Only the wind sighed through the ruins. Gripping the edge, I lowered myself into the darkness, my feet finding slick, uneven steps carved into the stone. Down I went, into the belly of the palace.
The cold deepened, becoming absolute, seeping into my marrow. The light from above vanished. I was blind, guided only by the icy touch of the wall and that relentless, inner pull.
After an eternity of descent, my foot hit level ground. The air changed. It was no longer dusty, but damp, heavy, and tasted of minerals and… something else. An ozone tang, like the air after a lightning strike, but colder, older.
A faint, impossible light began to emanate from the walls themselves. Not torchlight. A soft, blue-white bioluminescence from patches of strange fungus clinging to the stone. It illuminated a vast, low-ceilinged cavern. This was the ice cellar. But no ice remained.
Only water.
A black, perfectly still pool dominated the center, fed by a silent trickle from a crack in the far wall. The spring.
But I barely saw it. My eyes were locked on the far end of the cavern.
There, embedded in the stone wall as if it had grown there, was a massive, circular door. It was made of a metal that drank the faint light, darker than midnight. Its surface was etched with spiraling patterns that hurt my eyes to follow—patterns that looked less like decoration and more like frozen equations, celestial maps of voids no human eye should see.
And at the center of the door was a single, deep impression. A handprint.
The pull wasn't coming from the spring. It was coming from behind that door.
…home…
The whisper was clear now, filled with a yearning so profound it stole my breath.
This was no forgotten larder. This was a seal.
And I knew, with a certainty that came from the thing sleeping in my soul, that the handprint was mine.
A sound broke the silence. A soft scuff of a boot on stone, from the top of the chute.
I whirled, my blood freezing.
Silhouetted against the dim grey light above was the guard. He held a drawn dagger. And he wasn't alone. Beside him, her face pale but set in a look of grim resolution, was the servant girl.
"Told you he'd come here," the guard said, his voice echoing in the cavern. "The little rat found his nest."
The girl looked at me, her eyes filled with a terrible pity. "I'm sorry, Prince Kieran," she whispered. "But he pays my family's debts."
It wasn't a trap she'd set. She was the bait. And I, the desperate, dying mouse, had followed it right into the cat's mouth.
The guard started down the chute, dagger gleaming.
I was cornered. Weak. Unarmed. With my back to a sealed, alien door.
The Star-Eater within me didn't stir with fear. It stirred with something else.
Annoyance.
---