My Father Ordered His Own Mother's Execution and Forgot My Name—Then the Secret of His Relic Throne Revealed the Terrifying Truth About Our Enclave
The urgency from Ephraim’s threat galvanized us. Eight hundred gold sovereigns was an impossible sum in the midst of a civil war. But Ephraim was no idle boaster. He meant every word.
“We need to find who made this deal,” I said to Gideon, my mind racing. “Who on the council had the means, and the motive, to hire mercenaries against Malachi?”
Gideon nodded, his face etched with concentration. “The inner sanctum. Malachi’s private study. If anyone kept records, it would be there.”
But getting to Malachi’s study was easier said than done. Mortar fire, though crude, now rained down intermittently on the high citadel, shaking the very foundations. The three rival factions, each emboldened by Malachi’s death, were trying to blast their way into the central complex.
We found a moment, a lull in the barrage, to slip into the sanctum. The air inside was thick with dust and the acrid smell of burnt powder. We sprinted through deserted corridors, past shattered relics and splintered prayer benches.
Malachi’s study was a mess. Books had been thrown from shelves, scrolls scattered across the floor, and the heavy oak desk had been overturned. It was clear someone had already been through here, searching for something.
“They were looking for evidence,” I whispered, scanning the room. “The rebels. Or whoever hired Ephraim.”
Gideon, however, moved with an almost preternatural focus. He didn’t waste time on the obvious disarray. He ran his hands along the walls, tapped the floorboards, his keen eye searching for irregularities.
“Malachi was a methodical man,” Gideon muttered, brushing away dust from a section of the floor beneath where the desk had stood. “He would have had a hidden place. For things he truly wished to keep secret.”
His fingers found a loose seam in the stone. With a grunt, he pried up a floorboard. Beneath it, nestled in a small, damp hollow, was not gold, nor a ledger, but a single, leather-bound journal. Its cover was plain, unadorned.
“His personal journal,” I breathed, reaching for it.
Gideon gently stopped my hand. “Look at the cover. The edges.”
I leaned closer. The leather was deeply worn, almost smooth, as if handled constantly over many years. And etched faintly into the surface, barely visible, were the initials “M.D.”
I opened the journal, my fingers trembling. The first few pages were written in a firm, elegant hand, the script clear and authoritative. It spoke of his early reign, his duties, his hopes for Zion’s Rest.
Then, as I turned the pages, a sickening change became evident. The handwriting slowly, subtly, began to degenerate. Lines wavered. Letters became less precise. Words were occasionally misspelled.
It was a slow, terrifying descent.
A gasp escaped my lips. This was not a diary of political maneuvering. This was a testament to his suffering.
“He was trying to preserve it,” I whispered, my voice thick with emotion. “His memories. His very self.”
The further I turned, the more heart-wrenching it became. The elegant script became hesitant, then shaky, then a childish scrawl, barely recognizable as writing. There were sketches mixed with the words—crude drawings of a young girl, with long braids and wide eyes. My childhood self.
He had been tracing my face, desperately clinging to the image of his daughter, even as the throne devoured his mind. Every page was a fight against the tide.
I found a date, scratched faintly near a particularly blurred drawing of a flower: “Fourteen years after the coronation.” The same time Caleb Hollister vanished. The same time Malachi’s memory began its clear decline.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. My father hadn’t forgotten me suddenly. He had fought, day by day, year by year, to hold onto my memory. He had loved me, even as the throne stripped him of the ability to show it. The tyrant was not a monster, but a man desperately clinging to his family, alone in his suffering.
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