The Proud Princess & the Monsters in Dreams

“Have you ever killed before?” she asked the boy.

He didn’t answer.

It was answer enough. “You don’t know the feel of blood on your hands,” she murmured. “And I do not think that a soul which began innocent will ever forget the feel of fresh blood on it. So. Before you spill any, do you want it on you forever? Because we spoke of monsters in our dreams, but what happens when you see those monsters when you’re awake? Whenever you look in your mirror?”

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! 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. But they met before, when they were just barely teens, and he’s showing her the single day they had together.

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 –>

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.)

The continuation:

As the boy swept her through the sky, the whistling wind stormed around them. Its forceful gusts stung Damarishka’s eyes and snatched away her breath, with drizzle dampening her skin and slickening the boy’s wrist, which she gripped even harder.

But her arm was beginning to ache as she swung from him like a pendulum in the center of the turbulent sky—back and forth, her stomach in a swoop and flip.

Also, there would be bruises, meaning her father would make someone pay if he found the marks, and she would have no one to blame, for she could not bring home this boy—but why was she thinking this when—“What are you doing?” she shouted up at the boy over the shriek of the wind.

“Saving us!”

“I mean how are you flying?”

“Recklessly!”

“Kacking blell!” she cursed. “That is not making me feel better about this situation!”

Laughter erupted from him, an exhilarated sound without a niblet of apology. “You’re taking this fantastically, by the by! Nary a scream nor a faint on your horizon.”

“Drop me and you’ll hear me scream for sure!”

“Never! I promise!” He grasped her harder.

More bruises, she despaired.

And then the rain stopped—or else they flew out of the storm, for the fields rolling below them gleamed as though sown with diamonds.

Sunbeams sparkled between slate-hued clouds.

Damarishka’s breath caught in her chest, for the vista was gorgeous, as if the storm had strewn the earth with celestial gems. Despite the discomfort of her drenched hair plastered to her neck, and her sodden gown plastered to her midriff and arms and thighs, and her soggy boots dragging her down, exhilaration darted through her. Abruptly, the wildness of this dangerous misadventure struck her. The thrill! But—“Where are you taking me?” she shouted.

The boy glanced down, his own sopping hair slanting over his forehead and his dark eyes, and the storm had sprinkled his hair with its gems, too. “Do you want to come home with me?”

“What? No! I can’t leave my kingdom!” Not to her father. Not forever.

The boy tilted his head upward. “Down!” he cried. “My arm’s getting tired!”

“Who are you talking to?” she called up.

“The—” The boy suddenly shrieked, and abruptly he and she were both hurtling toward the earth at alarming speed.

Damarishka screamed; he screamed.

“Kacking blell, you—!” He shook his fist to the sky. Then, cursing, he clawed at Damarishka’s wrist as if that could slow their headlong descent.

Instead, they plummeted faster. The fields hurtled upward as they hurtled downward, and the wind screeched past, a banshee whisking along and threatening to swallow Damarishka’s life. Not even her scream could push its way out of her, throttled by utter terror.

Then the boy bellowed, “Pillows!”

Pillows!?

Pillows—there! Down on the meadow below, they were proliferating in a heightening pile of fluffy white, starchy—

The boy let her go.

Damarishka squeezed her eyes shut.

Stomach-up, she smashed down onto a heap of hundreds of goose-down bed-pillows, her hair flung out, the air in her lungs squished flat.

Despite the softened impact of yielding cushions, she sank down deep.

The boy oomphed somewhere to her right.

Gasping in shallow breaths, Damarishka battled upright inside a flurrying scent like freshly washed laundry, and a flapping sound around her like sheets on clotheslines. Her eyes bolted open to feathers swirling dizzyingly around her.

As she wallowed like an overfed cat on the fluffy heap, the boy, still unseen off to her right, was punching pillows—or crawling closer?

There! He was clambering over the mound, clearing the pillowed rise with feathers in his hair and stuck to his rain-damp cheeks. He blew one out of his mouth.

Somehow, though, for a second, he appeared more skeleton than boy, his cheeks hollowed out with deep contours of gauntness, a boy wasting away.

Then Damarishka blinked and nothing remained amiss, only the sun slanting across a rain-flecked, cherry-cheeked boy, bright with excitement.

Damarishka threw up her arms, the feathers stuck in her flounced sleeves pricking her rain-damp skin. “What was that?”

“The theft of a lot of pillows.” He grinned toothily and slapped a pillow under his knee. “A lot of people will go to bed very grumpy tonight. But we’re alive.” He whooped.

“I mean what was carrying us? And why did it drop you?”

He puffed out his cheeks. “Maybe I’d better return these pillows.”

Motion from the side yanked her head around. Pillows were leaping into the sky, shedding feathers like shot birds.

“What was carrying us,” she doggedly repeated, “up in the sky?”

When his inflexible jaw clearly signaled his refusal to answer—and was his face going gaunt again?—she crossed her arms. “Fine, be a mystery.”

“I’m not trying to be an enigma.”

“Then at least tell me who was attacking us back under the oak tree.”

“Those, I can name.” He spat vilely. “They were the monsters who killed my parents.”

“Killed your parents.” Her heart clenched, but she withheld her pity because his blackening demeanor was rejecting any. “Monsters attacked them? As in—”

“Human monsters, but still monsters.” Rage scrawled ugly red latticework across his face, whitening the jagged scar there.

Helplessly ignorant on how to soothe his fury, she sought a response and settled on simply: “Why?”

He flung himself down beside her while pillows kept furiously vanishing off in every direction. “Ambition? Power? I don’t know. I was only four.”

“They spared you?”

“Not them. I’m only still here because of ancient magic. It doesn’t matter. We should get moving.” He wheeled his scrutiny across the sky. “They’re still hunting for me; I know it.”

Back in the present, Damarishka mulled on her younger self—how she’d felt after landing on that heap of pillows, learning of his tragic origins, and then accompanying him over the rain-washed fields.

Her younger self had known she should head home, known that the repercussions of her absence would only augment with every further moment, and that she must not consort with anyone magical, and definitely not out here, but she couldn’t bring herself to go. Despite the fact that the boy was obviously being hunted, she’d secretly, recklessly thrilled with the adventure, wishing the day would stretch on forever.

That day became her magical reprieve away from her staid castle life, for no one knew where she was—except him, and he hurled the very idea of ‘staid’ into oblivion, as did she. While they wended their way across the meadows, she hitched up her skirts and spun like one drunk, and young Darian spun with her.

Whimsy had crowned her spirits with sun-dust and daydreams. She’d flaunted her grin at the sun and even teased Darian, “You know, your thoughts leap clever and quick as a cat’s. There are worse things to land on than pillows.”

He’d grinned at that. “Like smelly socks.”

She crinkled her nose. “I meant normal things like the ground. That’d hurt.”

“Bees, too,” he suggested.

“Nettles,” she outdid him.

“Nibbled on by blood bugs!” he outdid her.

“Ew! But we don’t have blood bugs here.”

He did a boyish skip and hop. “Lucky.”

“Do you have them where you live?”

“Only in our dungeon.”

“You keep people in your dungeon?”

“Nah. Too much hassle to clean. Everyone just has to behave.”

She laughed, and their conversation traipsed on, unstopping even when they arrived at his solitary wagon which stood beside a field of wheat, a little roof attached to make a moving house he could live in.

“I traveled here in this,” he boasted.

And she had gone trustingly inside it with him.

She couldn’t even blame her younger self, because his younger version had been charm embodied. His easy humor had warmed her like a hearth fire, and she hadn’t really been warm since the loss of her mother.

Or maybe her young self trusting young Darian had less to do with his charisma and everything to do with her eroded hope. When he had insinuated his way into her solitude with the fragile bloom of friendship tendered on his palm, he had offered her the most deeply alluring gift of all.

And there, inside his enclosed wagon, sitting face to face on his single bunk, their legs crossed and their souls afire, they hadn’t stopped talking.

She’d wanted to know everything that a boy without parents did, and he wanted to know everything a girl with parents wanted to do.

“I actually only have a father now,” she’d eventually, reluctantly, corrected him.

He’d cast his gaze down, away from her, but she’d sensed his attention sharpen like a crow sighting a bauble. “What happened to your mother?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Not sure?”

“It’s true. We were… underground and fleeing and—”

“Fleeing who?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know how we got there. Everything is a muddle and I would think it was a nightmare, only—” She bit her lips and mashed her hand on the bed.

“Your mother was gone in the morning,” he guessed, “and never came back.”

“And dirt was caked under my nails.” She didn’t mention the tear tracks that had been drawn in the grime on her cheeks. “And ever after…” She couldn’t finish.

“…at night,” the boy brushed his fingertips over her knuckles, “your sleeping mind sells your unheard screams to the monsters that run rampant in your dreams.”

Nightmares. “Yes.”

“If I could catch them,” he cupped her hand in his, “I would toss them to the heart of the sky where the tale would stay always unsung. I would bury all your nightmares in the velvet casing of the night so that their violent fire would blend in with the twinkling stars, and you could never reach them again.”

Enamored of his words, she wished to reciprocate, for surely he, too, had screamed into the powerless night for his slain mother and father. “And I,” she swore, “would steal your screams back from the monsters in your dreams and magically twirl them into hummingbird wings, and instead of encumbering your heart, they would enable your soul to soar.”

“If only,” he whispered, “we held sway in the world of dreams where the monsters collect our screams.”

“Can we hold sway here, at least?”

“Let’s never give up until they let us live.” In a sort of waking dream, he rose then and drifted to the wagon door, which he opened onto a world on the brink of night, where the orange dusk was slowly dispersing into tattered ribbons of indigo.

He invited her to his side, and they sat down hip to hip, their legs stretched out down the wagon stairs, and Damarishka thought: The world lies so vast before us, and we are so small.

The dark blue of night was thickening on one side like a tide of water filling up the sky, as if a glass were sloshing full of night, and inside it, the stars glimmered like twinkling fish on the ocean blue.

Nearer to the earth, fireflies flickered in the gloaming, and the boy took Damarishka’s hands in his and urged her, “Imagine something.”

“Imagine what?”

“Anything, a snail shell, a golden-beaked bird, and I’ll create it in glass for you from magic.”

“Can you create your likeness for me?”

“My likeness?”

“Your face in a mirror perhaps? It’s just—”

“Yes, I can do it. Close your eyes.”

She did, and in a few moments, the flat, cool surface of the back of a mirror spread along her palms.

“Now,” he whispered, and her eyelids parted.

“It’s—” perfect, she wanted to finish, for the mirror he’d made held his image, his cheeky smirk under his impish eyes, but outside the mirror, across from her hands, his hands were…

One was normal, pale and moon-washed.

But the other shone as bare as pearls: only finger bones and wrist bones stripped clean of meat, not becoming flesh until halfway down his forearm.

His smile hung on an edge of oddness, waiting.

Her fingertips, still holding the mirror, hovered a hairsbreadth away from the fingertips of his skeleton hand. “What happened?”

“The flesh, the muscle—it’ll regrow after the magic rejuvenates.”

“Your skin is the cost of magic?”

“Do you find the aspect repulsive?”

“Not… repulsive. Not when it’s part of you,” she stipulated.

“You wouldn’t prefer just any skeleton?” he jested, his tone not quite as light as it should be.

She didn’t smile. “I prefer you encased in flesh.”

His smile dropped. “So do I. But—” His fingers clenched, his fleshless knuckles blanched completely white. “I’ll kill them all, I swear.”

Damarishka blinked. “Kill who?” What had provoked his outburst?

“Them, the ones who slew my parents and constantly, consistently, incessantly try to destroy me, too, over and over and over. I swear I will filter their blood from their veins, slash it from their families, steep it from their children—”

“No.” She touched his knuckles—the skinless bones—but stifled a shudder at his fleshless joints, powdery-dry beneath her padded fingers, so she shifted her plea to his mouth instead, and he froze at her touch; he stopped, and she whispered, “No. Do not become what they did.” What my father did. Be stronger.

“But they—they killed my parents. And I—I am only here because of ancient and powerful magic. If I gathered it all up and turned it against them—”

“Have you ever killed before?”

He didn’t answer.

It was answer enough. “You don’t know the feel of blood on your hands,” she murmured. “And I do not think that a soul which began innocent will ever forget the feel of fresh blood on it. So. Before you spill any, do you want it on you forever? Because we spoke of monsters in our dreams, but what happens when you see those monsters when you’re awake? Whenever you look in your mirror?”

“What else can I do?” he ground out. “Hide forever?”

“Hide for now. Because you obviously can’t defeat them yet.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you ran from them today.”

For an unexpected instant, the faintest grin overtook him. “You noticed that, did you?”

The faintest smile visited her, too. “I did notice the earth falling away from me, yes, as some crazy boy I shouldn’t like was bearing me into the sky.”

“The crazy boy was only doing that because some crazy girl asked him to.”

“The crazy boy misunderstood the task.”

He laughed quietly, but it perished the moment after. “I don’t want to run all my life. To live poor and haggard in this wagon only to occasionally return home and hope the monsters don’t notice I’m there. I did not tell you, but my castle stands vacant, the servants long fled. I am not supposed to be alive, so at the merest sign of me, my parents’ murderers will descend.”

“Then dig in your heels. If you cannot fend them off, then fight them out. Return to your castle and build traps, walls, mazes, gorges, anything to keep them from getting in. And build up your strength. Make a plan. Prepare for the time when you will open your walls, when you will be invincible. But do not bow to war. First offer them peace. Then, if they attack, let their blood be on their own hands.”

“That… is a devious way to be peaceful. To make myself a trap.”

“Are you so certain they will strike?”

“When they discover I live, yes. And once I raise a barricade around my kingdom against them, they will know that I live.”

She hesitated. “Will you be safe there?” Alone?

“I have a reason to ensure it now.” The way he smiled, his saddened eyes studying her… “But let’s not dwell on unhappy things.”

She heartily agreed, for her own unpleasant thing burdened her mind: aside from her mother’s abhorrence of magic, Damarishka had been gone from the castle for far too long; some servant would likely be punished for her absence, and the longer she dallied here, the worse the servant’s suffering.

But couldn’t she be selfish just this once? Let herself be smitten with a boy? Young and flush and girlish instead of princessly? Buoyant with elation in his company?

Already, his hand was re-fleshing itself: muscle and veins of blood were winding around his bone, followed by a flowing cover of skin. Who knew when her magic friend would return here, if ever. If she had no chance but now… then now it must be.

And so, together, he and she left their sorrow behind, until it only trailed like footprints in their minds: mere indentations with nothing and nobody stepping there for a time.

Still smiling, still talking, then talking slower, slower, mumbling now… he and she fell asleep.

And in that sleep, Damarishka dreamed that their nightmares twirled into hummingbirds in flight, and their souls rode free on those wings.

*

Someone was shaking her. “Wake up! Quick!”

For an instant, her past reared up, her mother—

No, it was the boy, Darian, frantically scrambling backward into the shadows of his wagon.

Damarishka had fallen asleep. Mussed with sleep and bewilderment, she scrubbed at her eyes. “What time is it?”

“Past midnight. You have to go, now!” the boy cried.

“What’s wrong?” Why was he hunkered in the corner? She clambered up and grabbed for him, but caught only sticks—no, she caught bones.

His fingers were of bone again. “What magic did you do?” she blurted out.

He backed farther away, averting his face. But her eyes were adjusting to the dark, squinting. His longish hair looked too greasy on a scalp—a skull?—that was far too white to be skin, and the shoulders visibly prominent under his vest and shirt were far too knobby to be anything but bones.

“I won’t wreak death on the human monsters,” he swore. “Nor on their families. As you proposed, I will return home and barricade myself in my kingdom until such a time as…”

“Until—when?” Fear made her tone faintly shrill. “Will you ever visit me again?”

“I swear. I will, eventually, and I will hope, always… that—” without warning, he loomed before her and touched his skeleton fingertips to her lips, and in the moonlight from his wagon home’s tiny window, she looked straight into his face—his cheeks were impossibly sunken in, his face was barely fleshed, his eyes only white glints in deep sockets, and yet she felt the exhalation of his life-breath on her cheek as he finished with a whisper “—your loving heart is greater magic than theirs.”

*

Damarishka opened her eyes back in the present, in Darian’s library.

DUN DUN DUN! A long one this time, but I hope you enjoyed it! I wanted to get them back into the present day before the next installment, which is here 🙂

As for other news, I am still editing Heiress of Secrets when I have time. And I must head out now to meet my ex for hot chocolate! Fun times 😉

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

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