Weekly Drabble #229: The Question of the King (Patreon)

A notice: there'll be no drabble prompt thread this week, due to Christmas and related shenanigans, but a new prompt thread will go up on the 26th, so keep your eyes peeled.

This week's prompts are from Framing Device and Pyro Hawk with 'i shall set you free' and 'freedom's price', wherein a young would-be archaeologist grapples with a revelation and its potential consequences. Enjoy!

The Question of the King:

Jason Clarke stared at the gold coin on his desk.

To touch was to take.

The Golden King had made that absolutely clear; it was written above the entrance to his labyrinth in a language no one had spoken or written for thousands of years, but nonetheless instantly understandable to every visitor. Only he was allowed to touch his ever-growing hoard, the wealth he had choked the life from his kingdom over, but as his riches grew, so had his paranoia and obsession. He had ordered his priests and shamans to draw a creature from the darkest, cruellest pits of reality that existed, binding it into the unwilling body of a slave and setting it to forever guard his wealth.

Even thousands of years past his death and the fall of his kingdom, the Blind One was still bound to that command. Anyone who so much as touched a single coin, whether in abject greed or unaware curiousity, would die by the demon’s hands. At least, almost anyone.

Despite his madness, the Golden King had recognized that he was not immortal. He allowed for the ‘heirs of his body’ to be able to touch his endless wealth without triggering the curse he’d laid upon his treasure – but only upon his death. As long as he lived, he would control his kingdom’s wealth and no usurper – even his own offspring – would be able to challenge him. Not with every scrap of coin protected by The Blind One.

The Golden King had been dead for thousands of years now, his kingdom completely lost to time and no trace of his people remained upon the Earth, but The Blind One still followed that edict. No one but the Golden King or his heirs could be allowed to touch his treasure. Without him, that left only his heirs.

Jason Clarke continued to stare at the gold coin on his desk, one of the countless thousands that had filled the Golden King’s labyrinth, one of many scattered through the halls, most likely dropped by some long-forgotten grave-robber or explorer in their final, futile flight from the catacombs’ guardian. There were more than a few such discarded treasures; The Blind One cared nothing for them and rarely, if ever, bothered herself to return them to the vaults and chambers that they had originally lain within. Covered in dirt and all but unseen, it had remained where it was for God-knew-how-long, until he had sat down to share lunch with her and his hand had, quite inadvertently brushed up against it. He’d looked down at the thing he’d touched. He’d seen the faint gleam of metal under the grime and his heart had stopped.

That was all it took; he knew that well enough. The Golden King didn’t believe in accidents.To touch is to take. Whether you were cramming fistfuls of gold and gems into a satchel or you brushed up against a single discarded coin was all the same to him and to the curse he’d placed. Once it was carried into the treasure troves and deposited with the rest of the innumerable wealth here, anyone who touched his hoard was branded a thief – and the punishment for thievery was death. The Blind One had been sitting right next to him, but she didn’t so much as raise her head. She had noticed the sudden spike of fear and his breathlessness, but he told her he thought he had seen something in the darkness.

The demon laughed, quite amused. There might indeed be things in the darkness here, especially at the edges of the ever-growing labyrinth, but there was nothing worse than her. Nothing that would dare approach the demon, even while she was taking the shape of her long-dead host.

He didn’t know why he’d done it; most likely to prove something to himself. He’d managed to slip the coin into his pocket without her noticing. He’d wanted to know why she didn’t react, but he didn’t want to call attention to it. He assumed that it was something from one of the dead visitors; one of their own coins or jewellery that had been dropped during their doomed escape or final struggles. Regardless, the safest place to examine it was far away from The Blind One. He didn’t know if the Golden King considered the leavings of dead thieves to be his own and didn’t want to put that question out there. The possibility that the answer was ‘yes’ was far too risky.

When he returned to his apartment and dug the coin out, his heart had nearly stopped for a second time. It was one of the Golden King’s trove, hewn from the Earth from a long-forgotten mine, smelted, shaped and finally deposited deep below the ground and cursed to destroy any who touched it.

Any but the Golden King and his descendants.

Jason slumped down in his chair. It turned out that something of the Golden King’s reign did survive. He’d never studied his own family’s genealogy, but now he wondered if he should. Thousands of years... hundreds of descendants. How much of the tyrant’s blood mattered? A drop, a single gene sequence? Was it passed through mitochondrial DNA? Carried from the survivors of whatever cataclysm had swallowed the ancient empire through the native populations and then to colonists and immigrants.

He also wondered just how many heirs that the mad ruler had... but in the end, did that matter? He was the one here. He was the first of them to step inside the king’s halls, the first person to touch the treasure in countless millennia and not suffer the wrath of its guardian.

He could free her.

That thought didn’t so much explode in his head like some grand revelation, but slithered in through the cracks and crannies of his awareness. The Golden King’s heirs could touch the treasure without fear of reprisal, and so too could they free the demon from her bondage.

His first instinct was to do so, but his rational mind quickly surfaced. What would freeing her even mean? For all the time they’d spent together, The Blind One was still a demon. That wasn’t metaphor or poetic license; she might appear human, might seem waifish and harmless when she wore the guise of the girl who’d been sacrificed to her, but she wasn’t. She was a thing of hunger, endless need and an unquenchable desire for slaughter. What would freeing her mean?

Would she be sent back to whatever Hell she’d dwelt within before the Golden King conjured her? Free from shackles, would she indulge in slaughter until she was killed? Would she tempt, torment and corrupt humans as she might have once done? What would she do once she was freed by her enslaver’s commands?

He tapped a pen against the surface of his desk. He’d started all this just following ancient subway lines and forgotten tunnels. He’d never expected to find what he had, to have the questions he did or the problem in front of him now. He was just a simple grad student, looking to finish his Masters. He’d never wanted any of this, but he had it now. All wrapped neatly up in a terrible question he’d never once even considered.

What did it mean to be king?