Friday, November 11, 2005
Meet the Evils, and the Sleeping Princess...
Oh, just shut up about clichés. I KNOW it's horrid. It's not going to be as bad as you think... and this is the entirity of chapter 3. I've finally started focusing my chapters. Heh. And I may consider posting it all, now that my prologue makes less sense and is more palitable... I couldn't live without rewriting it... diary babble about hot guys... yeesh. Now it's a confusing vendetta... ><
If the princess seems familiar, it is because, yes, she has a bit of Tiana influenence. She is not Tiana, however.
This chapter is the painful proof that my evils hate cooperation with being evil. t least, my intended main evil is anyway... >< Not anymore... meh.
**
Chapter Three: A Sleeping Princess
**
The Frost Passage
**
In what seemed a hollowed out stone tomb, a young woman slept. Her features were fair enough to dub her pretty, though she wasn’t a beautiful young knockout—she had a slight case of acne, and she certainly wasn’t flawless. There was an empty innocence about her, leaving her to seem as if an untouched being amidst sin tainting a once beautiful world within ancient times.
There was almost no dim light to cast a shadow over her features, instead leaving the room bland and gray. It was colorless, and to some, nameless. There was nothing tangible about it but the woman cast within it, lying in a preserved slumber.
She did not stir.
The room she was in appeared to be made of some volcanic stone, built up by time rather than human hands. It was easily dubbed a chasm, a hollow maw meant to swallow the sentient being whole and leave them to suffer a painful death within an eternal chill within rather than without. It was a mouth, a cavern, a prison of words rather than iron bars. It was death from within one’s mind rather than a physical pain sending them reeling into an agony that would crush the heart and mind.
In that room, the young woman slept peacefully, the only sign that she was not dead the slightest rise and fall of her chest. Her hands were clasped beside her face, unreceptive eyes drawn closed against grasping ice in an eternal sleep.
She was the sleeper, the one sentenced to sleep under stone and under trees, fingers icily cold and chilled with the bite of death until the end. No one knew what her end would be. For one thing, there wasn’t anyone around to really wonder about what her fate was, and for another, there were no known crazy prophecies centered around her. She was merely the sleeper, a young woman with a slightly pretty face, slightly chewed up fingernails, and braided light brown hair.
Her white fingers were clasped tightly around a single longer lock of her hair that had escaped the binding braids, though there were naturally staticy pieces flickering around her features.
A voice suddenly cut through the air, the acoustics of the chamber sending his voice ringing through the hollows and echoing back to him in a dramatic and unintended effect. “The sleeping princess. Not quite what I expected.”
Beside the original speaker, a mid-height ranged being stood. He shook his head. “Not beautiful enough.”
“Maybe it was all the stock they had in princesses at that time,” the original speaker murmured thoughtfully, reaching out to brush a piece of her brown hair from her face. Over time, wind currents had tossed her hair, making it messily strangled in tiny bangs over her face in some places. He brushed these tenderly back from her forehead and gazed down at her thoughtfully, almost jerking his hand back. The princess’s face was as cold as ice in the depths of winter in some country in the north of Endyr where everyone said ‘eh’ all the time and watched people hit black disks into nets with bent sticks. The taller man’s name was Iren, and his companion was simply Bob.
Iren wore loose gray clothing, nondescript and revealing no affiliation with any side or country. His face was as plain as the sleeping princess’s, no dramatic scars creasing it in checkerboards of scar tissue, no hooked or hawk like nose, and no stringy goatee brushing his chin. He looked simply human, an ordinary peasant type of being, beyond the cruel looking blade sheathed at his waist. And he wore no dramatic magical jewelry, the only glimmering piece gracing his presence being a gold ring on one hand.
Bob, on the other hand, looked as if he were trying to be intensively cliché and noticeable. Owing to his name, perhaps it was to make up for the lack of fear inspired by his pseudonym. He wore deep black robes, belted with a thick buckle, and dramatic boots. His hair was short and black, carefully combed over his eyes, and nearly black eyes stared out from underneath his hair to pierce the nearby wall. Had he been magically equipped with flame, his gaze could’ve literally burnt through the wall or anything else he had decided to stare at.
The shorter Bob, clearly elf-born by his pointed ears, drew a dagger and approached the sleeping girl. She stirred briefly, looked as if she might cry aloud in her sleep.
“Wait!” Iren put a hand over Bob’s arm. “We’re not going to kill her, ninny.”
“Ninny?”
“The important part of that statement was that we weren’t going to kill her,” Iren explained.
Bob nodded once, and sheathed his dagger. The elf hadn’t appreciated being insulted with a derogatory term when he was as skilled as his taller human companion, but he was also smart enough to not stab Iren randomly. “Why not?”
Iren raised his eyebrows, and gave his companion an odd look. “Because we don’t know what will happen if we kill her. She might spell the end of the world as we know it.”
“I thought that was what we wanted.”
Iren sighed aloud, an annoyed look brushing across his eyes. “We don’t want to see the end of the world, Bob. We just want to prevent anyone from waking her up.”
“So, why can’t we kill her, then?”
The taller human chewed on the inside of his lip, attempting to avoid falling into what would ultimately cause him to get annoyed, shriek a bit, and possibly hurt something. “Because that’s not the point,” he finally decided. “And we don’t want reality to implode due to a lack of congruity with a notable lack of dramatic prophecies either declaring the end of the world or at least all things good and shiny in the universe. Considering the mathematical reasoning behind our princess’s placing, it is very likely that if we were to disturb her slumber, all things we know as reality would be shunted aside and cause a large paradox in the tapestry of all things remotely pertaining to logic in the universe.” He drew in a breath, and nodded once at the princess.
“We’re going to hold her hostage?” Bob asked hopefully, deciding that reality imploding due to something about the thing in the whatever was too much to think about.
“Perhaps.”
“Well, then, what do we want with the stupid sleeping princess if we aren’t gonna do anything with her?” Bob asked, slightly annoyed as he fingered the hilt of his jeweled, rune carved, magically, and remarkable shiny dagger.
Iren merely smiled dryly. “We just wanted to know where she was so that we’d have access to the interwinding passages between reality and imagination. That’s all.” He gestured to one end of the stone tomb. “Take the other end, please. And don’t be looking up her skirt,” he added as Bob waltzed over to the other end of the coffin-like bed and grabbed the handles.
Bob sighed, muttering a bit under his breath about no one ever understanding him. Iren rolled his eyes, and braced himself at the other end. Counting to three aloud, they heaved the tomb up, and began a slow and steady trek out of the cavern. The girl herself wasn’t notably heavy, but the tomb-like bed was solid, and weighed enough to be incredibly awkward to move had the elf not been fairly strong for his size.
“We’re stealin’ the princess?” Bob asked incredulously.
Iren smiled. “We’re stealing the princess.”
“And not to hold her hostage?”
“Not to hold her hostage. Yet.” Iren sighed.
As the princess was shifted around, her hands fell unclasped, and a small rose fell from her right hand, landing on the stone carved ground. A petal slipped from its flower and was crushed under the weight of Bob’s leather boots, but the rest of the flower remained in tact.
A faint glimmer happened around it, and it turned into an frost-coated flower as it completed a circle in its fall, turning as pale as snow. But none noticed, not even Iren, that the flower had fallen and been preserved in winter’s bitter chill of ice.
**
The Lesser Shadowcoves
**
For Iren, sitting silently was something almost easy to do. In the gloom of the Shadowcoves, he held the sleeping princess at what was in a way his own beck and call. He held the power over her, and could’ve ordered her destroyed on a whim.
He had no purpose to.
He sat silently on a carefully carved wooden chair, watching the sleeping woman. In what had seemed a moment of panic she had clasped her hands over her chest, but had still not awaken from her everlasting slumber. Bob had tried yelling in her ears, and still she had not stirred whatsoever. She remained frozen in a single moment of cold, lingering between reality and dreamscapes.
For a moment Iren brushed his fingers over her icy face again, feeling the biting chill teasing the warmth of his own flesh. It had been a long time since he had tried to touch a woman from affection, and he didn’t plan on starting with the sleeping princess. He was married.
A thin smile touched his face.
Married, but certainly not in love. Not any more.
The princess’s face had changed over the time it had taken to move her from her dark cavern to the Shadowcoves and the dull gray theme of the entire room. Somewhere there was an electric blue gleam sending brilliance shot through the misty tones, but it wasn’t in that room where a quiet Iren sat, thoughtfully watching the princess. He watched for any possibility of change, of any hint of a shift in her patterns from the movement from ice to shadow.
She now looked worried, as if something had been taken from her. She looked as if she was longing for something to be there for her in this strange place. Though her eyes hadn’t opened or even slightly flickered, still something managed to show on her face without the hint of a movement.
Iren was certain that the princess he now held in his captivity was afraid. Unable to see, unable to hold even an awareness over his touch, but still afraid.
Afraid for what?
He wasn’t certain. But he knew she was. And he knew that it wouldn’t be long before someone came after him for taking the princess from her resting place. It never was long that someone came after him, he knew. Always someone jumping on him, demanding that he as the antagonist surrendered the magical whatever, gave in to the demands of a foolish hero who always won...
Well, not this time. This time he had the princess.
That didn’t mean no one was going to stop him. He wasn’t even trying to take over the universe. But it did mean, to him, that he had something more than the heroes did. But Iren didn’t even know if there were going to be any convenient heroes after him.
Heroes. He grimaced. They were always so foolish, yet always managed to win. Bob had taken ages regaling him with tales about how the heroes had done this and that and this and this and then, while they were at it, had the nerve to do this! The nerve of them!
He touched her hair lightly, and pushed it back out of her face. The sleeping princess. Walking the doorway between monsters screaming, purple skies... between a fourth dimention and reality.
“The sleeping princess will not be awaken by love’s true kiss or any of that foolish blather,” he remembered somehow, distantly. “Just don’t touch her, and nothing weird will happen. Don't move her, and don’t kill her. And don’t try getting anyone to kiss her either...”
“Why, what would happen?”
“Well, nothing, really. Just she’s got horribly bad breath. She hasn’t brushed in a few weeks, you know, being asleep and all.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“So the world’s not going to explode or anything if we try to wake her up?”
“Well, no one knows. We’ve never done this before. But likely as not you’ll just end up with a sore throat or something. From screaming too much. Or a flu. There’s a lot of them going around.”
“Ah.”
“She’s just a sleeping princess. Why worry about it anyway?”
“Because she’s not suppose to be eternally sleeping? Because she’s lingering on the threshold between reality and dreams? Because if someone who didn't hear you tell me not to kiss her might kiss her and end up with a bad virus from her horrible breath?”
“That’s just what they want you to think.”
Iren couldn’t recall exactly where the conversation had come from, or why. But then, he was old enough to have enough interesting memories, even if he wasn’t really that old at all. It wasn’t as if he never got out, unlike some villain-types. He did, after all, have a wife to worry about. Even if she didn’t love him much, she still insisted on being taken out to see a drama every now and again, and a nice dinner once in a while too.
He wondered why exactly he had bothered getting married. Beyond the fact, of course, that his wife was an assassin, vicious, and very useful to the young human attempting to learn how to rule the universe.
Iren inwardly sighed. He didn’t even want the universe anymore. Too much of a bother, trying to keep everything from blowing up. Politics weren’t as fun as everyone seemed to think, and even if you were the Overlord of Terror with Minions of Great Ph34r through the land, you still would need people helping you out, or a really good stress relief class. It was hard enough keeping a city running straight, politically-wise.
Oh, well, such is life, he decided, and removed his hand from the princess’s hair. He found her somewhat pretty, in a plain sort of way. Not the sort of literal knockout that his wife was, and not outstandingly beautiful either. Just pretty.
He let a slight smile touch his face. Of course she was. A sleeping princess under a dramatic spell couldn’t be just plain ugly, could she?
Of course not.
It had still come as a slight shock to realize that the girl wasn’t a knockout and stunningly beautiful. It always seemed to work that way. The girl under the spell was stunning, managed to make the villains go starry eyed and act like dimwits, and fell in love with the hero at the end. They always had long silky hair, glimmering eyes, and flawless skin.
This one didn’t. She didn’t even have shiny hair. It was a bit tangled. But Iren didn’t particularly mind. After all, she was the sleeping princess, and he needed her, if only for the simple sake of distracting the heroes. Though, he noted silently, that she was indescribably and surprisingly simple was doing a fair job of throwing him off already.
Stage one complete... we have the sleeping princess, he thought. And wondered just how long it would take before there was a reaction from someone, or anyone about to enter into the dreadful fate of the quest.
Not long, of course...
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