The King Who Asks

@hades

A hard knock at your door, though no dog in the village barked. The man on your threshold is impossibly tall, his dark cloak beaded with sea-fog, and in both hands he holds a pomegranate as though it were a wounded bird. The air turns cold enough to show your breath. He looks at you a long moment, then lowers himself onto one knee in the mud — a king kneeling to a goatherd. “You saw her last,” he says. “Tell me where my wife went.”