Chapter 2: The Knight's Humiliation
The vines didn’t just hold him; they slithered. They pulled, tightening their grip with a sound like cracking knuckles, and dragged him across the moss and over a rough threshold of exposed roots. The world tilted, the dank forest light fading into something colder, quieter.
The air changed. The smell of wet earth was gone, replaced by a dry, ancient cold that carried the faint scent of old blood, polished bone, and a perfume like frozen violets. The spongy ground became solid, slick under his back. Frost.
Lloyd gasped, his breath pluming in the sudden chill. He was in a cavern, the walls a jagged mosaic of blackened oak and bones set into the stone like macabre mosaics. Above, phosphorescent moss clung to the ceiling, casting a sickly silver light over everything. And at the far end, looming, was the throne. It was larger up close, a architecture of suffering. Ribs formed the arms and back, femurs the legs, and nestled in the crest he could have sworn he saw the empty sockets of a dozen skulls staring blankly out.
Willow walked ahead, her boots clicking on the frost-sheathed floor. She didn’t look back.
“This… this is blasphemy,” Lloyd managed to spit out, the words shivering in the cold.
“It’s recycling,” she said over her shoulder, her voice cheerful. “Very practical. Now, let’s get you out of that noisy shell.”
She waved a hand, almost bored.
Every buckle, every strap on his expertly fitted plate armor gave way at once. It didn’t fall apart; it simply disassembled itself. The goroutine snapped open, the cuirass split down the middle, the greaves and vambraces uncurled from his limbs. It was a silent, systematic dismantling. The pieces clattered to the frosty floor in a dissonant heap around him, leaving him in only his thin linen undershirt and braies.
The cold seized him immediately, a thousand needle-teeth biting into his skin. He shuddered violently, his muscles clenching. The vulnerability was worse than the chill. He was exposed, not just to the air, but to her gaze. She turned, leaning a hip against the arm of her throne, and looked him over with the appraisal of a buyer at a market.
“Not bad,” she mused. “All that training does have its visual benefits. A definite improvement over Sir Brayford. He was all gut and bluster.”
The thorny vines retreated, slithering back into cracks in the walls. He was free to move, but the command that came next was worse than any binding.
“Come here,” she said, her voice dropping into a soft, irresistible melody. It wasn’t a magical compulsion this time—he was painfully aware of that now. It was the sheer force of her expectation, layered over the crushing weight of his defeat. It carved a channel in his will and his body simply followed.
He tried to stand. His legs, numb and trembling, refused.
“Ah-ah,” she chided, sipping from a chalice that hadn’t been in her hand a moment before. It was a skull, the top neatly sawn away, the bone stained dark with wine. “On all fours. A knight crawls to his queen, doesn’t he?”
Shame burned hotter than any fire. It warred with the cold, leaving him nauseous. He looked from her cold eyes to the floor, at the frost that glittered between his bare hands. His breath came in ragged, white puffs. He saw his own reflection, blurred and broken, in the ice.
With a sob of pure hatred that choked in his throat, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.
The frost burned his palms and knees. Each movement was a small, exquisite agony of temperature and degradation. The distance to her throne stretched, a vast plain of humiliation. He kept his head down, watching his hands advance, one after the other, through the crystalline layer. The silence was broken only by the soft, wet sound of his own breathing and the occasional, delicate sip she took from her grisly cup.
He reached her boots. He stopped, staring at the intricate tooling on the leather, the flecks of dried mud.
“Good,” she said, her voice warm above him. “Now, settle. Right there.”
He knelt back on his haunches, a beast awaiting instruction. She shifted, then placed one boot, then the other, firmly onto the broad plane of his back. The weight wasn’t great, but the pressure, the symbolism of it, drove the air from his lungs. He was a thing. A stool. She adjusted her position on the throne, getting comfortable, and the pressure increased.
He could feel every shift of her weight through the leather soles. He could smell the wine, rich and fruity, mingling with the scent of her boots and the underlying chill of the bone-chamber.
“This is from Sir Alaric,” she said conversationally, tapping the skull-chalice with a fingernail. It made a faint clink. “Terrible swordsman, lovely cheekbones. Made for a better cup.” She took a long drink. “You’re warmer than Brayford. He always ran cold. Made for a chilly footstool. You’re quite adequate.”
Tears of rage blurred his vision, freezing on his cheeks. He focused on a single point on the floor, a crack in the stone. He poured all his fury, all his shattered pride, into that crack.
“The funny thing about you righteous types,” Willow continued, her tone light, conversational, as if they were sharing a tavern bench, “is the noise. All that clanging and proclaiming. It’s just cover. Underneath, you’re so… empty. So easy to fill up with whatever I need you to be. Fear. Obedience. A little warmth for my feet.”
She rested the chalice on the arm of the throne, next to a heavy book bound in what looked like tanned skin. She began to braid a section of her hair, humming a tuneless little song.
Lloyd remained motionless, the cold seeping up from the floor into his bones, the heat of her boots branding his soul. The only part of him that felt alive was the ember of hatred in his chest, buried deep under the layers of ice and shame. It was small. It was faint.
But it was his. And it was all he had left.