The Poison Princess (38 page)

The horned demon attempted to stand, only to
be attacked by a pair of mossy spirits with mushrooms sprouting all
over their body. They each carried a spear-like weapon made from
fallen branches, and they began to lunge toward Scarlett. In
response, she rolled away from them, dodging the thrust of their
sharpened implements. The demon managed to get onto her knees while
simultaneously swiping her scythe back toward the pair of forest
guardians. Their spears severed at the tip, and they looked to one
another, fear in their eyes. Scarlett showed them no mercy, using
her magic to summon another flame to ignite inside their wooden and
moss covered frames.

All the while, the first spirit knelt on her
knees, holding her staff into the dirt of the ground. Her eyes
closed, as she channeled a spell with all of her effort, attempting
to stop the corruption from spreading through the forest. Her
attempt at saving the Willow’s Wood seemed to be largely in vain,
as the purple poison continued to plague the grass, the trees, and
the wildlife. The fire, meanwhile, torched everything it touched,
turning into a blaze through the forest. All around her, she could
hear the sounds of metal crashing harshly against wood, the fierce
crackling of the flames, the dripping of poison from the infected
leaves overhead, and the horrible screams of her brethren. Much
time passed, as she fought the internal battle using her own
natural source of power to combat the spreading filth. Finally,
however, she gave up in her efforts to save the forest, as her
connection to the wood had faded to almost nothing at all. Opening
her eyes once more, the spirit surveyed the violence in the
clearing and in her woods as a whole. Only Ruby and Scarlett
remained. All of the other wardens of the forest had perished to
poison, magic, or the brutality of the women’s weapons.

Bright blue tears rolled down the spirit’s
cheeks. “Why?”

Ruby walked toward the crying guardian with
her poisoned war hammer and stopped just in front of her. “Why
what?”

“You’ve destroyed the forest… Our home… Why?
Why would you do this?”

The princess said nothing (probably because
she herself couldn’t think of a logical reason), but she smiled at
the wood spirit, exposing her poison covered teeth. Then without
blinking, she raised and swung the heavy hammer, connecting with
the warden’s head. The impact made a sickening crunch sound,
splattering sap and bark, as the spirit’s neck snapped. Her body
fell limply to the ground, as the poison spread over her body as
well, coloring her purple to match the rest of the forest and her
fallen spirits. The flames crackled all around her, as it spread
along with the poison through the forest. Ruby felt outside her own
body. She didn’t feel like what she had just done had been her.
Someone had taken control of her and killed all those forest
spirits. She would never do such a thing. That’s what she told
herself anyway. The princess tried to ignore what she had done and
the look in the spirit’s eyes, as her hammer crashed into the
warden’s face.

The rest of the path through the Willow’s
Wood was less eventful. The venomous sludge eventually put out the
fires, as it traveled throughout the forest. Ever spreading, the
excess ooze dripped off the limbs of trees and killed the creatures
of the woods with its noxious nature. Ruby and Scarlett seemed not
to even notice. They just continued on through the forest, with the
singular focus of getting to Lavidia. The bright colors and
chirping birds no longer bothered them though.

Being back home reminded Ruby of how sheltered
an existence she had once had. Her adventures of the past decade
had illuminated that point quite clearly, and retuning home made
her feel a certain resentment for that naive child she had once
been. This place she had left, however, was no longer what Ruby
remembered.

The skies were grey and depressing despite
the warmth of summer, and a pall had been cast across the land.
Passing through the small farming villages and communities at the
outer reaches of the kingdom, she saw the misery of her people.
They all looked poor, weak, and undernourished. Their livestock
seemed to fare no better, and their crops looked to be of
insufficient quantities. They all seemed pathetic to her eyes, and
she felt almost nothing for them. At one point, her goal had been
to save not only her sister, but also her kingdom as a whole. That
thought simply didn’t occur to her now. She noted their misery but
had no desire to help them as she once would have. She was an
entirely separate woman from the one she had been eleven years
prior.

Vicious looking armed guards roamed the dirt
roads, and the pair of women chose to avoid them in case Leina and
the craggy hand demon had warned them of their arrival. The men
wore ebony black armor that had almost no reflection off its dull
and cloudy surface. Little, jagged pieces jutted out from various
sections of the armor making them look dangerous to the touch. The
shoulders had spikes sticking up nearly to the men’s ears, which
were hidden under a thick black helmet. Each of their visors were
down, shielding their eyes and managing to make them appear as more
(or perhaps less) than human. They were somehow a different entity
inside those suits of armor - some foreign, horrible creature to be
feared. This was their purpose after all.

Scarlett leaned over to her master, as they
walked. “They’re possessed by magic.”

“I know,” Ruby replied. “Same as they were
when I was last here.”

Given the nature of their journey, the
princess had her demon generate and wear a cloak and hood like the
one she’d taken from Slip. The horns made the hood a bit more
awkward but not enough to attract attention. Ruby and Scarlett
stuck to the side roads wherever possible, concealing themselves
under their hoods. They sought to avoid the guards’ sight above all
else. Getting the magical bracelets on the craggy hand demon and
killing him seemed an impossible enough task; they didn’t want to
make their job more difficult by incorporating all of the kingdom’s
guards.

The dark, grey skies helped conceal them, and
they were lucky to have arrived at dusk. The majority of the guards
retired to bars, homes, or other quarters, leaving only a handful
to patrol the streets in their place. Those that remained seemed to
care little for the concealed women walking through the street,
mistaking them for simple villagers.

Given the impoverished nature of the outer
farms, Ruby began to wonder what the castle and surrounding area
looked like after her time away. In their shared dream, Leina had
told her sister of excessive torture of random people of the
kingdom. She imagined rows upon rows of spikes with people impaled
and sliding down as time passed. She had to see what her sister had
done to the people closest to the castle to keep them all so afraid
of her.

Ruby and Scarlett continued onward and made
it through the outer village along the path to the castle with no
real confrontation. They slipped past the guards and continued
along the road. As they got nearer to the castle, the road slowly
began to widen and the dirt was replaced with cobbled stones. As
the sun rose, the city surrounding the castle came into view. In a
way, the city and castle both looked the same. The structures
remained intact, the roads navigated the same paths they always
had, and people congregated in the usual places. There were
additions, however. Dozens of cages were hanging from poles planted
in the ground or were lined up along the side of the road. Sick and
bloody people, some alive, some dead, stood or sat inside them.
Those lucky enough to be outside the cages minded them no
attention, clearly too afraid that they would soon be put inside
one. The spikes that Leina had mentioned in the nightmare were not
idle talk. Disgusting metal jutted out from the ground at various
places and naked rotting corpses were impaled through them, their
guts and bodily fluids dribbling down to the ground beneath
them.

When they entered the city, Ruby stopped in
front of one of these horrible spikes and stared at the body it was
pierced through. “You still think my sister can be saved?” she
asked her demon.

Scarlett looked to her princess, putting her
hand on her shoulder. “I’m sure you can save her if that’s what you
want.”

“If that’s what I want…” she repeated with
little inflection. Ruby continued to stare at the awful sight
before finally deciding to move on. “Let’s go. We need to find a
way into the castle.”

The pair of women continued forward into the
city, avoiding the guard’s eyes under their hoods and staying off
the main roads. They eventually came to a little hill that she used
as a vantage point to inspect the castle. From there, Ruby looked
down and surveyed what the castle had become. There was no moat as
some castles in the region had been built to include. Instead, the
castle was simply well constructed. Each corner had a tall tower,
where men were stationed to look down at the city below. The main
entryway into the castle was guarded extensively. The heavy
portcullis was down, with four men stationed on either side of the
metal grates. Behind them was a second drawn gate with even more
men guarding it. Overhead, two to three men with bows patrolled
back and forth, looking down below and suspiciously eyeing anyone
who got too close.

Ruby acknowledged that there was no way they
could get through all of that without a costly fight. Instead, the
princess began to consider alternative ways into the castle
grounds. Only one possibility seemed to stand up to her internal
scrutiny. There was a crypt that had at one time been where the
royal family and important members of the kingdom were buried upon
death. There were two entrances - one inside the castle, where the
clergy and family would enter, and another on the outside, where
the tenders to the graves could enter and maintain them.

Both entrances had been sealed off for many
years, however. After the establishment of Lavidia, there were
those who threatened its existence. In the early days of the
kingdom, the elves still lived in the region, but there was much
conflict between them. The elves were much more adept in certain
branches of sorcery than humanity. One key difference was their
predilection for necromancy. The elves were very concerned with
both death and rebirth. Some chose to live on past their natural
expiration, returning as anything from shambling corpses to
terrifyingly intelligent liches, while others sought to pass on
their own knowledge and wisdom in a cannibalistic practice upon
their deaths. It was largely because of these major cultural
differences that humans and elves fought.

The two groups clashed a number of times
before the elves were finally driven from the region, settling
permanently south of Elythine and the Sornik Sea. The humans then
began calling that area of the world the Land of the Dead. Before
their departure, however, the elves attacked Lavidia and the castle
at its heart. One of the necromancers cast a spell that brought
life to the dead stored in the crypts beneath the castle. Though
Lavidia’s soldiers eventually drove back the elves, the corpses
they revived refused to return to the earth no matter what was done
to them. Having no way to deal with the threat, the chamber was
simply sealed off. No one knew whether the corpses still maintained
their magic after the hundreds of years since their revival, but no
one was curious enough to have gone in search.

Ruby was not as hesitant. She needed a way to
get behind the castle walls, and there was no other way from what
she had seen. “Come on,” she told Scarlett. “We’ll go another
way.”

“Oh?” the demon asked.

“Yeah, there’s an undercroft that runs under
the castle. We’ll go through there.”

“Won’t it be guarded as well?”

“I wouldn’t expect so. No one has been down
there in a long time.”

Scarlett raised an eyebrow at that. “And why
would that be?”

“Undead.”

The horned demon leaned forward, waiting for
further explanation to come. There was none. “What do you mean
undead?”

“An elf necromancer cast a spell on the
graves long ago. No one knew enough about the sorcery that the
caster used, so they just sealed it off.”

“What kind of undead though?”

“I don’t really know. It all happened long
before my time. I’m sure the two of us can manage though.”

Scarlett was less optimistic. “I don’t know
anything about necromancy either. I’m not sure what good I’m going
to be.”

Ruby shrugged and kept moving. “They can’t be
anything but bones at this point. We’ll be fine.”

The horned demon bit her lip, worrying about
their chances to actually deal with something created by
necromancy, but she followed her human master toward the crypt.
Eventually, they arrived at an old mausoleum building in an empty
area. It was a simple grey structure with a set of pillars on
either side of the bronze door and a mounded ceiling over its top.
The vacant area had long been abandoned and unattended. Brown roots
grew up the very bottom of the sides of the mausoleum, while moss
and green vines stretched up, covering the rest of the structure,
weaving inside cracks in the masonry. Looking around, Scarlett
could find no one within her line of sight. Even the sounds of the
city had died out upon nearing the place. There were no windows
along the walls of the small structure, and the only entrance was
the heavy-looking bronze door that was locked by a large padlock
but was also covered with nailed boards stretching over its
surface. Scarlett could clearly tell that no one was meant to open
that door, and she was concerned that Ruby wanted to be that
person.

“Are you sure about this?” the horned demon
asked, wincing at the sight of the crypt’s entrance.