The Proud Princess and A Forbidden Love

His skeleton hands scraped disturbingly pleasantly across her cheek, and scraped through her hair, and his rough-tongued words scraped near her ear: “I will always find you.”

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 –>

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

“Almost without a doubt.”

“Why?”

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

The continuation:

“My magic as powerful as…!” Damarishka mutely relived the moments preceding Darian catching her as she’d fallen, how she had gotten stuck in a loop catapulting downward and then upward, and then down again and then up, and Whisker had said…

“You can manipulate time.” Darian thinned his lips, his turbulent gaze cast out over the tempestuous terrain of his realm: the rain-lashed peaks in the distance, the verdant curls of forest in the dales. “As your mother did.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

His black brows furrowed darkly, his black hair cutting across the skeletal half of his face, other strands catching in his half-fleshed mouth. “I hoped, if you never manifested your powers, those bastards would leave you alone. Instead, they triggered your magic’s awakening.”

Damarishka didn’t know what to say. Darian, leaving her to digest this without his input, paced into a thorough scrutiny of the tower roof’s perimeter, his head tilted to one side as though listening, the wind rippling through his cape behind him, making the material seem like liquid onyx.

While he stanchly examined every nook and cranny for any remnant of her attackers, Damarishka mulled on the fact that she could do magic, could supposedly wind back time. What if—

Abruptly, she knotted her fingers together, white-knuckled and almost abusive. “Could I have saved her?”

Darian pivoted mid-step, his expression candid, not quite pitying. Sympathetic maybe. Compassionate. “Damarishka…”

“Tell me the truth.” She dashed away foolish tears. “If my powers had manifested when they—it was them, wasn’t it, who took and likely killed my mother—the same ones who killed your parents and one of whom just tried to kill me—if they—if I—if my magic had manifested then, could I have saved—”

“No. Had your mother thought you stood a chance, she would have taught you by then.”

“But—”

“The only answer you can accept is no. Otherwise—” He demolished the distance between them and clamped her hand between his own of fleshless bones. “Your mother, you, I, my parents—we have lived life after life trying to escape this constant coil. How can you think to shoulder blame? They killed your mother, and mine, and my father, and—and now we are on their roster. Take your blame to their door, their feet. They have done this.”

“Life after… life?”

“Yes, they have done this time and again. I’ve hinted at it before; now I will be clear: the book of Eluded Futures contains the lives we have already lived. Destinies we’ve already attempted and been slain in.”

“Been slain in…”

“Yes. Every single time we have been born, they have come. Every time we have united, they have attacked us, and murdered us—twisted us and tortured us. We want nothing but to live life, together, but they will not let us survive even a single lifetime.”

Damarishka frowned. “What have we done that they do this?”

“We were born too powerful and dared to love each other. You and I together could destroy all the others.”

“But we wouldn’t!”

“We haven’t.” He released her, retreated, and lounged back between the teeth of the parapet, viciously scouring the stormy sky. “Sometimes, though, I think that will be the only way to stop them. Too many times have we hidden, hindered them, blocked them, bullied them back, battered them blue, yet still they keep killing us, and still we keep returning in time to try our love again.”

“How is this even possible?”

“Our parents. Do you want the story?”

She puffed herself up. “Of course!”

He grinned. “There’s my proud princess.”

“Tss! As if you’re lacking pride yourself!”

“Not with you by my side.” He tapped her huffy nose, at which she unexpectedly kissed his fingers, at which he left them motionless upon her lips, and for a moment, only the thundering wind of the sky and the thundering of their emotions stormed between them.

Then he withdrew his fingers and narrowed his eyes at the violent sky. “Many iterations ago, in a simpler time, your mother had an illicit affair with a foreign prince. Both young, drunk, and unattached, they were uninterested in knowing each other’s names. Unexpectedly, though, she swelled with his child, having been too drunk to use caution. Afterward, she found his name and tracked him down, but as she spied from afar, she discovered his penchant for brutality: he clouted his servants, ordered a starving, twelve-year-old thief executed, and spoke of burning all the dissenters to his rule alive. Your mother decided to conceal you from him—and from her own family, too—and my parents took her in.”

“Ha!” Damarishka’s laugh scratched into the air like a crow. “In that life, she avoided my violent father, but in this one, she married him…”

“Which she did in many lives,” Darian clipped out.

“Do you think,” Damarishka paused in strange ponderance, “do you think she hoped his violence would protect me?”

“Protect you!?” Darian whipped upright and was at her side within three blinks, not touching her, only… quietly… exhaling on her hair. “I watched,” he rasped, “time and again as she rewound time after time after he struck you, to remove you before he could hit you, so you could never know that he had, or that he would. And after she was gone, I cast a distant spell that would cripple his arm every time he raised it to strike you.”

Damarishka could barely breathe. “Then why would she stay with him?”

“Who always made you fall in love?” His skeleton hands scraped disturbingly pleasantly across her cheek, and scraped through her hair, and his rough-tongued words scraped near her ear: “In this life—in every life where she took you and went with him rather than staying with my parents—I believe she was trying to keep you alive by keeping you away from love.”

From him, from Darian. Damarishka swallowed, wavering on her feet, with her mother’s voice echoing in her mind, warning her away from dark-haired boys, urgent persuasions impelling Damarishka to find a blond-haired, blue-eyed prince.

Darian’s voice emerged raw: “But I would always find you.”

Like a rabbit in a snare, she was ensnared in his stare. The skeletal points of his thumbs slid their bony tips across her lips, and instead of shuddering or twisting away, she leaned into his skinless caress, and the resulting burning in his eyes nearly brought her to her knees.

“You and I,” he continued in that rough and scraping voice, “grew up together in our first life and fell in love. The other wizards disliked how powerful we were, however, and they forbade our union.”

“Forbade us!” Damarishka huffed.

Abruptly, the corner of his mouth crooked upward, and his jaw had rejuvenated enough by now to ostentatiously display his fully wicked grin as he chuckled. “You can imagine how well we obeyed.”

Damarishka smiled, too, feeling downright roguish now to match him. “Must I imagine, or will you tell?”

“Must I tell, or can you imagine?” His warm mouth smiled into her lips on a titillatingly ill-behaved kiss. “We married in secret, and that’s when the other enchanters came to kill us. Afterward, however, my parents worked along with your mother to—”

“What magic did your parents do?” Damarishka interrupted. “Did they control time, too?”

“Not time. Like I do, they manipulated physicalities—human tissue and bone, objects like furniture and wagons, elements such as wind, fire, water, etcetera.”

“Powerful.”

“Says the woman who could unwind time around any object she wished.”

“Any object?” She hoisted her brow.

Oddly, his cheeks flushed as he laughed. “Any object. Anyway, my parents and your mother, who manipulated the time continuum, tried to save us by cutting the entire physical space of our lives out of time itself, starting at a year before our birth and ending at the point when the enchanters killed us, and now we are currently trapped in repeat, reliving our lives over and over until we either manage to kill those killing us, or we permanently escape the enchanters.”

“How?”

“By living past the age they usually slaughter us.”

“Which is the age we are now,” Damarishka guessed.

Darian, keeping his hands in her hair, breathed a kiss upon her brow. “Which is the age we are now.”

DUN DUN DUN! That’s all this week! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it 🙂 For the next installment, click here.

Thrice the Shadow! (Nope, I still have not decided what that means.)

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