Prince Drakar
988 Words
POV: Zara Lay
I didn't sleep well.
By midnight I had three pages of notes and a sketch that didn't do justice to the angles of his face.
By two in the morning I'd searched every combination of silver hair disappearing boy oak tree that the internet would accept, which produced nothing useful.
By four I'd closed the laptop, turned off the lamp, and lain in the dark staring at the ceiling with the feather on the nightstand beside me, still faintly warm.
I went to school exhausted and more certain of one thing than I'd been of anything in years.
I hadn't imagined him.
I found him at lunch.
Or he found me
I'm still not sure how to describe it.
I'd taken my tray to the far end of the east wing corridor, the stretch near the old music rooms where nobody sat because the radiator clanked and the overhead light buzzed on a frequency that gave people headaches.
I sat there most days.
It required no explanation.
I set down my tray, pulled out my notebook, and when I looked up, he was sitting across from me.
I hadn't heard him arrive.
Hadn't seen him approach.
He was simply there, silver hair, dark jacket, watching me with an expression that was difficult to read and probably impossible to rattle.
I looked at him for a moment.
Then I found the sketch I'd done at two in the morning and held it up.
"Good likeness?" I asked.
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth
.
Not quite a smile.
"The eyes are slightly wrong."
"I'll fix them later."
I lowered the notebook.
"Who are you?"
"Someone who should not be having this conversation."
"And yet."
I folded my hands on the table, the way I did when I'd decided to be calm about something that didn't deserve calm.
"You're here."
He watched me steadily.
Up close, his eyes were an unusual shade grey with something silvered underneath, like light through clouded glass.
Old, somehow.
Not in the way faces aged, but in the way certain buildings felt old.
As if a great deal had happened inside them.
"My name is Drakar," he said.
"Just Drakar?"
A pause.
Like a small decision being made.
"Prince Drakar."
"Prince."
I said it the way I'd repeat an answer on a test I wasn't sure about.
"Of what?"
"Of something you don't have a name for yet."
That should have sounded absurd.
Sitting in a school corridor with a clanking radiator, a silver-haired boy telling me he was a prince of something nameless it should have been the point at which I picked up my tray and left.
I stayed.
"You were on the security footage yesterday," I said.
"Except you weren't.
I was there.
You weren't."
"Correct."
"That's not an explanation."
"No," he agreed.
"It isn't."
He wasn't being evasive the way people were evasive when hiding something embarrassing.
He was being careful measuring each word before releasing it, like someone who had learned through specific past experience that careless words caused damage.
"The feather," I said.
"A mistake.
I didn't intend to leave it."
"It's warm."
"Yes."
"Feathers aren't warm."
"No," he said.
"They aren't."
I should have pushed harder on that.
I would wonder later why I didn't.
Something in the way he said it without deflection, without fabrication, confirming the impossible as plain fact — made arguing feel beside the point.
"You said I wasn't supposed to remember you," I said instead.
"You're not."
"Why?"
The radiator clanked twice.
Down the corridor, a door opened and closed.
"Because no one does," he said.
"That is the rule.
Every person who has seen me who has seen any of us forgets.
Immediately.
Completely."
He paused.
"You are the first, in a very long time, who has not."
Any of us.
I filed that away.
"So why warn me? If I remembered by accident"
"Because the moment you remembered me, certain people became aware of it."
Something underneath his voice tightened.
"They are already looking for you.
Staying near me makes you easier to find."
"Who are they?"
"People who believe that what you've done threatens everything they've spent centuries protecting."
Centuries.
I sat with that word.
"And what have I done?" I asked quietly.
He looked at me with those old, silvered eyes.
The kind of look that carried more history than it was willing to share.
"You remembered me," he said.
"That was enough."
He stood.
Unhurried, precise a person who occupied space deliberately and left it the same way.
"Stay in crowded places," he said.
"Stay in the light.
Do not go anywhere alone until" He stopped.
"Until what?"
No answer.
He just looked at me, and I had the sudden irrational impression that he was memorising my face the way I had memorised his carefully, like something he expected to need later.
Then he walked away and was gone before I could decide whether to follow.
I walked home with my hands in my pockets, turning the conversation over.
Stay in crowded places.
Stay in the light.
I almost laughed.
I walked faster instead.
Three blocks from home, I noticed them.
Shadows but wrong.
The afternoon light fell at a consistent angle, stretching everything east.
My own shadow ran long and steady beside me.
These moved differently.
At the edges of my vision.
Against walls where nothing stood to cast them.
Keeping pace without sound.
I stopped walking.
They stopped too.
I didn't run.
Running felt like the wrong decision in a way I couldn't explain something deep and instinctive insisting that speed was not an advantage I had here.
I walked. Steadily.
Three blocks.
Up my front path.
Through my door.
I locked it behind me and stood in the hallway with my back against the wood, breathing.
Outside, the shadows settled slowly against the front wall of the house.
And waited.
- Writer
