THE HAUNTED KINGDOM 3 by CHARLES E.J. MOULTON (ereader that reads to you .txt) 📕

animal who remained calm through all of it. It was obvious in the middle of July that this horse had indeed travelled the dimensions in the day after our return to be with you eventually here in Clurafar.”
“Then,” Belinda said, “then came the question of when to give it to you. You’ve said the last few years that birthdays don’t mean much to you and we wanted a spiritual day to mark the return of this re-entry of your companion into your life.”
A young woman came in from the back door and closed it promptly behind her.
She was very beautiful, to say the least.
Long blond, reddish hair fell right down to her buttocks and her simple farm dress made of cotton fell so gorgeously over her frame that it was obvious that any man could fall in love with her, nay go mad in her presence. Her slightly turned up nose lay dainty above a pair of luscious lips, whose companion dark blue eyes seemed to cry out for wild love.
“Lance here” she said, caressing his majesty’s back as she walked by “told me how you had planned the inauguration of this monument for almost two or three years now and that you more than anything wanted this to be a spiritual monument of the angels and your travels. This seemed the perfect time.”
Alexander’s back was still tingling from her touch. He knew her from somewhere. He knew this woman somewhere from his travels. Who was she? She had looked different back then, but he knew her. “Shauna?” he said quietly, his voice sounding old and unused.
“Yes, Alexander?”
“Miss Fairweather,” the king said shyly, “where is my horse?”
Shauna walked up to Alexander, caressed his cheek, leaned forward and kissed him sensually on the lips. A tingling feeling went through his entire body. It was a small lightning bolt that shot up to his brain danced around his groin and started caressing his heart. He remembered the beach, his own beach that he saw before entering Callenia, he remembered the angels upon that beach and he remembered Michael, Raphael and Gabriel and all their encouraging words of wisdom.
He remembered picnics with his children, he remembered the wedding.
He remembered his training in the forest with Old Father.
He remembered the queen that brought him there.
She let go of him, grabbed him encouragingly by the arms and said: “Follow me, my friend!”
She took his hand and lead him to a door that opened onto a lavish field full of green grass.
On that field a horse was standing calmly and eating some leaves and some greens in a trough that had been put there before him.
Transfixed by this stallion, this beautiful stallion, Alexander walked up to the horse and started caressing it. Its sweet skin and mane seemed so familiar, so friendly. He did not need any proof to see who this stallion was. He saw it in these brown eyes.
Belinda was standing feet away from her father, tears in her eyes as he heard him telling Shauna something that made her heart soar.
It was an odd thing to notice him tell Shauna and look at Belinda.
It seemed strange, but that was the fact.
“One takes a journey across the wasteland with friends, one suffers, one fights, one wins and then one wonders. And then at last there is peace.”
Smiling; Belinda embraced her father, kissed him sweetly on the cheek and told him that she loved him. He smiled and repeated the phrase and then watched his daughter leave for the door.
The well trained trick riding gypsy took the king’s hand and sighed.
“I know what this means to you” she said and caressed his cheek with his other hand.
He looked at Mercutio and nodded.
”I am astounded to see this horse again” he uttered in a dream and looked back at the girl. He smiled and added: “Thank you, Shauna.”
”No problem” she answered. “You are a good man.”
”You are a good woman.”
Shauna stroked his cheek again, let go of his hand and went to a group of people that stood by the door. She turned around again and saw the king almost conversing with his newly refound friend.
Alexander had lost something when he had come back to the real world.
This lost jewel had come back now to stay.
Alexander laid his head on his friend’s back and stood there for so long he did not know when he actually let go. He knew that people were standing there forever watching him, but Alexander was in a dream. His best friend was back.
He remembered later standing almost an hour holding a real conversation with the horse.
He remembered being hugged by everyone and laughing and getting drunk.
He remembered holding a speech toward thousands by the monument at twelve that day. He remembered looking up at the monument and crying.
He remembered having a party until dusk by in that house. He remembered telling Belinda how much he loved her.
He recalled hearing tell him the same. There was an eerie feeling of a circle being completed and a mutual trust between father and daughter that went beyond mere family.
There was a spiritual connection here between two people of the same soul family that had been put here on earth to fight for each other and won.
This was a bond way beyond family.
He remembered standing in the chapel and seeing her resurrected.
Mystically, it made him stronger in a way that was incomprehensible to them both.
Mercutio’s return made him so strong he could move mountains.
But he also remembered only standing by that horse and crying.
Somehow the day he had looked forward to for three years came and went without any real fanfare. Somehow, he wanted to look at the old women, the dogs and the children and the young men and pretty women that had arrived that day and tell them: “I have found a friend.”
Instead he told them of a dream and of travelling the darkness.
He verified the rumours and told them that he had had fought demons and that he had saved his family, he had talked to angels and that he was a hero that had saved their country.
He did love his daughter and he told them so.
His heart was completely with Mercutio that day.
Then a small robin caught King Alexander's eye.
Turning to go back home, mounting his stallion, he saw it sitting on a branch.
Its red breast reminded him of the passion of nature. He was taken back to April 11th 1422 when the messenger from a hollow hell had cried for help in the form of a bird nourished on Callenia’s friut. He had told no one about that bird and he was sure he would not tell anyone about this bird either. But he knew who this bird was. It was his father. Back then, his father’s soul had pleaded for him to give him peace. Now that bird was returning with that peace found.
It was an angelic messenger of peace nourished on the fruits of the Hweoim Tree.
This time, it was not giggling. This time it was chirping.
Riding away from the house, the monument behind him, he had to shake his head in awe over the circles that were closing and the new beginnings that were forming.
Shauna and Lance got to ride alone in his carriage that day, Theo as coachman and six white stallions as workhorses.
From the rattling and swinging the carriage was doing, and from the fact that the curtains that were drawn, Grandfather suspected what the sweet couple were doing there inside. But to Alex, the world could’ve fallen to pieces and the skies turn dark red.
He was blissfully happy not only for the two lovemaking teenagers, but for himself.
He had been half, now he was whole.
In his heart he knew that Mercutio was carrying him on his back today. Not just the Mercutio that had been born five years ago, but the one that had helped him survive on the way to hell.
The reincarnation that was here back again.
The only real witness to his past pain was his support between his legs and under his feet that day.
Alexander had come back home.
He had come full circle back to his own heart.
It was an amazing sight to see for everyone, in back of and in front of and to both sides of the king.
The queen was holding on to her husband’s shoulders and actually sleeping, her head on his back, riding on the king’s old friend.
Belinda saw the king and queen of her country, her predecessors, and had to smile.
She remembered herself riding with her own father in the haunted kingdom like that.
She had to sigh, looking at the orange coloured dusky sunset ahead and hold Steven all the tighter, reminded of what a great empire they lived in. An empire where the king and queen could ride on the same horse, sixty-year-olds looking like teenagers on the reincarnated soul of a horse.
An angel touched Belinda’s shoulder that day and told her that she, too, had come full circle, that Shauna and Lance would soon have a son that would be involved in a great expedition.
She saw it clearly and kept it a secret until the very day she died, when she told the boy, then a man.
It was told to her quietly in her own heart in the arms of her love.
Alexander had been told that history would be different here than it would’ve been or was in the alternate reality. There, 1492 would mark the start of colonial slavery that would found a nation based on the robbing of land.
Alfred and Sean Winsletenna would together send a young sailor
across the ocean to found an empire with whoever was to be found there.
The land would make God’s creation embark on a journey that would take it toward eternal peace.
St. Gabriel had made that rule for him to follow
The whole reason why this was possible sat on the back of Mercutio that day, a pillow for his beloved
queen to sleep on, dreaming of golden sand.
Alex daydreamt of Eden, his very own beach by his own spiritual ocean a light in his mind beyond the healed areas that God had labelled the Fields of Nostalgia.
Belinda Winsletenna was happy at last.
So was Prosperania Emperor, King Alexander of Clurafar.
Occasionally, Alex on his horse and Belinda in her carriage looked over at each other and smiled. They just had to smile at each other. Triumph was there and thankfulness. Love was there and so was freedom, the freedom to laugh and the freedom to cry, the freedom to live and the freedom to die.
Father and daughter had come full circle to meet each other half way.
The one finding his peace with life, the other finding her life in peace.
Their mutual journeys had been long.
It had taken them through fire and torment, through adultery and kidnapping, curses, plagues and wars. But together the king and the princess had made it possible for each other to go to sleep at night with a calm conscience, for they were what the legends spoke of as ‘awake and glittering souls’.
As Alexander told her later that night, over a glass of wine in the Grand Hall: “I accomplished great things, Belinda, thanks to