Dizzying, those gold-gleaming eyes slide over him, hunting the dark and dusty iron hallways of his empty body. Dazzling, they search the edges of his chess pieces, as if the weathered chips and cracks might tell of his next move. Dazed, they widen upon his cold face at the sound of their own name. Rehoboam. Said softly, it is a word to stumble into, to be lost in, like a thick fog. Said loudly and with pride, it tolls a swelling bell; the herald of a hero’s victorious procession. Said passionately, lowly, venomous with adoration, it- Well. No matter the specifics. It suits the cold, cavernous halls of his throat quite well, a haunting of ghostly glory, and perhaps our velvet hero agrees, for there is a light that flames to life behind his treasure-trove gaze and glitters off the sheltered gold and jewels therein when he hears it.

His response is an admirable play at the ingenue, big-eyed and questing and ignorant, but the Kingbreaker has seen his fingers twitch with eagerness over the chess board too many times, running calculations and theories so quickly that their sheer number seems to frustrate his noble brow. -And, indeed, a moment later he had turned serious, and hushed, and thoughtful. Thoughtful in a dire way. Thoughtful in a way of which cup holds the poison? Thoughtful in the way of knowing he’d drink it to find out.

“I know you now,” he whispers, and the iron monster’s head lifts a little under his scrutiny, perhaps proud, perhaps apprehensive. “And so I will know you always.” As Rehoboam’s sun-streaked stare lifts to the old blood of the Kingbreaker’s glittering eyes, the beast’s black lashes shutter them- content to be looked upon, maybe; unable to meet them, possibly. To be known. To haunt. As he had become a castle for so many long-dead things, so now would he, in turn, become such a ghoul in the brightly-lit rooms of this hero’s head, and he finds his feelings on this acknowledgment unsettlingly difficult to parse.

“What else would you ask of me?” Soft and perhaps trying to be innocent, to be naive of things he has learned and could not now unknow, for he- Rehoboam, that silver hero- is not the type, the monster thinks, who can ignore a thing he has discovered. His mind a restless, yawning mouth that consumes all it comes in contact with, and hungers for more after the last scraps are licked up and swallowed away into his thoughts. He won’t forget- not his mother’s mysterious distance, not the conundrum of the Lagoon and all its purpose, not the Kingbreaker. (Not the word, the cold and clattering old word, that had fallen from the Kingbreaker’s mouth between them and lay writhing, a bleeding, toothsome weight in the silence after its wretched wake.) What more could he ask of him indeed.

“Ask of you…” he repeats, watching Rehoboam’s sly silver bishop shift oh-so-shyly aside, inviting his eager rook to draw closer. “I wonder, what should I ask of you.” No question in his echoing voice, and he thinks the cracks in the mirror of his cold face are, too, now immortal in the dizzying maze of treasures behind Rehoboam’s waiting eyes. His own stare, molten and churning in the fissures of his basalt mask, rolls once again to the blade of white plunging down our lissome hero’s velvet nape. “Stay,” he rumbles, abrupt as a thunderclap. For a long moment, this is the only word between them, but the volcanic rock of his brow is cracking into new shapes, the plunging red caverns of his nostrils pluming with a sudden heave of breath, and his dry lips work silently against themselves for the duration of that hush.

“-Stay. Here, amongst this humid air and this sinking loam your mother sought before your own name. Where there may yet be specters for you to question, if you so value their opinions of your worth and purpose.” Each sentence drops in pitch and pressure, even as he draws nearer, so close their heads draw alongside each other and then past, the muted damp thud of his massive feet the sound of bodies falling limp, his still-speaking mouth drifting to a halt beside the flushed pink of his dear companion’s white-slashed throat. The last is nearly whispered: “Where I may find you again-” so low as to be nearly inaudible, but with no softness, only the hushed tremor of a foreshock promising an earthquake, which comes in full force with the thunderous quiver of his word: “-Rehoboam,” the hitch upon his M unintentional and wet.

He stays there, breathing the smell of foreign pine upon Rehoboam’s sweat-speckled flesh, for a length of time he could not in retrospect determine, drawing away only when the sound of our hero’s quiet swallowing shudders the dust and cobwebs from his long-forgotten rooms. Peeling himself from the heat of Rehoboam’s intimacy, he tips his last chess piece to the silver queen’s feet and thuds some little distance away, head tilted to the horizon but not seeing it.

“-But I do not take without giving. What then, my love, would you ask of me?”