A Jester, Parsnip

You would not call yourself a prideful man. If you were being perfectly honest, which you often are not, you would classify yourself as only a jester. Do away with all other allusions of the self. Spare no thought.

"But surely you also embody these most fine principles, my fool?"

The Baron smiled in his usual dreamy sort of way, like a curtain slowly drawn shut. He was aware then of the teeth of the trap, glinting softly, as they drew neatly tighter around him. "Alas, but I am not proper stock," he said, swiftly- later, he understood this was a very stupid thing to say. Something so easily fixed. Changed. Mutable.

Nothing proud.

"Please kneel, master Jester."

He found his knees hit the stones of the hall just like the times before.

Honed on the knife of it. Chained to a wire, the rattle, and the hound below. This is a dance to focus your mind, your lungs. Soft words wasted on a thing like you. What you need, my friend, is a threat more vicious than the one you make yourself. Someone fed you a piece of sinew and you hung on that string ever after.

Now your life spools out, wasted thread in a labyrinth. Up every night thinking of what he would say, the moment the collar is slipped, back in the muck trying to strangle the world. You would waste the kindness, as usual.

The fever was the bite of it. Your life a fragment, the pieces slipping past, some days more crystalline than others. Years lost as you burned from the inside out.

Nothing pitiful.

If you had focused- but you couldn't. Only the Baron understood what you needed, in order to focus.

"You see potential in it. Then you would be pleased to shape it so, my sanity?"

He'd watched Adair when they spoke, the Baron and his musician, charted the expression on the man's face-- never helmed, never hidden-- seen the twist in pale lips. Flight. Smoke on the horizon. But it was never an option. He'd used up all his options. Every incorrect choice a boy of 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 could make. Almost every.

Nothing petty.

And the musician bowed, in his glory of pale hair, shocked grey from some troubled past. "I do not even know its name, lordship." Something easily changed. Mutable.

The Baron's gaze roamed the hall. Lazy. Abstracting. And it lit upon the bloodied knight. "Well? What is its name, ghost of ours?"

The one they called Sane, the one who fixated so carefully on not tuning strings. His greatest weakness was his heart and he knew it, so he'd torn it out and fed it to the hounds, and then they were loyal to him. But the world gave him a new one, a new one, a new one. He taught this curse to you.

They found him the evening after the hunt, Sane, Sane, Sane. The irony of the match. One of our Baron's little jokes. You always were.

The room is black as pitch. They made it this way for you, all the shadow a person could vanish into. Nothing to see, there's nothing to see. So you hear it, instead. That soft whistle of breath across the room, some padded steps back and forth.

A hound named Carrot, Turnip, Radish, Beetroot, Ginger. Fingers carding through a glossy pelt, watching with that smile. He was nineteen years young and he lost every game he was made to play.

"I love you, I love you, I love you," it says. Holding itself. Dancing there.

The truth of it, the plain truth and nothing but: It was all rotten. It was your fault, but it wasn't just your fault. And you never could have bitten the hand that fed you. The dream of it kept you running in your sleep. Kept you running when someone else did it for you.