Aligning the Forgotten ✓

Chapter 1: Renit

One brutal shove to shut the old, splintered door isn't enough. Breathing heavy, Renit Marron, banished prince of Esaria, slams his shoulder against the rough surface once more. Not only for the need to hurry as the guards are getting close, but he's frustrated, too. Everything has fallen apart. He takes out his anger on the door until finally, the lock clicks shut and he's alone.

As he has been for the past month. Now a broken and guilted witch, he turns weakly towards the small attic space, presses his back against the door, and rests his head against the chipped wood. Even the sting of the splinters digging into his tunic, breaking through the thin fabric, isn't enough to bring him fully back to himself. He's forgotten who he is, it all went away the second Roux looked at him without a hint of recognition for the love they shared.

He squeezes his eyes shut in the dark but finds more waiting for him. Renit is tired of the dark, not only the swirling black clouds in his mind but the dim lighting of this petite attic space, the ceiling barely tall enough for him to stand at full height. The wooden beams stretched across the ceiling reach from one end of the space to the other, covered in the long-gone ghost of cobwebs and dust.

A small window barely big enough for Renit's hand is his only visual to the streets beyond and the cluster of guards that could have sworn they spotted the shadow of someone walking through the streets. His shadow. They spotted him, after the entire month of behaving in such a stealthy matter that no one, not even the king, could catch him.

He supposes the faults started when he heard rumors of Roux fighting in the pits tonight, her first time in two weeks after someone broke her arm. A dirty fighter. Renit had dragged a dagger along his throat later that night, in the quiet and soothing blackness of a tight alley.

When Renit heard Roux was fighting in the pits, he threw away all the caution he's been centering his life around. The guards spotted him as quickly as they would an innocent pedestrian moving from one place to the other. Before he got the chance to see her, to watch her brutally take down another fighter that never stood a chance in the first place, they forced him to come back here.

His sigh is laced with exasperation, and the banished prince pushes himself off the door. The wooden floorboards creak underneath his leather boots, now scuffed and ruined, ripped along the side from a piece of barbed wire that had lodged itself when he tried to escape. The condition of his clothes is something else he must worry about, among the many other things currently weighing him down.

A banished prince. The king believes Renit to be long gone, possibly in a different kingdom entirely. But Renit never left. Instead of giving his father the advantage, he chose an abandoned cottage in the capital, one that hadn't held a resident in years, and brought what he could up to the attic.

No one would check there. And, if they did, their lives would be over shortly after.

Renit's only belongings are stuffed away, hidden in an old chest. He stares down at it, reminded of the wooden chests he recovered with Roux. How had he been so foolish to waste that time? Why couldn't he have loved her from the start?

Those belongings mean little to him, they're merely changes of clothes, a spare pair of boots, and an empty journal he hasn't given himself the strength to write in yet. After those first few days, his hand hovered over the page, a sharpened piece of charcoal gripped tightly in his fingers, but he couldn't bring himself to come up with the perfect words for what happened.

He wishes to remember it all, everything his father did to ruin his life. He had lost Darlene and Oisin for the fault of his own but this one, losing Roux—that is entirely the king's fault. A twinge of guilt twists his heart as he realizes Roux could have never been here in the first place if he was kind enough to let her stay in that damn village near the cliffsides.