The Proud Princess & the Chain of Human Agony

“She’s calling for you, you little bastard!” one of the hooded figures bellowed toward the castle.

The castle’s double doors crashed open.

Young Darian stepped out onto the stair landing, wearing buckled black boots, torn trousers, and a billowing white shirt. His wild hair flew, onyx-dark, above his blanched white scar, his mouth abominably twisted. “Don’t you DARE hurt her!”

“Yield to us!” boomed the cloaked form. “Give us your power, or she will suffer!”

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 just shown 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 them about to part ways –>

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, without any muscle or fat between skin and bone; his eyes were only white glints of sclera deep in his sockets—all of him seemingly un-alive, 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.”

The continuation:

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

“You see,” he murmured before she could say aught.

Behind her, a hairsbreadth away, he exhaled a living breath, like the one which had exhaled from that seemingly not-alive boy he’d been…

She dragged her shaky fingers along her gown. “What must I see?”

“That I chose to lock out my enemies because of you, instead of slaying them. Because of your words and the wisdom of your secret heart.”

She recalled another part of their conversation, too. As they’d sat cross-legged, facing one another on his wagon bed, their knees touching, their voices mingling—even before his hand had turned to bone and he had sworn to shed his enemies’ blood—he and she had discussed war and violence, and she had advocated for peace.

“Even if another side instigates the pain—” as she’d said it, she knew the boy couldn’t know, but she was referring to her father’s own fate and his past, brief, cruel captivity “—I have seen the one tortured rise up to become more brutal than those who abused him. It becomes a chain of human suffering: one human brutalizes another, who brutalizes the next, who brutalizes the next. Sometimes, one person must turn away from the pain done him and choose peace. And thereby end the ongoing perpetuation of the chain of human agony.”

The boy raised a brow in visibly dubious skepticism. “Will peace truly bring peace to all, though?”

“It will at least bring some less blood—and fewer bruises.”

“Are you bruised?” He lifted his fingertips from his knees as if to reach for her face, but then aborted the touch. Crimson tinged his cheeks as he curved his fingers into fists, and his demeanor assumed the intensity of a vow. “I can carry you away, you know, if they hurt you.”

She laughed tearily (tears she hoped he didn’t notice, as they were still unshed) while looking away. “Would you?”

“Do you want me to?”

In the present, she drifted toward a library window set in an alcove where the broad window ledge provided a nest of tasseled pillows perfect for lounging and reading. “When you… the way you looked at me some of the time, during that day—I thought you were dangerous. A treacherous boy who might take me away without my permission.”

“I considered it,” he admitted softly. “I was dangerous, potentially. I was lonely, bitter, angry, and, obviously, in other iterations of our lives, I did take you, then. But not in this iteration.”

“In other iterations? Ah, you mean in some of the potential lives that the book with our eluded futures shows—the fates that we’ve evaded in this life?”

He dipped his head in affirmation. “You were not always unwilling to be taken back then. But when you were… it did not always end well. ”

“I fought?”

“Not too much. Mostly, you saw the merits in being snatched from home.”

Against her will, his faint smile as he spoke these words intrigued her, sparking her imagination in areas she probably shouldn’t enter.

To avoid thinking of stupidities, she veered tactics. “Your magic… it eats away your flesh and pares you down to bone as its cost, and yet you have looked nothing but healthy the entire time since you abducted me, and surely you’ve done more magic now than then.”

“I’ve not actually used too much. Does it… disturb you that the magic takes my flesh—at least until the power rejuvenates?”

Instead of answering his question, she asked another of her own. “What magic did you do—back then, before you shook me awake in that wagon? The boy you were was half-rotted by the time you woke me.”

“All of those spells were for you: I cast a copious number of them to protect you on your way home—and I cast the one to take your memory of me.”

“Why did you?”

“Take my existence from you, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“To protect you.”

“Was I in danger?”

In lieu of answering, he crossed to the shelf and slid out the Futures Eluded book from earlier. He rifled through the pages, mouth set grimly, then slapped it on the table beside the cakes, causing ripples in the cocoa. “Behold.”

The scene shifting stormily across the pages depicted a sky of roiling clouds above Darian’s castle courtyard. At least twenty cloaked figures braced themselves in a circle on the flagstones, their cloaks riled by the wind, although their hoods firmly obscured their identities.

And in their center: Damarishka. Maybe thirteen years old, barefoot and in a white nightshift, her long, tangled hair mussed and uncombed, as if they had dragged her straight from sleep. Even in the library, in the present, she wavered as faint exhaustion shook her limbs, and the wind sheared across her in a phantom sensation. Strands of her hair skimmed over her mouth while fear clenched in her gut.

Around her in the scene floated at least a hundred knives, all aimed at her throat, heart, ribs, abdomen, every vital, susceptible body part (like an invisible butcher indicating the best places to split open a pig); a few dagger points even hung suspended a finger’s breadth away from her eyes. Two more cornered her parted lips, her panicked gasps fogging the daggers’ steel tips.

“She’s calling for you, you little bastard!” one of the hooded figures bellowed toward the castle.

The castle’s double doors crashed open.

Young Darian stepped out onto the stair landing, wearing buckled black boots, torn trousers, and a billowing white shirt. His wild hair flew, onyx-dark, above his blanched white scar, his mouth abominably twisted. “Don’t you dare!”

“Yield to us!” boomed the cloaked form. “Give us your power, or she will suffer!”

One of the knives by her mouth pricked her skin, and a rivulet of blood trickled down her chin.

Darian slammed the book shut, startling Damarishka out of the sensations of past storm and terror.

His jaw fixed in a hard line. “No matter what I did—whether I surrendered, fought, or hurled their terribleness at their consciences—that they would hold knives to a young girl!—it did not matter; you never… I could never get you out of that trap. Our lives always ended there.”

Damarishka swallowed.

“So.” He absently traced the book’s embossed title. “That is why I took myself out of your mind this time, so that you would never quest for me and thereby draw my enemies to the only weakness outside my protection.”

She wrapped herself in quietness. “Why did you choose me, though? In every iteration?”

“Did I choose you?” he whispered. “Do we ever choose our favorite soul in the world?”

---

I hope you enjoyed this new bit! The next part is here.

Also, I am still editing Heiress of Secrets when I have time. But I must head out now to help my friend bake some Greek dessert 🙂

Thrice the Shadow, y’all! Have a lovely holiday and be kind to everyone this week.

And if you want to support me(!), you can:

• read my books and yell about how great they are EVERYWHERE lol
• OR sign up to my ARC list if it’s still open at the bottom of this page
• OR if you want to throw money at me, you can ‘buy me a coffee’ via buy me a coffee
• OR support me regularly via the patreon (though I never post anything there cuz I suuuuuuuuck). However, the funds from this regularly feed me when I run out of money, so if you want to help me financially, this is probably the best way.