The Proud Princess & Her Distorted Heart

“Fascinating as this is,” Darian physically stepped in between them, the skeleton half of his face in a grinning rictus while the half with skin was grimacing, “we’ve gotten off topic. Damarishka, were you hurt in the fall, or when I caught you?”

How silly was it that the way he said ‘when I caught you’ made her heart distort in ways that were rampantly indiscreet for a body organ? She actually wanted to be caught again…

Continuing the fairy tale which I started in Czech, which veers like a mad scientist between cozy, gothic, adventure, and romance. 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…

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 –>

Abruptly, a hand of bare, stripped bone encircled her wrist and yanked her to a halt.

Her frantic fall stalled with her swinging crazily a floor above the flagstones, her arm almost pulled from its socket, clutched by— She twisted her head upward to find a man with a half-fleshed skull—

The continuation:

Darian was holding her, his face half skull, half flesh, and all contorted into anger. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“What?” Unable to believe he would suggest such absurdity, she unleashed some nice and knifelike sarcasm. “Why would I smash my beautiful body on a flagstone courtyard that doesn’t appreciate my stunningness? Somebody…” Her voice trailed off, because the vast wings of the dragon were shrinking and furring up and—cat ears, cat claws, cat paws—it turned into Whisker.

Levitating, the ever-insouciant black cat brushed himself off with his hat as if sojourning as a dragon transpired as a daily dalliance. “So glad your humor stayed intact along with your body, my lady. Dead senses of humor lack life. Or is that stating the obvious?”

Damarishka had words. “You were a dragon!”

While Whisker fussed with dust on his hat, Darian floated Damarishka and himself down toward the flagstone courtyard, near the ebony-wooded chicken coop where a black rooster boasted his strut among the hens. “Yes, well.” Darian’s mouth—the flesh part, not the grinning jawbone part—twisted wryly. “I did tell you he was not human.”

“You…” Damarishka couldn’t even begin to guess anything anymore. “Is he real?”

“Quite.”

Her feet alighted on the ground and Darian’s hands—only bare bones without muscle or flesh—caught her balance.

Damarishka pointedly crossed her arms. “Explain.”

Darian pointedly sighed out the confession. “When I was still a boy, almost two decades ago, before—well, nevermind before. I found a dragon with a split claw, its wing segments arrow-torn, a spear jutting from his hind leg, and bad teeth.”

“Master!”

“It is true.” Darian executed an unapologetic bow toward the affronted Whisker. “He was huddling at the foot of one of our mountains, and despite his heated expulsions of breath, I healed him. I meant to leave it at that and let him fly away, but he followed me home, like a cat.”

Discriminating Whisker licked a persnickety paw. “Master provided my palate with many meaty morsels. Food furnished without any effort on the part of the hungry one is not to be scorned.”

Darian continued in his offhand way, speaking of how he had so cavalierly befriended a dragon: “He deigned to speak to me at some point, and with his approval, I eventually enchanted him an alternate form, so now he can alter at will into a magical cat. Only truly soulless humans would hunt a hatted cat, meaning he can thusly avoid pursuit by dangerous humans.”

Whisker gravely flattened his hat to his chest. “Humans kill dragonkind, you see.”

“Do you eat humans?” Damarishka put timidly forth. “Because if you do, they are kind of justified in protecting themselves.”

“Pffff!” Whisker flapped his hat toward the puffy-clouded sky. “Have I eaten you, my lady? I am a cultured being with developed abilities! We don’t eat creatures that are stimulated enough to hunt us. We feast on the dumb ones that don’t give us lip. Boars. Cows. Moose. You never see a moose incentivized to exert a mastery over pitchforks. Cows prefer wearing cowhide to gauntlets. And boars would be more likely to rootle for roots than swords. You humans, however, kill any creature that you judge physically terrifying. I challenge you: look at my little fellows the spiders. How many of them have you slain in your life just for webbing in one of your corners?”

“I… have killed none,” Damarishka answered as truthfully as she knew.

“Then your maids have slain them on your royal behalf.” Whisker swishingly bowed alongside his hat. “No judgement on your courage, of course.”

“Actually, it was one of my maids who told me not to kill spiders.” Damarishka diligently thought back to her childhood. “When I was a little girl, she informed me that spiders don’t transmit infection or disease even if they bite you, and they catch and kill the flies and other insects that can make you sick.”

Whisker stroked his whiskered chin. “Very peculiar. Advanced thinking for a simple maid.”

“I’ve always thought so, too. I believe she briefly entered my life from part of a larger tale.”

“I wonder where her story went.”

“I’m sorry I cannot know. Now that I think of it, she was likely in disguise as a maid.”

“I am of the same thought. Perhaps—”

“Fascinating as this is,” Darian physically stepped in between them, the skeleton half of his face in a grinning rictus while the half with skin was grimacing, “we’ve gotten off topic. Damarishka, were you hurt in the fall, or when I caught you?”

How silly was it that the way he said ‘when I caught you’ made her heart distort in ways that were rampantly indiscreet for a body organ? She actually wanted to be caught again, clasped against that man’s firmly made chest—well, actually, he might just be bone underneath, a skinless breastbone with no heart under it, only a solar plexus of shriveled desiccation, which should make the idea of being clasped to him less romantic, but it didn’t.

It must be testimony to how enamored of him she was that she enjoyed him even when he was only bone.

Should she be enamored of a man this quickly?

Well, there was no law against it…

Brought belatedly back to her senses when he cocked the brow on the half-fleshed side of his face, she took inventory of her body. “Not an ache on me.”

“Ah, the elasticity of youth,” Whisker sagely intoned.

Darian adhered more appropriately to the matter at hand: “How did you fall?”

Damarishka shuddered. “Someone pushed me.”

“Pushed you.” Darian glared upward, frowning and ferocious. “They were inside my castle?”

“On the roof.”

“Curse it. Whisker, can you secure the premises and then brew us a tisane?”

“Chamomile?” Whisker inquired.

“Rosehip, I think.”

“A choice one must not be ashamed of.” Whisker tossed his hat into the air and then neatly secured it with a prick of his claw. “You place proper faith in my competence, Master!” He whisked himself away.

Damarishka marveled after him. “You use a dragon as your butler?”

Darian’s half-fleshed face halfway grinned. “He uses me as food provider. A fair exchange.” Then he took hold of Damarishka’s arms and sprang upward.

She shrieked and he held her tighter, and bony or not, she did love the proximity of this man.

And as he ferried her up and up and up along the castle wall, and the ground receded farther and farther below, she concluded that she decidedly preferred going up to down.

But then she noticed the bits of skin on his jaw being invisibly pared away, and she fretted: “Are you using too much magic?”

Darian squinted upward as the tower windows sped past them. “The worst damage is already done.”

His tone brooked no continuation of the subject, and so she asked instead, “Did you defeat the wizards?”

They almost overshot the roof, and Darian bobbed them back down and over the parapets. He deposited her gently on the stone surface, as if he were handling something precious. And then, grimly, he said: “No. That’s why I returned so quickly. The attack was a diversion for most of them to infiltrate here.”

Damarishka sucked in a breath. “Were they the ones who pushed me?”

“Almost without a doubt.”

“Why?”

His gaze skewered her with its ferocity. “Because your magic is at least as powerful as mine.”

DUN DUN DUN! Thrice the Shadow. (Nope, I still have not decided what that means.) For the next part, click here!

That’s all this week, y’all!

Be kind 🙂

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