Episode 33 - Parallel

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Welcome back to this little section of the internet and the disjointed reality that it presents to you. (Pause) I know it’s a difficult journey. Does it make you feel better to know that this is how I experience life? In this very disjointed and twisted way. Where nothing feels real or at least… I don’t know how to explain it without sounding clinically paranoid. And look, I am not one to shame mental health struggles, but I am someone who wants to avoid certain consequences or aspects of those struggles. I understand they have a purpose and value, but they frighten me. I’m alright. I wouldn’t do anything that would diminish that or jeopardize that. And I think if anyone really knew my story that would surprise them. They’d appreciate it, sure, but there’s something puzzling about it. Something unexpected in the way everything falls out. It would likely feel like a necessary passage of the story–be it some plot point or an internal monologue–had been lost. And no matter how wonderful the conclusion, that would still sting a bit. You would still feel entitled to more. And as a consequence of that, you would feel deprived of something. 

That isn’t how anything works. That isn’t how it should work, but I understand that’s how we tend to feel in situations like that. I get told often, maybe too often, that I understand human emotions a bit too well. And I don’t think that’s accurate. But it’s hard to come up with a better explanation. It’s hard to come up with the exact words, and maybe I foolishly hoped TikTok would help with that, somehow. I don’t know. The disjointed nature of the app is certainly appealing at least. Life will imitate art will imitate life because the familiar is always alluring. Not in an irresistible way but in a way you would have to consciously resist. And I don’t think we’re all too good at that.

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Prince Ezin was swallowed up by his own disbelief. And perhaps that is why he remained so calm in his father’s presence. It certainly wasn’t a learned behavior from years of watching the king’s rage rise and fall, swallowing it up nearly everyone around him. That had only taught him fear and the need to flatter. Lord Hicket had always been the exception, the only one safe from the fire, the only one able to endure, and that is an achievement certainly but was it noble enough to warrant marrying a princess? A dowager princess perhaps. Or one his own age no matter where she had come from or how she come to accept him as her match. But this proposal was quite different, and there was a cruelty in that particular arrangement that was impossible to justify. 

It was encapsulated in Princess Eathebel’s near wailing when her brother slipped her the news before the king could. Time was on Prince Ezin’s side, after all. King Roget would need to tell the queen and tend to a number of other formalities. Would the queen be receptive to the match, he briefly wondered. Certainly not. Certainly, she could understand the plight her daughter was in, the plight that all women risk facing. And yet, would it matter? The princess was the king’s to do with as he pleases. And this match did please him, it seemed. As horrible as that was. 

In the solitude of his sister’s chambers, Prince Ezin watched her distress unravel with these thoughts briefly flicking in his mind. He could not hold onto them too tightly. His sister was the one who needed his embrace. She needed comfort of some sort. Her world was falling apart, only to be reassembled in such a dreadful way.

“This is my damnation,” she whispered to him. “Marriage to him or I’ll die in some convent a country away.” 

It was exhaustion that stilled her voice, not fear of the king and what his wrath could mean, though being so hesitant about his plans was treasonous. His children above all of his subjects had to submit to his will. And it should have come easily to them. The king was divinely ordained, and the blood of his children was also blessed in that perfect way. 

But we, dear recipients of this tale, can see that isn’t true. We live in a world that has moved on from the mysticism surrounding thrones, and we can see a broken family for what it is. Assuming, we look, of course, assuming the windows are placed in just the right way to show you the proof you need or the proof strong enough to pierce through the fairytale you are clinging onto it. Which is hard to do, isn’t it? It certainly is hard to make.

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TikTok is chaotic, I need to admit, and that’s seemingly by design. Videos are short, although I think 10 minute videos are a thing that either is coming or has come and creators just refuse to use it. I mean, they didn’t think the wheel was broken, so why bother to change it? It certainly didn’t need to be fixed. Anyway, I’m getting lost in my own thoughts. Again. I tend to do that.  I’m sure you noticed. My mind wanders to some point that in the moment feels important, but I can’t explain to you why it feels that way. 

Anyway, the point: TikTok videos are–by design or practice–short videos that you can pass through in somewhat rapid succession. And they are not usually linked together in any fashion. It is a series of disjointed glimpses into various realities. But it’s disjointed like how I understood my own reality, And… honestly… sometimes it’s feels like I’m dipping in and out of completely different things. Parallel lives is an expression I read once. They don’t cross. They can’t cross. But who knows why? And no, I don’t need a mathematical proof. I said lives not lines. I get that they are similar words, but one letter makes a difference. Anyway, these parallel lives can come together on TikTok. And in my own head, somehow, someway.

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The prince requested an audience with his mother at her earliest convenience. He had thought that doing such was a formality. He had thought it was just a dance they had to go through, asking as a prince and queen regardless of the fact that they were mother and son. But they were mother and son. Certainly the response would show that. He did not doubt that or her. He trusted her: the mother he had only known as kind and loving to the child that she had only ever known as her son and heir. Back then, Prince Ezin was a child, as we all are when we meet our parents. We are young and unsure of ourselves and naive to the world. We believe what we are told without question, until there is reason to question it. 

Prince Ezin’s reason was his mother’s silence. Her disinterest in her own daughter despite the pleas of her son, despite knowing what miseries a bad marriage could bring to a woman. After all, isn’t that something all women know? Through their own experiences or those of their mothers, sisters, and friends. Worse yet, the queen herself was repulsed by Hicket. She said as much to Prince Ezin when they were alone. It was a truth that she had trusted him with. So why trust Hicket with her daughter. The prince could not begin to understand. 

In the silence Queen Asha left behind, Princess Eathebel’s pleas echoed in his mind. “Please stop this,” she had begged. “Please save me.”

And she needed to be saved. This needed to be stopped. If not by a king or a queen, then a prince would have to do. But that did leave other questions, most specifically how.

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Do I think TikTok is going to be enlightening for me? Yes. Or sometimes I do. And I hate that I feel that way. It’s an app driven by an algorithm that’s meant to maximize watch time. We keep doing this. That design is ripe for problems, and we keep trying it. Right now, as an example, I am dangerously close to falling into pseudoscience TikTok. And reporting that garbage does not do what it probably should do. I don’t know how I fell into that hole, and I don’t know how to get out of it. But before I went down that road, I don’t know what I was seeing exactly. But it felt like missing pieces. Pieces of me. I mean, pieces that everyone else had except for me. And that brought clarity. I got drunk off of that clarity. Which is not my best choice of words, but there was just no other way for me to explain it to you.

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Prince Ezin’s eyes were opening, but he could not see the full board. No one, in the light or shadows, can see the full board, with all of its moving pieces and secretive mechanics. And then there are those pieces that veil themselves and refuse to be seen. Wane was such a piece. He could not see all the pieces either, but he could ensure that he remained unseen, at least by the prince. There was no need for the two of them to meet formally.  The moment between brother and sister did not need to include Wane.The message was conveyed, received by this secret third party, which would then spare the princess from sharing the news. Or the specifics of the news. Wane knew that cry. He had seen Princess Eathebel’s reaction to those things which break her heart. The whispers in the palace could have told him the rest. 

For a man like Wane the answer to such plights always seems so simple. The current king wanted the marriage. The young prince seemed hesitant. Swapping them out would solve the problem. And maybe it would solve other problems the princess had. 

Though he was not one for naivety, he had succumbed to it then. He had wanted to kill the king for quite some time, but on better days, he could see the danger in surrendering to such an impulse. It would certainly be the death of him if he tried. The king’s guards were diligent and well-trained, certainly better trained than he. Wane had scrambled to figure out many of his tricks across the year and many continents, but those tricks were taught to the king’s guard in training, in the first few months of putting on their uniforms and picking up their weapons. They–sons of nobility themselves–could not even be bribed. And then there was his love’s hesitation, the lingering hope that her parents would come to love her, begging him to keep still. Some of these problems had not changed, but the latter was falling in his favor. 

Then again, he found himself thinking, there was something else to consider now. The death of his child, when he was so sure he had struck down her cousin. He was more than sure. He had wandered through the palace halls, crept into chambers, and stood above a child whose pigmentation was nothing like his child. And yet, it was his child who had died. He had held her body for himself. She hardly fit in his hands; she was so small. And so perhaps it was just… Well he could hardly believe a child of his was weak, but maybe she was. Maybe she was too weak to survive. And that was what did her in. It happened to any number of infants. It was what he tried to replicate in the prince’s daughter. 

But that thought led to so many others he did not wish to have. He could not make himself believe any of what needed to be believed in that circumstance. It was simply too much. 

Understandable, perhaps, given that she was his child, and no one can tell a parent in such an intense storm how it is they should weather it. Trouble awaits, however. For once he learned to shield himself from uncomfortable truths, it was slowly becoming a habit. And now he was walking through the palace as if the king’s many guards were not the only beings alive who could easily defeat him, as if they could not easily spot him and overpower him. As if he were not walking into what might have been his demise. 

And yet, as he strolled through the hallways, creeping along the shadows towards the king’s chambers, he remained unseen. There was no one there to see him. Station points were empty, others were staffed with the most inexperienced of the lot, and more still contained guards and seeming diversions for said guards. Rationality started to take hold just then, but all it could tell him was something wasn’t right. 

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TikTok has recently shown me a lot of those… Okay, look, I know the parallel universe, multiverse theory thing is almost played out at this point, but it is an interesting idea. Or almost therapeutic one. And then it’s not. Okay, to start, there’s something beautiful about the idea that there’s another me out there who wasn’t born with this same inheritance. The inheritance of heart ache and hurt. Scars, trauma. Things that aren’t so big that you have a chance of taking them off of you. No, I mean the things that carry a very different weight. And I’m carrying them with me all the time. I can’t drop them off at a safety deposit box, but I don't want to say that they’re a part of me. And with multiverse theory, I really don’t have to, do I? Because there’s another me out there who isn’t like this.

If there are other me’s out there, there’s something comforting about some other me not having to deal with this. That she was born into a family that was capable of loving her and each other. That everything that resulted from that inability to love all the consequences to their choices that no one could have anticipated, all of that never happened. And I don’t really know why that feels so validating. Is it just confirmation that it never should've happen? That it didn’t have to happen? That it wasn’t inevitable? It wasn’t just (quote) “the way things were” (end quote) unraveling in a very specific way. I won’t deny that people make choices, certainly, but even if those choices had gone differently, I wouldn’t feel better about everything that this family has been. So there is part of me that wants to believe it could have been different. And multiverse theory gives me the evidence. 

But then I get bitter because it didn’t have to be this way. Things really could have been different in this or any other universe. But it wasn’t for me specifically.. I did not get that break. (Sigh) So I am allowed to be angry about it, right? I get to be mad because this wasn’t fair. But I don’t know how to be angry. That’s the other part.

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Something was different, Wane realized. It might not have been wrong or right, but things were not as they should have been. On one hand, it made it easier for him to slip through the shadows unnoticed, but there was still the matter as to why things were the way they were. Why was he catching glimpses of young guards more closely aligned with the prince than the king? Perhaps the answer was obvious. Or so he would wonder in the days to come when the image of the bloody knife flashed in his mind. It sat awkwardly in the Prince’s hand. The boy simply didn’t know how to hold it, and as he transformed into a man by his father’s blood hastily drawn, it did not fall into place. And yet, Wane knew as he stared upon the sight before, so much else would have to. What choice was there? The son had killed the father, whether it was justified or not.

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Aishi Online is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, produced, performed, and edited by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. If you like the show, please leave a review, tell a friend, or donate to the show’s Ko-Fi account.