Exit

The season changed.

The tensions at court could not be calmed with words or actions, just by time, the way time turns passions to apathy.
Nuada was a little less everyday. He stayed within the walls of the dún, and the king took it all to mean that he’d finally won, despite the fact that even though Nuada wasn’t disobeying, he wasn’t serving either. He wasn’t doing anything, really… He was listless. The prince who chose action over vows spent all his days in his quarters.
The king would never admit to it, but there had always been something in the responses Nuada offered him that would make him pause, reconsider… doubt. With him shut away and keeping to himself, there was no one to keep the king in check, and he was even more unbridled than before.
He began exiling any lord who’d ever had even the slightest of sympathies for the old ways, and the vile spirits of the woods. He would capture worshippers of the Creideamh Sí and have them race each other. He chose consecrated trees to be cut down for furniture… or kindling. He ordered horses that had been thought to be wild herds of the Morrigan herself to be captured and broken. They refused to be kept, and many of them died before he did finally give up.
Nuada was unaware of the extent of it, because the king, ever a coward wrapped in bravado, did all of it out on the borders of the badlands. He said it was more fun out in the wilderness, he would never admit he was afraid of his own son.
Finally, the king went too far.
The smell of sour smoke too close pulled Nuada from his isolation.
The king had ordered any story or record relating to the old ways, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the sídhe, to be collected and burned. Stories told by voices long mourned. Stories carrying the pain of generations. Some of them were written by Nuadas’ own hand. Some…
…by his mothers’.
 “I’ll kill you!” Nuada screamed through hot tears, held back by the few decent men who couldn’t bear it any longer. There were many whose loyalties were torn, pained to witness the boy they’d watched suffer through life with dignity, finally collapsing under it all.
His father stood triumphantly before the bonfire. Smiling.
“That’s a rage I’m proud to see, at last.”
It made Nuada wretch in anger and disdain… with himself, but he still wrestled against the holds, and finally slipped through. He landed a single blow, square on the laughing jaw of his father-king.
The lords saw it.
The court saw it.
Nuada didn’t care… until it was too late.

“That cursed glade is next, and whatever monster in there that you’ve been fucking, will burn to ash and cinders.”

He was locked in his quarters, only spared the cellars out of an extension of his fathers own pride, and railed against the doors until his shoulders were bruised to bone.
He was desperate.
The windows were guarded from the outside, so he climbed, punctured the thatched roof with difficulty, and was already about to collapse from exhaustion when he broke through to the night sky. He still had his weapons to recover, the dún to escape, and fields to cross, but this was his doing, and he would get to Lasair if he had to crawl.