The Proud Princess & the Cruel Mimicry of Love

By what cruel mimicry of ‘love’ should I—a man reduced to a thing which cannot touch you with softness, cannot kiss you with—what right have I to a woman like you? You of passion and flesh, of potential and ardent, actual essence.

Continuing the fairy tale which I started in Czech, which teeters between cozy, gothic, light, and romantic. 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 there is more to this than she knows…

ANYONE WHO READ THE PREVIOUS POST, WIPE IT FROM THY MIND! I redid it to this one. Therefore, if it feels slightly familiar, that is why!

For all the previous parts, click here: The Proud Princess and the Masked Mage. For bite-sized bits, start with the first and then continue. Or jump right in –>

IN THE PREVIOUS INSTALLMENT –>

When sunrise breached her bedchamber, the first well-rested awakening in years enlivened her.

Darian, she realized. He had played her to sleep in order to keep her nightmares at bay.

But who, her aching heart asked, was staving off his?

The continuation:

Damarishka resisted waking, not wishing to end the loftiest, most nebulous sleep she’d had in years, but a dense wall of wakefulness was building up around her.

No, she begged. Just one more second… minute…

Unfortunately, the chirping of birds winging beyond the windowpanes conspired against her, their cheeps chastising her for her slugabed ways, not to mention some garrulous dormice gabbing gregariously in the bedroom corner.

Sighing, Damarishka at last blinked herself from amorphous dreams, stretched, and yawned—and spied a note upon her pillow.

Its red wax seal was illumined by indomitable sunlight beaming undeterred through the windows and reflecting off a silver carafe by her bed.

A note from Darian?

Excitement fluttered across her nerves (a sensation she would rather not question), and she reached…

Within seconds, she broke the seal…

To nothing. Not a word, not a spot, not the dot of an ‘i’!

A blank page.

But then, lo! Bold handwriting looped dauntlessly across it, asking: How did you sleep?

Damarishka’s cheeks unaccountably heated, although she didn’t know why.

Then rationality intruded: How could she transcribe a reply?

A glance at the stand resolved this quandary: a quill awaited, complicit pawn in Darian’s magical plan.

Damarishka took up the quill and wrote: Splendidly. Your music lulled me all night. But did you sleep?

A moment later, his reply (or evasion) appeared: Will you join us for breakfast? Whisker wishes to sharpen his etiquette on someone who appreciates his comely feline manners.

Damarishka pursed her lips. She would fain not argue first thing in the morning, but people circumventing issues made her wrathful, and so, she doggedly repeated: Did you sleep?

A hesitation, then landed his obviously disinclined response: I do not need to as much as you.

As she puckered her brow, he wrote onward: You asked why I chose you, last night, after which I responded by questioning if we ever choose our most beloved soul in the world (the person with whom we most align—in thought, in fascination, in interest, in enjoyment). It was an evasion.

She scribbled: THIS is an evasion.

He: Only partly. I…

Nothing more.

Was he thinking? Gathering words?

Lies?

Elusive enigmas with which to befuddle her attempts to truly know him?

At last, more words inked his thoughts: I am conflicted in my feelings toward you. I should not—that is to say, magic grinds me down to skull and bone. By what cruel mimicry of ‘love’ should I—a man reduced to a skeleton, a pitiable remnant of a body, which cannot touch you with softness, cannot kiss you with—what right have I to a woman like you? You of passion and flesh, of potential and ardent, actual essence. I nearly did not come for you at all; I nearly left you in your father’s pretty prison. Sometimes, I think I should have.

No, she scrawled, sickened by the faint scent of burning men—a residue of her former life, of her emptied mind as she used to eat the smell of scorch in her father’s palace garden, those vestiges now as sticky as blood viscous in her throat. She peeled off the foul sensation with effort. Continue, she wrote. Tell me why you did come.

More inked words poured: Because in the book of our eluded futures, you and I—something beneath the surface always bonded us. Even in the worst of our potential lives—namely, the one where I abducted you with brutality and chained you, when your animosity rightfully grew like a bitter, poisoned seed, even in that vicious life, one scene showed…

He trailed off, and Damarishka, fidgety and fervid with curiosity, jotted: Tell me.

And his inked words flowed unflinchingly onward: In this scene, I was stretched naked and stomach-down on my bed, perusing a map of my lands. My bedsheets glimmered in disarray, implying… the obvious. That you and I…

Damarishka flushed to her toes, imagining that they would eventually do so in this life, as well, and she wasn’t quite against it. (Maybe not at all against it, but she shouldn’t be thinking of that now.)

His unabashed script spun blazingly onward: And you, in patent mutiny, were sitting on the carpet by my bed, nested in a blanket, your chained arm stretched to my headboard. (In this cruel iteration, you were still clearly trying to escape me.) In the candlelight, you marvelously spellbound that version of me. Scarcely clothed as you were in that half-laced nightshift, yet still so thickly cloaked with dignity and grandeur, which drove me to the edge of madness, but which I never wished to strip you of. You overcame me in untold ways.

As he described her so intimately, his depiction so enamored, Damarishka couldn’t name how she felt.

He continued: You were balancing a book on your upraised knee, your lip between your teeth, your eyes avidly scanning the text, your mind roving visibly elsewhere, in stories outside ours. It simultaneously confounded and bewitched me that you could soften so much while reading a book after screaming at me with such fierce hatred and passion. I… in this scene, I abandoned my map, slid across my sheets, and offered you an immoral bargain—and yet one well-worn, as I apparently had innumerable times before: I promised to take you to the library to pick another book if you slept with me.

Damarishka, incongruously, was startled into a laugh. You used books to bribe me for THAT?

She wondered if he were laughing as he replied: You took the bargain every time.

She wrote: You were a scoundrel.

He confirmed it easily: As accused. Worse, actually. Degenerate. Debased. Debaucher. And arrogant to boot. In this scene—as you fumed, infuriated—I trailed a finger along the nightshift barely held up on your shoulder, and I gloated, “You don’t find me entirely awful.” And the most extraordinary thing is that you didn’t. The way you looked at me wanted, desired, wished, craved even as you fended it off with a ruthless hatred. Eventually, you slew me, but in so doing, you destroyed yourself, too. My point in relaying this is that some bond of heart or soul or mind or something binds us in every potential life. And if you, even minutely, could want the inexcusable villain I was in that eluded future, then…

Damarishka concluded where he was leading: Then I might even want you now, with you pared by magic down to skull and bone.

Precisely, he affirmed, and she imagined him heaving a relieved sigh. Yes. And that is why I came for you.

This bond between them—she felt it, too.

But something else niggled at her.

Her quill scratched again: Does this mean that, in other courses of our lives, you were not pared down by magic to a skeleton?

Yes, he wrote. I was not.

She bit her lip. Then why do you waste away when you use magic now?

A reluctance settled into the space between them, which stretched before he replied: It is an ugly story, and one I should tell you face to face. Are you hungry? Your absence torments us at the breakfast table.

His exaggeration unexpectedly both charmed and diverted her, and a blushing laugh brushed her lips even as her stomach growled.

I heard that, he wrote teasingly.

Damarishka laughed outright, and then practically sensed his subsequent smile like a presence crouching beside her. A genial warmth brimmed in her middle.

She shouldn’t feel bright and flittering like a butterfly, she thought, not with so much mystery steeping him, yet she couldn’t stop her smile.

Stealthily, he had slipped into the nooks of her wishes where she’d thought no one would ever squeeze.

When you are ready, he wrote, toss this letter into the air, and it will lead you to the dining hall.

With that, the paper and quill both disintegrated into raining sparkles that vanished before reaching her lap.

These enchantments of his utterly enthralled her; after her heavy, leaden life, the whimsy of his life (despite the darkness at its edges) made her buoyant.

She clambered from the bed at once and made wise use of the garderobe first, then took stock of her appearance in the vanity mirror.

Her hair had frolicked with chaos in the night, and her curls flocked in every mussed direction imaginable.

Leaving it spiral as it wished, she splashed cold water on her cheeks, then meandered to the wardrobe of stolen gowns (stolen from her castle at home and spirited into the cabinets here at Darian’s). She chose her favorite green velvet, which fell in long, dark folds that shimmered like an enchanted forest wherever sunbeams fell. Then she slipped on dark, matching gloves. White stockings.

And golden-silk slippers, each with a tiny bell.

At last, she tossed the letter into the air, and at once, it sailed briskly toward the door.

Damarishka traversed the halls behind it, hardly hearing the bells on her toes or the hush of her footfalls over her lightly dancing soul. She scarcely paid heed to the relentless black corridors of oppressive black stone that closed gleamingly in as if cloistering her in the belly of a beetle.

The letter guided her into the dining hall, where Darian’s highhanded flying cat, Whisker, was currently prattling, “It’s nice to have you fleshed out again, Master. Your skeleton hands scratch well, but femurs are hardly comfortable lap material.”

Damarishka’s footsteps impetuously froze.

“Princess!” Whisker whisked himself her way while doffing his hat. “I was just praising Master for keeping his human flesh and muscle on his bones since your arrival. He has been mostly mopey skull and scrappy skin for years, which—oh, come in, come move; don’t stand there!”

Anxiously, Damarishka sought Darian.

At the head of the table, he had risen and gone motionless halfway through his bow. Without his golden mask, the stark hollows of his face contoured him into a gaunt yet beautiful man, with raven-dark hair that feathered over his void-dark eyes. His black cloak slid like a waterfall around his elegant pose of homage, brushing his boots, which were glossy with polish.

Damarishka’s question toppled like a burning city. “Am I to understand you’ve been a skeleton for years?”

He smoothly rose while just as smoothly smoothing out his expression. “Not now.”

“An evasion.”

“Yes,” he answered simply. “I existed mostly without flesh for years. Although at least being only bone spared me having to consume food.”

“But you love food.” The boy he’d been had glowed when he’d spoken of it—the blueberry pies, the mushroom loaves—

“Yes.” Although his face didn’t crumple, Damarishka imagined his soul did, a little, behind his forcibly vacant eyes.

“Why?” She battled back rage. “What magic were you doing all these years that justified you being depleted to bone?”

“Sustaining the barricades around my kingdom to keep my enemies out. As you suggested I do rather than fighting them. For that, my sacrifice was warranted. Now that you are here, however, I’ll remain flesh and blood and… heart and soul together. At least as long as I can reduce my use of magic.”

Her mind pieced together the bits he left unspoken behind his words. “What of the barricades now? Do they require less magic?”

“No,” he stated simply, setting his gloved fingertips to the table. “They are failing. Without my expending the vast magic vital to maintaining them, it is inevitable. Because of this, I must soon set out soon to check the borders.”

“Are we in danger?”

“Potentially.”

“Definitely,” Whisker inserted.

Darian slid his frown toward the floating cat. “Eventually. Once the other enchanters discover that my barricades are down, they will come.”

“And,” Damarishka theorized while pulling out an upholstered chair at the table but not sitting, “you believe they will come in violence.”

“They always come in violence.” Shadows congregated in his tone. “I do not know why, but they never simply let us, as in you and I, live.”

“Now that you are grown, will you be able to fend them off?”

“That question,” his palpable fury strummed the air around him, “haunts my thoughts every time I look at you: Can I defeat them this time, in this iteration of our lives?”

“Me?”

“They come for you, too, and every time—”

“Fie, Master!” Whisker whisked up and fondly patted Damarishka’s hand with his paw. “No dreary thoughts! We’ll do our best, my lady. Have a scone for courage.”

She almost choked on a laugh, and before she could regroup, in swished her cat.

He poised briefly on his hind legs, his black tail cutting the air, his pomposity cutting the company. “Claw has arrived!”

“The perambulatory wonder!” Whisker heralded, accompanied by a contrary rolling of his eyes.

Claw hissed.

Damarishka seated herself, undertaking to stamp down her gloom, and considered the silver trays and porcelain dishes arrayed at the center of the table before her. “Where were you last night?” she challenged her pet. “You always sleep by my pillow.”

“You did not acknowledge my presence in your sleep.”

“An oversight.”

“Unforgivable.”

“But you’ll forgive me.”

Claw tended to a paw with a delicate tongue. “I upped a hairball in a place you have yet to discover, O Neglectful One, and then I rose early in order to taste of the local rats.”

“Decadent fare, is it not?” Whisker inquired, flitting about like only wingless cats do.

“Voluptuous rats here,” Claw allowed. “Befittingly maintained.”

As the cats proceeded to advance their meticulous debate on the quality of local rat, Damarishka strove not to react to Darian’s appraisal of her, and strove not to think of the gaunt and skeletal boy he’d been, or of the unnervingly beautiful and yet too-thin man he was now, and of the barriers to his kingdom falling, and the fact that those who’d killed his parents would eventually come here again.

She focused only on loading her plate with buttery mushrooms in a sauce of cream and spinach. She plucked an orange, too, which instantly hoisted itself from her hand and spun around, magically peeling itself. The spiraling rind twirled away, and beyond it, Darian (author of the unpeeling) crooked an impish grin.

The corners of Damarishka’s mouth turned involuntarily up.

Smiling graciously, Darian spread out his cloak to resume his seat—but instead, his chair went screeching across the stone, and his gaze shot straight to the window. “They’re here.”

“Who?” Damarishka blurted without thought.

“The murderers—the bastards.” His black gaze terrifying, his manner almost violent, Darian sprinted for the corridor.

Whisker arched into the air, his scarlet cloak aflutter, his valiant bravado a-billow. “I will join you, Master!”

“No,” Darian flung over his shoulder, halfway to the door. “Protect Damarishka. And you—” Abruptly, vehemently, he halted in the doorframe and slewed his look over her.

His intensity staked her in place.

“Live.” Then he bolted out the door.

DUN DUN DUN! I hope you enjoyed the rewrite! You can find the next part here.

Work on Heiress of Secrets is still on hold while I try to finish a story about my wicked queen’s past (when she fell in love with a carnival boy… IT MADE MY WRITERS’ GROUP CRY! I think I did something wrong.)

Anyway, be kind, y’all!

Thrice the Shadow.

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