Licorice's Mistake

Licorice is more flexible than other confections, which makes it stronger under pressure. That was why the first court had been built from it.

Between the first castings of the realm and the final dissolving of the First Confectioner, licorice had proven itself again and again. Where other substances demanded balance to survive, licorice endured imbalance and remembered it. The Sugarborn said that every structure made from it carried the echo of what it had resisted. That echo was strong. It was also a warning.

Amareth, the first court’s confectioner craftsman, had always known that, even before she was entrusted with the candy galleries and the measurements. Licorice bent easily. It held sweetness without hardening. It preserved memory without bittering it into disgust. That was why the First Confectioner had chosen it for his beginning, and why his first court still stood when others had been rebuilt, reshaped, or quietly abandoned.

She had been taught that licorice remembered stress the way sugar remembered joy. It bent around the strain and held its shape afterward. When pressed too far, it did not shatter. It endured. In his records, the First Confectioner had valued that endurance above all else, especially since he still believed endurance and preservation were the same thing.

Amareth had read those records slowly, always under supervision. The margins were dense with annotations added over centuries. Corrections. Warnings. Revisions written by Sugarborn, who had survived the consequences of misunderstanding him. Endurance and preservation were not the same. The distinction had cost the realm its creator.

Some of those later notes did not read like scholarship. They read like aftermath. Sentences that broke pattern, ink pressed too hard, words forced into the page as if the writer had needed to trap the memory somewhere other than their lattice.

Amareth pressed her palm to the inner arch as she passed beneath it out of a gallery, feeling the faint vibration of the court’s memory threads responding to her presence. The threads knew her touch. They knew the shape of her intentions. They tightened slightly. The threads lingered against her, testing. They did not withdraw as quickly as they usually did. Amareth slowed her step, letting her intention smooth, offering calm rather than command. Only then did the tension ease.

She still felt them, faintly, as she moved away. A second heartbeat under her own. A question held in sugar. However, she noticed they lingered longer than usual. Founding Day always made the court and its threads restless.

Even the walls remembered more loudly. Old stresses rose closer to the surface. Old alignments pressed against the present. The court did not forget how it had begun, and it did not forgive carelessness in remembering it.

The Sugarborn guests gathered early, their bodies drawn into sharper definition by the significance of the hour. They murmured among themselves in low tones. Some carried the dark sheen of black licorice, their forms tall and narrow, edges hardened by long service. Others bore marbled streaks where sugar and bitterness had fused imperfectly over centuries, repaired and repaired again. Still others were bright cherry red or pale amber, softer, younger, their shapes prone to subtle slump when distracted.

The older guests stood closer to the walls, where the memory threads were thickest. The younger clustered around the central table, watching the measures with a reverence they did not yet understand.

Intention mattered more than resemblance in the Licorice Court.

Amareth took her place at the central table, where the measurement devices were kept. She did not touch them yet. She stood with her hands folded, palms pressed together lightly, feeling the court hum through her.

The hum carried the faint aftertaste of bitterness and something else beneath it, something unresolved. It reminded her of the First Confectioner’s earliest pages, where sweetness had still read like promise.

The First Confectioner’s words were never recited all at once. Instead, fragments were spoken as needed, fitted to circumstance, preserved through repetition rather than display. Amareth had learned them slowly, over years of service, each phrase given only when she had proven she would not misuse it.

Some words were never taught at all. They were only referenced, named, and circled carefully in the records of instructions.

Those words were written in darker ink. Ink mixed with sugar ash. Words that bent meaning instead of carrying it.

“Some words end things,” her mentor had once told her.

The mentor had not said it gently. The phrase had been placed within Amareth like a warning tag pressed into cooling sugar.

“And some prevent endings,” Amareth had replied, still young enough to think the distinction was academic.

Her mentor’s silence afterward had been the lesson.

The elders of the court began the founding observance in low tones, voices sliding over one another like pulled sugar cooling quickly. Amareth listened with half her awareness. The other half tracked the court’s subtle shifts: a tightening in the west wall, a faint drag in the air near the upper vaults, a vibration deep beneath the floor where the oldest licorice supports bore weight they had borne since the court’s first casting.

The vibration was deeper than usual. Slower. It carried old memories. It carried the sense of stress returning to a remembered point.

Founding Day, stirring up old alignments as the memory of the First Confectioner lingered more strongly on this day than on any other. He had been human. That detail still tasted strange, even now. Human magic was clumsy, hungry, shaped by flesh and time. Humans reached too quickly and held too tightly. And yet it had been a human who had dreamed sugar into permanence, who had stepped through the dreamward and pulled a kingdom behind him like molten glass drawn into thread.

He had wanted sweetness that did not fade.

He had succeeded well enough to destroy himself.

Amareth adjusted the position of the small vessels arrayed before her, aligning them with the court’s hum. These were symbolic, empty, their purpose complete the moment they were placed. Founding Day required restraint, tradition, and acknowledgment.

Each vessel represented a boundary observed. Each alignment marked a choice preserved. Each empty glass mouth said: This is where we stop.

She would have obeyed that law.

She would have, if the dreamward had not opened inside the court.

The shift was delicate enough that only those attuned to energy shifts noticed it at first. A thinning in the air near the eastern arcade. A pressure change that carried no flavor. Amareth felt it against the inner lattice of her form and stilled.

She recognized the sensation immediately. Dream ingress. A human mind brushing against the realm without knowing where it had wandered.

A human child stepped through.

He was unfinished, in the way that human dreams often were. His edges blurred. His feet hovered just above the floor. His eyes were bright, his smile wide. He did not register the court as a court. He saw color, and sweetness, and height, and possibility.

He laughed.

The sound rang, clean and sharp, and the memory threads answered it before Amareth could warn them. The vibration rippled outward, bending the geometry of the hall by a fraction too small for untrained senses but large enough to make the elders glance toward the arcade in unison.

Several elders stiffened. One raised a hand halfway, then lowered it again. The law was settled. The child would pass through.

Amareth’s focus snapped fully into place on the child.

Children came often enough. They wandered here in their sleep, drawn by sweetness or story or happenstance. They were permitted to wander. The rule was simple. Let them pass through. Let the dream play out. Let it fold back on itself and dissolve when waking came.

Dissolution returned the dream to its source. Dissolution was how human minds survived contact with the Sugarborn.

This child ran forward, hand outstretched. His fingers brushed a black licorice column and recoiled at the bitterness and hardness, surprise flickering across his face. He laughed again, louder, delighted by the strangeness of it.

The laughter struck the floor and lingered.

The elders murmured. Unease passed through the court and its guests, slow and viscous.

“He should not linger on Founding Day,” one said.

“He will not,” another replied. “They do not stay.”

Amareth watched the child’s laughter sink into the floor, leaving a faint shimmer that did not fade as quickly as it should have. Usually, laughter dissolved into sweetness, thinning as it spread, leaving only a warmth in the threads. This shimmer held its shape.

Her confectioner training pressed against her awareness.

The First Confectioner had believed sweetness could be had and held without being owned by another. His early notes, sealed deep within the caramel vaults, spoke of experiments that brushed the boundary between realms without crossing it. He had written of traces. Of honors. Of impressions taken lightly enough to release themselves.

Those passages were annotated heavily. Words like “risk” and “error” were repeated in later hands.

Amareth had also read those notes once under her mentor’s supervision. She remembered the caution woven into them, the warnings layered beneath ambition. And she remembered the hope. The hope had been what ruined him.

The child spun in place, dizzy with joy. His laughter fractured into harmonics that set the court’s memory threads singing. The sound filled the hall, resonant and bright, too alive for a place built on preservation.

Some of the court’s guests shifted, irritation flickering through their expressions. Founding Day demanded attention. Disorder was a kind of disrespect. A few, attempting courtesy, passed the child small candies meant for dreamers. Sugar pearls. Soft caramels. The child accepted them eagerly, laughing as he devoured them, sweetness layering upon sweetness.

Each piece of sugar he consumed bound him more tightly to the realm. Not physically. Resonantly. Human dreams absorbed sweetness easily.

Amareth felt something stir in the deepest part of her candy-red inner vines.

She should have turned away.

Instead, she reached for the measuring devices.

The vessel she chose was small, clear, and reinforced with licorice filaments drawn into the structural pattern. She worked quickly, hands steady, movements precise. This was not indulgence. This was an offering. This was a gesture to the First Confectioner on the day of his beginning, shaped by restraint rather than excess.

A trace of children’s laughter. Nothing more.

That was what she told herself.

The child paused, watching her with open curiosity.

“Wow, what are you making?” he asked, wide-eyed.

His voice carried weight in the hall as human essence always did. It pulled on sugar, on memory, on anything that listened to it.

Amareth inclined her head. “It is a remembrance, dear child.”

He grinned, then tilted his head as if listening for something beyond the court. “Can I take it with me?” he asked. “When I wake up?”

“With you,” Amareth asked carefully, “where?”

“My room,” he said. “It’s blue. My sister sleeps next to me…. but, she doesn’t dream like I do.”

The words landed in Amareth with a bluntness no ritual phrase could carry. His room. His sister. A life waiting for him on the other side of waking.

She felt the dream thinning already, the subtle loosening that meant dissolution was near. The edges of him wavered, not from fear, but from the natural mercy of endings.

A trace came from what a dream left behind. A wake. A shimmer. Sweetness shed as laughter moved on.

An anchor took the dream itself.

Amareth swallowed the sudden tightness in her throat, an imitation of human panic she did not have the body for. “It will not follow you,” she said, and forced her voice to remain gentle. “It is only for this hall.”

He accepted that with the easy disappointment of a child who had learned to have been refused anything important. He smiled again.

The laughter burst free once more, but this time it did not disperse evenly. It clustered, drawn toward the now open measuring vessel as if the sugar had already begun to listen.

The court held its breath.

Amareth adjusted her stance, aligning herself with the court’s hum. She began the incantation softly, sugar-tongue flowing from her without conscious effort. Each syllable instructed the sugar how to listen without clinging, how to thin what it held, how to prepare for release.

The incantation described dissolution before it described binding. It reminded the sugar that endings were sacred.

The measurements progressed smoothly. The vessel brightened. The laughter thinned, drawn into a filament fine enough to weave, its edges already beginning to soften.

At the final phrase, Amareth hesitated.

The syllables were close in sound. Too close. Old sugar-tongue and human-root that shared echoes. The correct one was perfect for this honor.

She thought of the First Confectioner.

She chose the one that felt right.

The vessel sealed.

The child’s laughter cut off as if snapped.

Silence struck the court, sudden and absolute.

Amareth felt the error land before her mind named it. The vessel vibrated against her palms, a deep, steady hum that did not soften or fade. Inside, the laughter looped, unchanged, repeating quietly without loss.

“No,” she said, sharp enough to crack sugar. She spoke the correct syllable immediately, the release clause that followed a binding in every, any, sanctioned use.

Instead, the hum deepened.

“That’s not what I meant,” Amareth said, and the words tasted wrong even as she spoke them.

The court reacted next. Memory threads tightened. Licorice struts creaked under a pressure they were never meant to bear. Elders closed in, their forms sharpening.

“What have you done, Amareth?” one demanded.

Another elder tasted the air and recoiled. “The dream has stopped moving.”

Amareth did not answer. She stared into the vessel, into the human laughter held perfectly, completely. This was not just a trace. This was not even a remembrance.

The child’s dream-form had unraveled entirely and collapsed into the vessel without resistance. His essence was held whole, laughter bright and unaware, stripped of the mechanism that would have allowed it to end.

He would never wake.

It was a capture. A prison made by her own voice and hand.

An elder leaned closer. “This is a fixation,” he said. “You have halted the natural dissolution of the child’s dream.”

Sweetness red thickened throughout the court. Bitterness black sharpened and thinned. The balance that defined the Licorice Court began to strain and groan. Some of the guests began to flee, and a clamor filled the air.

The court itself resisted the sound, as if the licorice wanted to swallow panic and keep the hall from fracturing.

Something beyond the court’s perception aligned itself with the vessel’s hum.

“We… we can undo it,” Amareth said, though her certainty faltered. “The founding measure—”

“The measure was spoken,” the eldest interrupted, his voice brittle with authority. “The sugar has obeyed, despite your futile attempt.”

The bottle pulsed again, its hum syncing with an even deeper resonance. The child’s laughter grew fainter from compression, as if the joy itself were being pressed into a smaller and smaller space.

Then the Licorice Queen arrived.

Her presence forced attention.

Her form was tall and austere, wrought entirely of hardened licorice, her crown a spiral of black sugar threaded with ancient memory. She looked at the vessel once. Then at Amareth.

“What have you anchored,” the Queen asked quietly.

Amareth could not answer.

The Queen’s gaze returned to the vessel. “Human essence, held outside its ending,” she said. “A fixed reference. A prison of sweetness.”

The words settled into the court like a verdict.

The boy was dead. Removed.

Amareth felt it as a sudden absence in the hall’s listening. The space where his dream had been thinning was gone. No path back. No returning thread to the waking child.

The court’s hum turned angry and persistent.

Amareth was escorted to the deepest vault under the guard of the Queen’s court and two master confectioners. When they arrived, the other confectioners chanted bitter wards layered over sweetness until the air outside the vessel seemed to harden. The vessel was then sealed, dampened, and bound to the vault.

Each ward was meant to dull attention. None of them could erase the signal, the hum.

The Licorice Queen did not leave with the others. She remained at the threshold of the vault and spoke without raising her voice, because she did not need to.

“Name what you intended,” she said.

Amareth’s mouth felt full of sugar ash. “A remembrance.”

“Name what you made.”

Amareth looked down at her hands, still stained with the faint shimmer of laughter that would never dissolve. “A prison,” she said.

“Then you will serve it,” the Queen replied.

There was no anger in her tone. Only containment.

Licorice threads were drawn through Amareth’s lattice while she stood listening, binding her to the vault below. The process was precise and slow. It did not hurt in the way humans described pain. It felt like being rewritten. Like being made into her new function.

The hum settled into her, permanent.

“You will hear changes,” the Queen said. “You will report them.”

Amareth raised her gaze. “And the child?”

The Queen’s eyes did not soften. “There is no child,” she said.

It was not cruelty. It was the law. Labels were for things that could return.

That night, as Amareth stood her watch, the hum shifted; she felt it.

It was subtle. A change in alignment rather than volume. A pressure in the licorice itself, as if the court were bending toward something it had not faced before.

Somewhere beyond the Sugarborn realm, something had found its reference.

The licorice walls bent toward it.

They held onto the hum.

They remembered it.