The Proud Princess & His Tormented Music

As twilight welled out of the day, his music welled out of the night.

It played through her hair, her breath, and wound windingly around her heart… luring her near, inviting her in…

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 –>

“Now,” he said, “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.”

The continuation:

Damarishka endured.

She endured Darian swishing out because the wizards’ breach meant he had to re-erect the safeguards on his border.

She endured the knowledge that this would mean more cost to his literal flesh and blood, peeling his bones clean of muscle and flesh again.

She endured her own embittered fury that people like these wizards and her father existed, people who extracted tolls of life and anguish from others for something in themselves that huddled tiny and broken and fearful.

She endured Darian’s departure on this fruitless, sucking venture against fruitless, sucking people—his mouth grimly set and her heart hanging heavily—and she sought distraction in the rose garden…

…and in the music room…

…and in the library…

…and back again.

She endured Whisker floating boldly behind her, his enactment of attempts at drollness ever bolder. She endured somewhat sleepy Claw inserting somewhat somnolent commentary.

She endured meandering aimlessly through the turgid, truculent hours…

…until she came to a resolve.

This resolve flushed her skin scarlet and rendered her impatient with anticipation.

More hours curled around her as the windy afternoon whisked away the rainstorm and raindrops, and dusk began to paint the day in hues of persimmon and pomegranate, and night’s ink of midnight spread across the sky…

Yet Darian did not return.

Not openly.

He did not arrive in a whisper or chuckle or murmur behind her, only…

There.

As twilight welled out of the day, his music welled out of the night.

It played through her hair, her breath, and wound windingly around her heart… luring her near, inviting her in…

It composed a rising symphony of feelings that she could not quell (much less endure).

On the threshold of the music room, she alighted on a pause and watched.

He played.

But not in joy… not in welcome…

He played in grief.

As she drifted closer, step by cautious step, she beheld his face was a skull.

For the first time, she noted that a scar of knitted bone diagonally bisected the skull’s face; it shone stark white in a moonbeam, like a glossy shard of silver poured through his cheek and jawbone.

And she knew.

No one could survive such a cleaving…

She knew it before she spoke.

“You were not,” she whispered, “a skeleton in our other lives, were you.”

“No.” He slammed his fingers down on the piano keys in a discordant note, skewing the music and darkening the song. “I was not.” He spoke onward as he played. “When they killed my parents when I was a boy in this life, I did not escape the sword that cleaved in twain my skull. I lay there rotting with them, but either my deathless will to live remained, or my parents accounted for this event, too, for magic eventually reconstructed me back into a boy of flesh and bone and breath… but false breath, false flesh, for I am not a man who wields magic; I am magic. That is why my body unpeels itself with every magical use.”

What could Damarishka say, when to speak it meant it was real?

She had endured so much, though; she could endure even this, his words as he murmured, “Am I not hideous? Am I not a nothing of a man?” He lifted his skeleton hand, and the music faded away, both its beauty and its discordance. “I am put together only with magic and bone. In this iteration, only you are still alive.”

It was horrific, the idea that only she of them both lived and breathed, that she was alone… no, not alone, not truly, for he still existed…

He endured.

She knelt upon the parqueted floor, her gown folding and rustling before him on the piano bench, and she drew his skeletal hand between her own of flesh and blood, lifted it, and flattened his palm to her cheek. “When your magic recreates the flesh of your body, will you give yourself to me?”

His skull’s rictus could make no other expression than mordant grin (although she knew him so well by now she didn’t need a contortion of muscle to convey to her his thoughts). “What do you mean?” he rasped.

She laughed, chastisingly, tearily. “Why did you abduct me?”

The tips of his finger bones indented her cheek, soft and precious. “You still wish…”

“What else have I ever wished?” She turned her head and kissed his bare bone of a hand. “In every life.”

That’s all this week! Short but hopefully sweet! Maybe bittersweet. I am thinking of trying to complete the story by Christmas and putting out a print version. Thoughts? Anyone want the paperback of it? 🙂 I made a short video for this post here:

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In any case, thrice the Shadow! (Nope, I still have not decided what that means LOL)

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