“Mankind was crafted elsewhere,” every mother and father would be quick to remind their children. “A paradise, of sorts; given no shell nor hide nor claw to defend himself only because such things were unnecessary. Food wasn’t so much grown as spring out of the earth, mature and perfectly ripe for eating. It was a golden era; an abundant, overflowing, beautiful world.”
And then the conversation would degenerate into one of any number of explanations as to why this was no longer the case. The tamest accounts would typically involve either a series of unfortunate events that would culminate in some bizarre mankind afflicting accident or, most rarely, a simple admittance of ignorance to the subject. The most theologically inclined stories normally painted humankind as having grown some amusing combination of proud, fat, and stupid, and this new world being some form of punishment. Finally, and perhaps the most well-known (even if it was the least believed), were the stories told by siblings, from older to younger; it was a rare day when these didn’t involve monsters or some variety of paranoia inducing freaks, and it was from these stories that the rumors grew, and eventually flourished like some foul crop.
He, it was said, looks into your mind and plucks out the ideas he finds most ripe to eat, and he’s wounded by pure thoughts, whatever those may be. He steals children, looking for the most irksome and devouring those who don’t go to sleep on time, like some male Baba-Yaga without the slightest self-restraint or, for that matter, sense of proportionate retribution. He’s some inhuman thing masquerading in the flesh of a normal person, or he’s some poor abomination, suffering from some spiritual parasite that feasts upon his humanity and directs his every action. Perhaps he’s some splintered fragment of that amalgamation of madness, or, perhaps, he’s some sort of demon the King has imprisoned and bound to serve the land, unwillingly.
The fact the last one, by its very nature, would logically mean the King himself had arcane power was a subject that people found all manner of ways to avoid bringing up.
It didn’t matter, regardless. Some sick truth must be in these accusations, the common wisdom would posit, as diverse and incongruent the conclusions may be; after all, he, the Witch Prince, takes the natural order and subverts it, creating flame where there was none and manipulating objects from afar with a flick of his wrist.
No man, after all, could have that power; that was in the domain of the equines and other loathsome creatures, and some of the darker whispers in the kingdom would hint that, indeed, the Prince had perished long ago and had been replaced, substituted by some spying creature intent on harm.
He has executed people with that unnatural skill as well, some of the elderly shopkeepers might whisper to their patrons as the sun begins to set and activity dies down; yes, true, they were bad pieces of work, the lot of them, and yes, true, he had operated on orders from the King, but the fact remains . . .
He killed them with a touch. Well, a couple of touches; a hand on either side of their temples’, to be precise, but accuracy within a story this juicy was garnish in the best of times, and superfluously detrimental in most.
And the response would always fall into one of three groups: a mildly horrified gasp here and there, meticulously crafted to make it well known that this information was simply terrible, and someone ought to do something about it; some grumbling from the less reserved individuals, mutterings about how it’s all unnatural and how it shouldn’t be allowed; and finally dead silence from the more intelligent persons, who, having just heard a story about how the aforementioned man had stopped a fellow’s heart with a touch, decided that perhaps such a man didn’t warrant bothering.
Of course, this sort of atmosphere made the Witch Prince’s intervention on arcane matters . . . interesting, to say the least. There was a sense of relief, yes, whenever he arrived along with two members of the King’s Guard, and it was complimented by the fact that the Witch Prince always was . . . less, in many ways, than the stories about him would indicate. Slim, short, and tired looking, to such an extent he honestly appeared to be nothing more than someone’s uncle who decided to visit, rather than the man-ogre-demon thing that everyone had crafted within their minds.
The whispering crowds, when they were certain that rumor wouldn’t reach sensitive ears, would nevertheless tell each other that the two guards flanking him were for the people’s protection, and not for the Witch Prince’s.
Sometimes, if the marauding menace to the town was particularly infrequent in its visits, the Witch Prince would become something of a staple for the people he was visiting, and though his intermingling of words both common and unknown was off-putting, it made him a humorous storyteller; it was known, at least in the towns that had received the Witch Prince’s aid, that an optional title of his would be ‘The Liar’; always added playfully, of course, and only when nobody associated with the royal family was nearby. After all, The Witch Prince’s attempts to explain the existence of a metal monstrosity fueled by miniature internal explosions couldn’t possibly be the truth, and this mythical ‘Car’ creature was clearly a fabrication only the most inane of children would find plausible to exist.
This, at least, was what occurred during long, uninterrupted periods of peace; the Witch Prince would adopt a pseudo-storyteller role, and the days would pass lazily as he would spin tales concerning captured lightning and such.
He would simply meld into the background noise of a population, and even his two flanking guards would soon find themselves welcomed into bar games.
And in time, the whispering crowds would whisper no more.
Yet, always, the peace would shatter and the rumors would spread again. Invariably the Witch Prince, when he found the source of the town’s problems, would start flinging crackling bolts of electricity at the local fiendish monstrosity.
Finding the town’s boastful liar suddenly hurling fire from his fingertips was a jarring experience. Doubly so when he would scream all manner of strange obscenities as he did so.