SWNOVELS Chapter Alex IX
Sleep lingered in the very back of his mind.
It seemed that he could never sleep since Omdrus delivered his sad news. He could just barely remember how he’d died. How he and Octavia had died. There were only fragments, like cutting through Calderstones Park, waiting at Menlove Avenue to be able to cross, and being late going home because Alex had gotten detention for fighting again.
He hadn’t even told Octavia yet. Though he doubted that she’d be too upset over the prospect of never having to leave. But of course, she was too young to understand that it meant that they’d never see their mom again. That they’d never see their friends again.
Maybe he did wish that he had someone to talk to. Someone that he knew, someone that wouldn’t call him crazy. But he didn’t. And it was his own fault, really. He should have told Octavia the moment that he found out, he should have told Eddie as well.
Eddie who slept in the sailor’s bed next to his. The boy who slept so peacefully. He’d already been asleep once Alex had entered the tent. Alex, who hid away to deal with his fate alone.
He rose from the hammock quietly, still wearing the clothes from the day before. The clothes that he’d only read about in stories, in myth and legend, and of the histories.
He left the tent without a sound. And he went to the cliff with the sword in the wall. Where Omdrus told him that he could be a king.
It was stupid really. He couldn’t have been a king. He wasn’t like the kings in the stories. He wasn’t like King Arthur, who had been raised as a common boy, only to rise up and become greatness. He wasn’t like Theseus or Leonidas. He wasn’t like his namesake, Alexander The Great.
He was just Alexander Hayes, the dead boy who lived at 4 Beaconsfield Road, in Woolton, in Liverpool, the boy who got into fights at school all the time.
He didn’t know if this world was better than his. He didn’t find it any more peaceful. Not with a war to fight. And it was a shame really. Because if there really was peace, perhaps, he would have welcomed death with open arms. Perhaps he could have come to terms with it.
But instead, he found himself staring at some stupid sword that a wolf told him he was destined to wield. And how could this wolf know? Was he all-knowing? Yes, he was wise.
But alas, his desperation for life, and his curiosity about his own destiny, his own fate, got the better of him. He walked toward the sword and put two hands around the hilt. Thinking it smart, he put a foot against the wall as well.
And then he pulled. And he needed not pull hard.
But as the sword came from the wall, he was sent bottom first into the grass with that hilt in his hand.
His destiny.
The all-seeing, the all-knowing wolf knew. Omdrus knew that Alexander was the one to wield this sword and become a great king.
But this boy, prophesized for greatness, never saw himself as a king.
Only as a boy searching for purpose.