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I Made You Breakfast

[Find other stories from the 2024 Friday Writing Challenge here]

It had been one more of those early mornings. He woke up and checked back and he saw his General still soundly asleep besides him on the pillow that they shared. Soundly was a correct word to use, he thought, because his snore could be loud enough to disturb the birds outside the window and ruin their song. Other times, their rhythms matched, and he would lay on his chest and listen to his heartbeat as his slow restful rumbled breathing would tickle his ear. It had not been the first time, but it had been a long time since they last could be afforded the decency of a privacy.

How ironic; now that peace reigned, they could not have been driven further apart.

The days they spent in the mud and the shrubs, on the campaign trail to save their lands, had been some of the harshest his short as of yet life had to endure. In blood and sinew, they were made enemies once upon a time, him a prince and his opponent a lieutenant. He recalled his friend, the cunning Lady Wrethella, and her army of maidens which he admired as much as he feared. Thanks to her cunning and a slight slip-up, he bested his opponent in battle. A couple nights later, a slight slip-up of his own led their lips to entangle for the first time. The night tasted like wine, and the day tasted like soot, and the embers of his friend’s home led to the dissolution of twelve years of war. They never had been enemies, they never should have been ones, but he was once a Prince of the Autumn Court of the Solarian Kingdoms. Twelve years of war, and all it took to end it was a woman vowing her revenge on the world as they knew it.

They failed to save those old mythic lands not because they did not try their best, but because the hatred of their nations ran deeper than the veins from which they all once sprouted from together.

Peace is a funny thing to listen at in the morning. The summer house was secluded, a retreat deep in the countryside that was partially owned by both of their nations and which exchanged hands every so often. It had been fifty years since Mytheria drew its last breath, and the birds of this new world chirped the same songs he had grown listening once upon a child with young ears and even younger fur and horns that longed to grow, to be as ferocious as his grandfather’s, to rival those of his brothers, to be equal in the image his father imposed on him. The father he once loved lay slain by the sword he gave her, thanks to the gates he unlocked for her willingly. In return, she had promised him a quick, clean kill.

There could have been no other way. For the world to live, Mytheria had to die. A death metaphorical and literal, manifested upon by the blood of creatures mythical and strange and real. Critters that sleep peacefully until the sun rises over the horizon, rumbling in their sleep, mumbling sweet words in languages they call their own. That night once tasted like wine. The wine tasted like bark. Last night, the celebration of his birthday which coincided with his rise as the new rightful and sole King of Kings of Solaria, they got to meet once more. He was back from the deep ends of the galaxy, hunting down the threat their enemies posed upon them. He had grown to have silver hair, and his moustache had grown longer, falling gently upon lips cracked with age.

“Maybe one day we shall dance again without the eyes of the world upon us, mon ami,” he told him amicably, his fingers lingering upon his shoulder in the hope that the lights would go out and the eyes would divert and the world would extinguish – if only for a moment. He still carried their combined scars, retraced at the end of a night they once slipped by. That bombed out fortress had a balcony that overlooked a meadow and a river, a river they once shared, where they bathed in the evening and cooked breakfast by its shores the morning after. And as his fingers left his shoulders, the nobles and the officers and all the highly esteemed creatures of the courts sought his attention. An attention so fleeting yet in such high demand; the monotony of the expectation ate his insides. He needed the escape.

Late that same night, he pulled his General to the side, behind a curtain on a room adjacent to the throne. He gave him an envelope, and a promise to see each other in three days’ time. He sealed the promise with a kiss that was so sudden and so fleeting, and he was gone again in an instant; passed by the veil to the side where their combined high societies expected better of them. A society that had separated them into a master of peace and a commander of war. Of course the General obliged; he would have been a fool and a moron to not do so. He was kind and thoughtful to every man and woman that had earned his trust, and to his beloved King he had nothing but his whole heart deposited upon the trust he assured him. In their common struggle, they learned a lot about each other. Chief among them, the once young prince discovered the delicacies of the scythian cuisine, the way the once young lieutenant enjoyed a good charred slab of meat cut on cubes on a skillet and served with sunny side-up eggs and softened onions.

He could say “I made you breakfast” but it would have still been a lie because a King does not make his own food, let alone his own bed. And yet, under the glow of the rising sun, within those golden embers of daylight, he found a reason to live. He retraced the steps he half-remembered from years past. Mytheria was gone and all that was left was peace; and peace tasted like burnt toasted bread, slightly charred slabs of meat cuts, and spilled eggs that resembled a scramble more than they did the sun. The sun itself would have to suffice outside, glowing over the meadows and the rivers this valley overlooked. The wind was crisp. He did not notice how louder the birds had been singing the songs of their homeworld. Stepping slowly with half-dazed eyes that were still heavy from sleeping in late, the General arrived to the kitchenette. His face beamed with a smile. “What did you dream about, Arckie?” he asked his King. “For I dreamed about making you breakfast again.”