The Proud Princess Underground

Abruptly, he slowed their descent to a scant and floating sway, as if they were leaves, adrift and weightless, sweeping side to side and spinning in an aerial dance, and if she’d been able to ignore the suffocating knowledge of the weight of dirt all around them, she might have loved the feel, the gentle, rocking fall…

Continuing the fairy tale which I wrote in Czech and am translating into English for fun! Although at this point I’m just adding ALL THE STUFF! What’s happened so far is SO CLICHE! All the cliches, y’all. A dastardly masked mage kidnaps a spoiled princess from her birthday ball and spirits her away in his flying carriage to his black castle to marry her. Oh, dear, what will she do with such a cliched problem?

If you want to read all the previous parts at once, they’re here: The Proud Princess and the Masked Mage. Or if you want bite-sized bits instead of all at once, you can start with the first and then go one after the other. Or you can just jump right in lol–>

IN THE PREVIOUS INSTALLMENT, she was reliving a scene that he magically suppressed from when they were twelve, when they first met, and that installment ended with their twelve-year-old selves stuck outside in a storm and –>

The next lightning strike exploded around them. Her eyes stung, her nostrils burned, and she smelled scorched hair, singed bark, and—

“I’m sorry, princess!” the boy shouted, seizing her hand.

And then the ground opened up beneath her.

It was simply gone.

Screaming, she toppled with him into a void.

The continuation:

Damarishka flailed midair, her body hurtling downward, her screaming gaze flung upward—toward the earth above, which was now reduced to a hole that framed the black branches of the oak tree.

Its limbs were clawing at the sky while its leaves, aswirl, were spiraling down into the hole like stupid birds trying to follow Damarishka’s catapulting fall.

Then the hole sealed up, enclosing Damarishka in this heaving, lightless drop, and the boy in the dark grappled her close.

Abruptly, he slowed their descent to a scant and floating sway, as if they were leaves, adrift and weightless, sweeping side to side and spinning in an aerial dance, and if she’d been able to ignore the suffocating knowledge of the weight of dirt all around them, she might have loved the feel, the gentle, rocking fall…

But panic was veining through her fast, and Damarishka, gasping, groped for the boy’s arms in an attempt to evade the attack she knew was coming. “You have to get me out of here!”

Any answer he might’ve had went either unspoken or unheard, for the rock above them exploded apart, and not two stories above them gaped a new mouth in the earth, widening as if to eat the overcast sky, with dark shapes of living things that lined its edge, forms rippling in and out of sinister shapes.

Huge boulders peeled away from the sides of the crevice with ear-splitting screeches, like monsters torn from the rock face and slung downward.

The boy cursed again and shoved Damarishka’s face into his chest. He smelled of rain and rock and mint and blueberries—which why was she noticing this now, with clods of dirt pelting her ears and crumbling in her hair and a boulder falling at them from above?!

She scarcely drew in another breath when she was thudding to her feet and staggering forward. A blast of displaced air behind her smacked into her with a whoosh. The boy, beside her, hauled her up before she could sprawl face-flat. “Run!”

A glance back over her shoulder showed that he’d somehow found (or made?) a cave branching off the shaft they’d been floating down, and as she watched, the hind end of the plunging boulder vanished out of sight, visible in some dim overcast light slanting down from above.

Shouts echoed off the rock walls, eerily distorted.

The boy looped his arm around her waist. “Faster!”

Her feet acted of their own accord and followed his lead, but then her gaze shifted to the looming void of the tunnel before them and—

Don’t scream! Mother had hissed into Damarishka’s ear. Don’t scream, don’t scream, don’t scream!

Damarishka squeezed her eyes tighter, wheezing for breath.

Knobs of dirt pummeling her shoulders, rolling off her back and onto the hard ground.

Don’t scream! Mother’s hand had mashed Damarishka’s mouth shut. They’ll hear and—

The earth rumbling.

Mercy upon us! Damarishka, you’ll have to run. Run, darling, run!

Pushing Damarishka away, so much dirt falling that it was piling onto Damarishka’s arms, her neck.

Run, Damarishka, now!

The boy’s hand gripped her fingers hard, anchoring her, but shivers reeled up her nerves and—

Mother!

Tears streaked hot and gritty down Damarishka’s cheeks and smudged the grime into muddied smears on her skin.

Stay always unseen!

Any bravery inside her knotted into a mess, and the glop and gluck of the miry earth sucked at her heels and—

“Stop!” Winded, wheezing, she dragged at the boy’s hand. “I can’t be down here. We’re going to suffocate!” I am going to suffocate, she thought.

“We won’t, I promise! Don’t you trust me?”

“No!”

He tripped and stumbled while half-turning, but also still running, and in the faint floating fairy lights racing alongside them—which he must’ve magically conjured up while she’d been swamped by the awful past—his eyebrows practically shot up into his hairline. “What?”

She almost—almost—laughed at the sheer absurdity of his blatant shock that she might not trust him, but then panic submerged her again. Her breathing stuttered, her sobs gulped openly out, and—

—the ceiling was starting to fall.

Don’t scream, darling! Run!

“Get me out of here!” Damarishka shrieked.

“Kacking blell!” the boy cursed. “Hold on to me!” And the whole earth above them rumbled and shifted and ruptured into another split-open rift. Dislodged rocks exploded outward and rolled toward them in a waterfall of pebbles—but then the boy wheeled her into his arms, and she toppled against his chest. Her knees buckled and he caught her with an arm around her waist. He reached up—his motion jolted her as she pressed her face into his vest—and he shouted a word she couldn’t understand.

They jerked into the air and shot upward. As they—flew?—pebbles knocked into her elbows and heels.

Mercy, her heart couldn’t bear this! She grasped the boy tighter, her stomach barreling downward as her body was borne up and up and—

A gust of drizzle smattered her shoulders and dampened her knuckles, windy air pitching her hair in every direction.

Damarishka raised her head. They were speeding out of the hole; something invisible seemed to be holding the boy’s arm and hoisting him up into the air, and Damarishka along with him as he gripped her to him.

But they didn’t stop at the ground. They kept arrowing upward even as the earthen hole below them wove itself shut and smoothed into a wet, grassy carpet that fell farther away.

There was nothing beneath her feet, and her belly tumbled, her legs kicking, as the boy was somehow flying her into the sky.

Was he unwittingly abducting her?

(And, somehow, somewhere, she had lost her kite.)

DUN DUN DUN! Yeah, I know it’s chaotic, but I know what’s going on and there should be ANSWERS coming next time! These characters are chatty, y’all, as in they keep telling me more and more of their story! Here is the next part!

Anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows I’m always on the verge of anxious collapse, BUT! I am still editing Heiress of Secrets and this is my favorite line this week:

Thrice the Shadow, y’all! Be kind to everyone this week.

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