Our young hero is tense, a little restless- caught, it seems, between the relief of recoiling and the- pride is not the right word. Not for this boy. It’s something else that makes stillness in the Kingbreaker’s long, deep shadow worth the nerves, he thinks. Something that makes him listen attentively, but his dark eyes in his ash-soft face are not on the board, not watching the pieces that he moves; they are watching the Kingbreaker, and his purposeful, steady hands, and his little army. He wonders if the boy even wants to win, or if he feels that this match is something else altogether. When he watches the monster move his pieces, what does he see?

When he hears the word ‘love’, there is no alarm on his face, only a naked distrust- and even still, how soft that distrust lies across the landscape of his slender head. His eyes and ears are still upon the beast, and still his eager young fingers feel across his pieces on the board, as if the Kingbreaker’s gruesome confession were a play he’s trying to puzzle out the counter to. He has a name, he confesses in turn, and the silence that follows is expected, and yet softer than the monster anticipated. That it’s our heroic figure- our Rehoboam- who breaks it is not expected, and the shadowy beast exhales a long, slow cloud of surprise, close enough to mist the twines of Rehoboam’s dark forelock with the dew of the Kingbreaker’s cavernous lungs like diamonds speckling his noble brow.

“You said you loved me?” He inclines his massive head in acknowledgment, though as he does, the word- “Love-” drives from his mouth, heavy and pressing and uncharacteristically insistent, crushing Rehoboam’s casual attempt to urge it into the past under the shackling weight of the present. “Those who love me call me Reh,” he pushes carefully, bladed dark lashes over liquid dark eyes in a velvet face, and all of them pointing at the Kingbreaker, watching him, calculating him, weighing the cold figure of his emotionless mouth against the hot chaos of his glittering eyes, and he- Rehoboam, our noble hero, tremulous on his sleek, slender legs- presses, so deliberately, a step closer. Obliging, dark and rippling with unused muscle in the shuddering patchwork of leafy shadow, the iron monster lowers his great head, as if bending to hear a sacred promise. “And what do I call you?” Ruddy as half-dead embers stoked to life, his gleaming gaze slides to Rehoboam’s deep forest stare, and stays there, close enough that his wild forelock is tangling with our hero’s, twining it in a nest of black brambles of curls.

“I love you.” With the finality and omen of a guillotine blade sliding into place. “No name, nor curse, nor incantation could cleave it from me. I have chosen it in spite of you; because of you; in your honour. Just as the force of you cannot be contained within the tender care of a nickname bestowed upon your gentle brow. If I never spoke your word, you would still, dear heart, know that I love you. Rehoboam. Reh.” Each name (curse; incantation) a freshly tempered blade, sharp and metallic in his pluming forge of a mouth and ready for blood, but lain, harmless, across the Kingbreaker’s proffered palms. The silence after is long and churning with considerations; a maze of them. A shifting house of mirrors of them, for he knew what he’d offer the moment Rehoboam asked for it. An inevitability- but even so, as he stares into the forest of Rehoboam’s deep eyes, he allows himself to consider.

“I wonder, my darling,” he begins at last, quietly, his voice merely an echo of a voice- a ghost of past emotion, long murdered, but remembered in every hallway of his heart and haunting still his ghoulish gaze- “if you would invoke me if you knew it.” He has a suspicion that he knows the answer, and that Rehoboam, that careful, clever hero, does as well. ‘What do I call you?’ he phrased it, a cunning application of a seemingly harmless pawn. The steel beast has no issue surrendering his queen to such a play.

“I will take any name you offer me, but if you seek such a word from me, there is only the Kingbreaker.” Though his voice is still low and seemingly from great distance, there is no longer the faded memory of passion in it, only the distant roar of the sea and the muted red dash of meat and bone against brine-slick rock, inevitable and alone.