How I Became the King of Sweden in 2050
Copyright© 2024 by Adam.F
Chapter 6
William laid on the gravel for 20 minutes until he got his breath back, he got to his feet, and he slowly made his way back to the castle to give the queen Madeline’s hair pin.
After William handed the hairpin to the Queen, she sent him to his room to rest up and told him his second task would be the next night.
William walked up the stairs to his room, he stripped off his dirty clothes, then he had a hot shower. Then he went to bed.
“I’ve always found that the quality of a man’s silence says more than his speech,” the Court Archivist remarked, meticulously polishing a series of brass handgrips used for stabilizing the Great Library’s sliding ladders. He didn’t look up as he spoke, his focus entirely on the friction of the cloth against the metal. The gallery was quiet, save for the rhythmic shush-shush of his cleaning, a sound that seemed to anchor the vast, echoing space. Here, the air tasted of old parchment and beeswax, and the light filtered through high, narrow slits in the stone, casting long, geometric shadows that shifted with the slow migration of the sun.
William walked past the Archivist, his boots clicking softly on the polished marble. He felt a strange sense of lightness in his chest, a stark contrast to the heavy, oppressive anticipation that had clung to him the previous day. The palace was breathing in its own rhythmic way—servants scurrying in the periphery, the distant chime of a clock striking the hour, the low hum of a court that never truly slept. He wasn’t thinking about the hairpin or the Queen’s expression when he had handed it over; instead, he was focused on the precise weight of the air as he approached the heavy oak doors of the throne room.
“You have a knack for finding things that wish to remain hidden,” the Queen said, her voice echoing through the cavernous room. She didn’t look at him but rather stared intently at the hairpin he had retrieved, which now sat atop a velvet cushion like a fallen star. “But the things I require now are not tucked away in drawers or hidden in pockets. They are buried in the silence of the Weeping Woods, where the canopy is so thick that the moon is merely a rumor.”
She finally turned to him, her gaze softened. “My daughter, Victoria, lost something decades ago. A doll of porcelain and silk, a companion of her earliest years. It is a trifle to the world, perhaps, but to her, it is a tether to a version of herself she cannot retrieve. You are to enter the deep dark of the forest and bring it back.”
“The doll doesn’t want to be found,” the Archivist whispered, though he was now looking at a wall of leather-bound ledgers rather than William.
William lingered for a moment, the cryptic warning humming in the air between them. He looked at the Archivist’s steady hands the way the man handled the ledgers with a tenderness usually reserved for infants. There was a quiet kinship in the gallery, a shared understanding that some things were kept not because they were valuable, but because the act of keeping them was the only way to stave off total erasure. William gave a small, respectful nod and backed away. The heavy oak doors of the throne room clicking shut behind him with a finality that felt like a starting pistol.
“Wait,” the Archivist called out; his voice barely ripples in the silence of the gallery. He didn’t turn around, but he held out a small, iron-rimmed lantern, its wick dry and waiting. “The Woods do not recognize a map, William. They recognize a scent. And the porcelain girl has a scent that attracts things that do not breathe.”
William took the lantern, the metal cold, and pitted against his palm. He didn’t ask what the Archivist meant. There was a trust in the man’s eccentricity that felt more reliable than the Queen’s polished demands. He stepped out of the palace gates and into the midday heat, but the road to the Weeping Woods was a blurring sequence of milestones and dusty turnpikes. He spent the afternoon walking through golden wheat fields and crossing shallow creeks, the landscape shifting from the manicured order of the capital to the wild, untamed sprawl of the borderlands. By the time the first grey boughs of the forest appeared on the horizon, the sun had already begun to dip, painting the sky in bruised purples and deep ochres.
The flint struck a spark, a tiny orange blossom that bloomed for a second before catching the wick. As William lifted the lantern, the light didn’t so much illuminate the path as it did carve a fragile, amber tunnel through the encroaching gloom. He stepped past the threshold of the first great oaks, and the transition was instantaneous; the warmth of the dying day was swallowed by a sudden, damp chill that clung to his skin like a wet sheet. The Weeping Woods earned their name not from sorrow, but from the way the humidity condensed on the silver-grey leaves, dripping in a constant, rhythmic cadence that sounded like a thousand distant voices sobbing in unison.
He began his search by following the low-lying currents of the creek, remembering the Archivist’s warning about scents. He didn’t know what a porcelain doll smelled like, but he noticed that the forest seemed to react to the light of his lantern. The shadows didn’t just retreat; they recoiled, curling back into the hollows of rotting logs and the crevices of jagged limestone outcrops. Every few paces, William paused, lifting the lantern high to scan the undergrowth. He wasn’t looking for a face or a dress, but for something that didn’t belong. A flash of artificial white against the suffocating greens and browns of the loam.
The search became a lesson in patience and spatial distortion. William found that the forest operated on a circular logic; he would pass a distinctive, lightning-scarred stump only to find himself passing it again twenty minutes later, though the dripping leaves now sounded more like whispers than rain. He began to track not by sight, but by the way the shadows clung to his ankles, feeling the pull of something artificial and stagnant amidst the wild growth. Every time he pivoted, the lantern’s amber glow caught the glint of a spider’s web or the reflective eye of a nocturnal scavenger, teasing him with false promises of porcelain.
As the moon climbed toward its zenith, casting a ghostly pallor over the canopy, William noticed a peculiar stillness in a grove of ancient, weeping willows. In the center stood a cedar tree, its trunk hollowed out by centuries of rot and slow-burning fungus, creating a natural alcove that smelled of damp earth and old minerals. He stepped closer, lifting the lantern. There, perched precariously on a ledge of decaying wood, sat the doll. She was small, barely ten inches tall, wearing a dress of faded cornflower blue silk that had miraculously resisted the damp of the woods.
Her porcelain face was pristine, her wide, painted eyes staring blankly into the void of the hollow, as if she had been waiting for a specific set of footsteps to echo through the grove.
The wick was burning low in the lantern; the flame now a frantic, shivering needle of light that seemed to shrink with every step. As William walked, the amber glow contracted, pulling the circle of visibility tighter around his boots, as if the forest were slowly reclaiming the space he had carved out. He cradled the porcelain doll against his chest; her silk dress cool and unnervingly smooth against his thumb, and he could feel the weight of the woods shifting behind him. The rhythmic dripping of the leaves had ceased, replaced by a heavy, expectant silence that felt less like an absence of sound and more like a held breath.
He didn’t dare look back. He could feel the “things that do not breathe” trailing him, not with footsteps, but with a sudden drop in temperature that prickled the back of his neck. They didn’t want the doll; they wanted the light, and as the oil in the lantern sputtered, the shadows at the periphery of his vision began to stretch and lean inward, tasting the air. Every time the wick flickered, the darkness lunged a few inches closer, eager to swallow the small, flickering hope of the iron-rimmed lamp.
The flame gave one final, desperate gasp a tiny, white-hot needle of light that shrank to the size of a pinprick before collapsing into a thin ribbon of grey smoke. In that sudden plunge into blindness, the silence of the woods vanished, replaced by a sudden, violent rush of air, as if the forest had finally exhaled. William didn’t stop; he surged forward, his boots catching a protruding root that sent him stumbling, but the sensation of the air changed. The oppressive, damp chill evaporated, replaced by the crisp, open breeze of the meadow. He felt the first touch of moonlight on his skin, and as he stumbled across the threshold of the tree line, he glanced back. Behind him, the edge of the dark Forrest stood like a wall of solid obsidian, and for a fleeting second. He saw a dozen pale, finger-like shapes retreating into the darkness, unable to cross the invisible line where the wild ended, and the road began.