Meum Miraculum

Chapter 39

Alaricus' POV
I clench my hands at my sides remembering the dirty way the bastard king would look at my mother. Her tan hardened complexion wasn't something most men found favourable at the time, but he had been enamoured by it. All too pleased when my lovely younger sister too had inherited the foreign traits. Although she was as kind and sweet as my mother was, she was much more fragile. Time had hardened my mother and she was the strongest person I knew including the all powerful queen pythonissam, but my sister was fragile. A determined mind, but a heart that was much too kind. She was sheltered by the both of us.

It was as if I could still see her innocent green eyes gazing up at me. At the time autism was still considered an ailment, a sickness. It was unfortunately misunderstood, and Lilium's childish innocence had been ridiculed. All the more reason for my mother and I to have to protect her, and making her even more sheltered and blind to the cruelty of the world.

Keeping those memories locked away in my mind had become a habit, but for Amara I'd travel to even the darkest parts of my mind.
Although it wasn't me that had the right to look at those memories as a tragic event for I'd caused them, the culprit shouldn't find solace in pain, but rather in punishment. It had taken place centuries ago and yet I could still remember every moment, every emotion as if I were reliving it.

-------------------------------------------------------
Waking up had always been difficult for me, despite the scratchy cot I lay on, my dreams weren't something I liked to leave behind to face reality. But I couldn't ignore the light calls of Lilium. As soft as her voice was her calls to awaken me were persistent.

"Wake up Alaricus, I made breakfast." She whined and I smiled under the cover of my thin blanket, reaching out to grab her little hand and tugging her so she'd fall onto the cot. She let out a little giggle as she fell, looking at me with the big green eyes. For a 14 year old girl Lilium looked to be younger, but perhaps that was only part of what made her appear so fragile.

"And what did you make little Lilium?" I ask her and she twists her nose to the side at my words. In her mind she was a warrior, and in no way little.

"Oatmeal." She says and I nod, it was the one breakfast item mother and I had taught her, but Lilium was a brilliant little chef she'd always use the little we had in the home to put her own twist to the oatmeal. At times resorting to go to the royal home to get ingredients. Although that I had strictly warned her not to do. We didn't need their food.

Her tan skin and dark hair made her look like a younger version of my mother, her green eyes though from our grandfather. Her looks won her the favour of the king. Although he didn't particularly like admitting we were his children as no respectable king liked admitting he had children with his concubine or perhaps it was the queen that stopped him from doing so. I though was unmistakably his son, our resemblance so uncanny that some foreign royal visitors would think I was the prince.

But it was his infatuation with my mother that made him dote on my younger sister. For perhaps in his twisted mind in a way, she was a result of his ownership of my mother. Although she was nothing like him. She was everything good, while he was the human embodiment of evil, a malicious old man. But he treated my sister well, in his eyes being a father meant giving gifts so he gave her what we couldn't afford to.

Although the king treated my sister like a daughter, that wasn't the way the prince looked at her. I was the first born of the king but it was the queen's children that became successors. Unfortunately they were unable to birth a daughter to take the queen's place, and although the queen loved her son, her and the whole kingdom had wanted a daughter. For women were much more powerful than men.