To more fully enjoy this story in living, breathing HTML,
please visit our website at:
/~vivian
Now offering over 140,000 words of pure prurience!
--------------------------------------------------------
Sangrelysia
by Vivian Darkbloom
An Hour of Reflection
Meg and Peg. A twinge of regret.
It should have been a time of exultant jubilation, but instead my
anxiety about this moment of many transitions had cracked the
shell to reveal a brooding melancholy; had stripped away my usual
mask of blithe nonchalanace, laying bare the vulnerability of my
deepest fears.
It was late, the very same night. The packing of my trunk long
ago completed, I now sat watching the Princess prancing daftly
about in delightful feathery diaphanous scarves, gaily scattering
belongings first here and then across the room, as the gaggle of
girls giggled and gathered.
"We get to camp out! Under the stars!" she exclaimed, scurrying
about in giddy excitement. "I love camping out."
Off to visit Aunt Peg, sister of the Princess' mother, the
ex-Queen. Vanished Queen, hence unseen. Perhaps not simply
disappeared, but vanquished, banished. I should have prevented it
-- I was the one -- but how was I to know? In the corner I sat,
motionless in the shadow of remorse. But perhaps I was being too
harsh inflicting reflective self-flagellation.
How was I to know? That one day the King and Queen would ride off
to disappear, that the shadows of that day would draw long across
the lawn, that whispers would grow, and everyone know they should
have returned by now? But not to panic.
It was only then that I searched as best I could, but found only
darkness. Only after they had not come back that I realized the
folly of my failure to prevent the dark magic. King Hieronymus
and Queen Megan, their laughter no more to be heard reverberating
from the walls and flagstones, and the best magic I could produce
was painfully inadequate.
How was I to know? The Sangrelysia I was born and flourished into
was a celebration, a paradise. Golden sunlight flooding rich
green grassy fields and forests full of colorful sweet-scented
flowers, jasmine and roses, chattering birds and prancing playful
fauna.
Jauntily we rode, thundering across the plains, while a roaring
fiery red dragon in the distance patrolled the Northern borders
to turn back the very evils which had descended, becoming now
only too real.
It was always from the North that vile ways of thinking would
arrive, gateway to the chilly chaotic land where pale-skinned
invaders schemed and fought amongst themselves. The mysterious
land of dragons, where reality's increased uncertainty gave rise
to heightened magic, yet paradoxically it was the portal to the
mundane world, threshold of the land without magic.
I had often thought to close off the border entirely, but King
Hieronymus would wisely refuse. "A well-designed fortress always
has a weakness," he would reply. So we, knowing the weakness,
could anticipate the course of the intruders.
Now and again we would have a worthy visitor, one who genuinely
did not belong in the world-without-magic, who would arrive and
breathe a sigh of relief, settling in gently to our peculiar ways
without a tremor.
Back then, tales of ancient long ago battles had floated
carelessly across the breeze on the lips of overacting bards
intoxicated with conceit at their own storytelling. What could be
worse than a pompous narrator, unconcerned with the feelings of
the listener? But it was all in good fun, as it should have been.
"What about my harp?" the Princess shouted. "I need to practice
for my recital in the spring."
"Your Aunt Peg has one you can use, I'm sure," I said. "Don't you
think we're carrying along a sufficient quantity of stuff
already?"
Her face fell.
"Alright, so take it along if you want. You're the Princess."
She beamed, running over to me, placing fingertips of both hands
gently on my knees, and kissed me on the lips. The kiss was, as
the Princess herself, a lingering glimmer of the former joyful
state of Sangrelysia, as our tongues met and explored
momentarily. Then she was across the room, transporting some
article of clutter from where it was to somewhere else.
The Sangrelysia of my youth was pointedly carefree. We went out
of our way to indulge in reckless abandon. It was our mission,
our accomplishment. I grew up knowing about the dark secrets,
books filled with spells cast to cause pain and submission, but
why would I want to fill my head with such things?
It wasn't until disaster struck that I found myself desperately
skimming such tedious, grey dusty volumes, clad in the spiderwebs
of neglect. I sat in my tower frantically seeking to fill in the
gaps. Into the shadows I had gazed, as far as I could, but still
nothing. Never before had I needed to look into the depths of
night with such intensity, shadows cast by invisible demons.
Yet unpracticed in the ways of darkness, I saw only vague forms,
slithering in the half-light, impossible to grasp. And my stomach
churned at the idea that someone had sought out such things, that
these very ideas so violently revulsed my mind, were intimately
cherished by some perverse creature, the form of whom I scarcely
dared imagine.
No longer innocent now, my eyes. Thief and detective must stare
at the same sordid affliction, share the same obsession with the
perverse. As detective, forced to explore the hideous gears of
criminal churning, dutifully I descended to the depths of
comprehension, to follow the logic of the absurd, to trace the
wires of greed back to their source, compiling a mental map of
the terrible circuitry. To foil the devices of evil, one must
trace the course of cramped paranoid desire, hunch over to occupy
the grim hovel of dread and deceit, to reveal the tangled,
obfuscated workings lurking within.
Had I been looking with the wiser eyes of today, perhaps the
answer would have emerged. But submerged instead into the stench-
ridden slime-infested sucking swamp of inky mud, what I seek has
already been enveloped in the depths. And the kingdom has become
as a ship rent by jagged reefs, sinking in mired decay.
Behind ones back, the weeds and thorns may grow, the spiderwebs
and rotting mildew overwhelm all that is fair and bounteous, the
insects devour the interior of the support beams, leaving behind
only the thin veneer, the shallow surface appearance of illusory
strength.
Then the insect emperor, greatest of cockroaches, King George
himself swept in, and toppled the beauty of the old ways. Brought
down with the nudge of a finger, the beautiful, venerable but
naive majesty of centuries-old wisdom was no match for the
cold-hearted ambition of power-lust.
Too long had we averted our gaze with carefree youthful
arrogance. Too long had dark magic been permitted to fester. The
ascension council bribed or poisoned, or corrupted by evil
incantations. The council, for want of eligible heir, crowned
George as the brother of the King. Rumors of the evil doings of a
certain wizard Elwrong, master of darts, were instantly quashed,
and the official news was twisted to proclaim the glory and
virtue of the new King.
The princess skipped, then flounced onto the bed, out of sight
amid giggles behind the sweeping pleated curve of the regally
amethyst velvet curtain, leaving me to only imagine the soft
tickles and girl-snuggles within. The curtain, drawn back by an
ornate cincture, hung from the false draped sky, the canopy
suspended from four intricately lathed wooden posts.
In my pocket, my fingernail clicked the cold, smooth surface of
the crystalline globe I had found, the one the Princess had
fathomed more deeply than I (perhaps I was irrelevant after all).
The crystal ball, I felt a need to keep with me now, disturbing
though it was. Somehow it held the key to unlock the secret of
the theft that had so cruelly taken place. Worse than the theft
of an Empire, the devastation of an ideal.
Was my struggle only futile? How long would I need to continue
digging into the stinking bowels of deceitful lies? To disinter
the gruesome worm-eaten carcasses? In the end, would it even make
any difference?
In vain, I listened for even a whisper of the voices of my
ancestors, the nameless wizard who held the post before me, who
so calmly instructed me in the ways of magic. I had a name back
then (not telling, sorry!) until he conferred on me the sacred
status of namelessness, so that he could recede into the autumn
sunlight, to bask in the fading yellow rays.
Now I could understand his faint sadness that I found such a
mystery in my youth, the elegiac longing of one who had stared
evil in the face and now reminisced on the days prior to such
knowledge.
Mercifully, he had departed, with a faint smile on his face,
faintness to match the sadness that had so mystified me. A face I
could almost no longer remember, as the glaze of each passing
sunset varnished another layer of gray fog over the memories to
which I clung.
A scuffle and flurry, a handful of bounces, and my Princess stood
grinning, face upturned to me. "Hi," she said.
"Hello," I reluctantly replied.
"Why so sad?"
A heavy sigh, I'm afraid. "Thinking about your mom and dad."
She thought, and shrugged, then grinned again. "You'll find them,
don't worry. And I'm going to help!"
Her idiotic, silly cheerful bluster brought drops of warm
refreshing salty moisture to my eyes. She put her arms around me,
and I caressed and held her delicate, fragile, sweet precious
softness with my palms and fingertips. It was her future that
kept me going. The woman she would become, and the men and women
who would emerge childhood into a world we were now creating.
Eventually, I let her go. I had to, so she could finish getting
ready.
Chapter 9
_______________________________________________________
For more stories, please visit our site:
/~vivian