always and forever is forever young
your shadow on the pavement, the dark side of the sun

A tiny flame, like a little heartbeat, sprung up from the tip of the magic box when he flicked the catch. The minute surge of fire latched greedily onto the paper hovering above it, producing a more powerful wave. A charred frontier moved swiftly across the document while flames licked at the base, curling the corners. The gold-printed word at the top, urgente, caved in on itself.

“Hope that wasn’t important,” Helena, the chamber maid, remarked.

Mallos could have lit the fire himself, but the lighter fascinated him. He flicked the catch repeatedly, watching the flame appear and disappear. Mortals these days had newfound magic of their own.

Helena clucked at him, apparently unimpressed by the cinders dropping onto the desk which she would have to clean up. She’d been assigned to his quarters at some point during his absence, presumably because someone higher up in the food chain had determined that she would be a match enough for him. Most of his previous maids had ended up in his bed or outside the king’s office in a rage. She picked up the cushions on his sofa and plumped them furiously, muttering about pyromaniac deities.

“God of the sun,” Mallos reminded her, flicking the lighter again. How did it work?

“And piracy,” Helena grunted, shaking her head like it was a great scandal. “God of piracy, sponsoring the royal family. You’d never hear of that in my faith.”

Mallos would have rolled his eyes at the prospect of another lecture about Helena’s own private pantheon of deities, but he was too busy trying to find out how the lighter came apart.

“Bloody pirates,” she grumbled, moving Mallos’ sketchpad off the coffee table so she could dust it down. A pointless exercise, since it wasn’t even dusty. “My nephew fights pirates, you know. Helped bring in that batch yesterday. Hope they never come out of those cells.”

Mallos, who had extracted a screwdriver from his desk and was avidly unscrewing the lighter’s backing, had stopped listening. He was so focused on the screw that he didn’t notice when Helena accidentally knocked his mug off the coffee table. It slipped to the ground and smashed into a million pieces. She hesitated, glancing at him, but carried right on dusting when he didn’t even look up.

“Gaol is too good for some of them, though,” she continued thoughtfully. “That Warbird, she needs the noose. If you ask me…”

He glanced up, his eyes slightly unfocused like he was still thinking about the lighter. “What did you say?”

“Didn’t you hear? They caught the Warbird yesterday. If she isn’t hanged, my poor brother will turn in his – ”

She broke off, startled, when Mallos leapt out of his seat like he’d been electrocuted. He vanished; the screwdriver dropped with a resounding thud onto the desk. Helena blinked at it for a moment and then carried on dusting, still muttering under her breath.

Mallos wasted no time trying to negotiate the winding castle interior. It was like a labyrinth. He teleported directly down into the dungeons, where the guards on duty looked only slightly surprised to see him. They half-heartedly suggested that he should probably get permission from the king before he went into any of the cells, which he ignored, and they didn’t push it any further.

There were two guards on duty by every entrance to the dungeons, but none actually inside. Why would there need to be? The cells were completely secure. Once Mallos brushed aside the guards’ feeble protests and slipped into the dungeons, there wasn’t another soul in sight. A crossroads of corridors led off towards different blocks of cells. Torches lit the windowless walls with their dim, flickering light. Pirates, pirates… where were the pirates? Mallos put his hand on the wall and closed his eyes, tapping into a power he rarely used: ecological empathy. The walls to his right were thicker than the walls to his left and had more metal within them. That had to be the high security cells.

He turned right, walking past further corridors leading off into different blocks of cells. At the end of the corridor was a small, poky room furnished only with a table and a couple of chairs. Two guards were playing poker with doubloons and a deck of cards. A thick, metal door adorned the wall on the far side.

“Hey.” One of the guards noticed him. “What are you doing down – ”

Mallos skirted their table and walked through the door as though it wasn’t there. The guards glanced at each other, shrugged and went back to their game.

Five thick, metal doors lined the wall on each side. Now that he was closer, Mallos extended his psychic abilities to sense which rooms were occupied and which weren’t. At first he couldn’t sense Croe’s energy and thought perhaps he’d taken a wrong turn, but something about the occupant in cell three made him pause. He checked again. It was her, just… different. He slipped through the door as easily as he had the previous one.

The room was even dimmer than the corridor, shadowy. The ceilings were high and the two torches, the only light in the room, were high out of reach. Their ever-moving light made the contours of the room seem more sharp while at the same time semi-obscuring the room’s minimal furniture. A low, metal bed with a thin mattress was wedged against the far wall. A tap jutted against the wall next to him. And there, huddled on the floor…

Quiet as a cat, Mallos closed the distance between them and crouched down on the floor beside her, taking her head in his hands. His dark eyes searched her face, unhindered by the lack of light. What he’d meant to say, are you alright?, seemed laughably inadequate and self-fulfilling. There was nothing alright about any of this.

“Are you hurt?” He asked instead, gentle. A less obtrusive question with a practical answer. He removed one his hands from her head and sought out her hand instead, running his fingers over it, looking for scratches and scrapes.

i can feel you in the silence saying, “let forever be,
love, and only love, will set you free.”