Jacob hammered desperately, unrelentingly, at the door lifting the heavy silver knocker and banging it down again and again. He had just ridden in on one of the flying panthers to reach the castle which turned out to be in the sky; from the distance it had merely looked impossibly tall. He shuddered as the clouds parted and more ghastly, faceless Seintile guarding the front door leered at him menacingly from atop the winged, midnight-blue cat creatures and silvery-black, alpaca unicorns they rode and flexed their white, clawed hands.
Black, devilish-eyed gargoyles sat upon the rooftop sometimes flying off and scaring away the family of golden owls who perched there also.
“Coming!” Shouted a beautiful, feminine-sounding voice finally from inside and he heard the rapid footfalls of someone rushing to the door. A very young, slender girl with copper-gold curls and big, beautiful, darkish eyes answered the door. Traipsed up in silvery-white glass slippers straight out of Cinderella and a white, billowy, ball gown of a dress. Its light, floaty kind of material possibly a very fine silk.
A small, ornate, silver crown with delicate intricate pattern work adorned the golden fire of her head. She’s beautiful she could be a fairy-tale princess, a goddess, a maiden sacrifice, or an 1880’s belle of the ball, what attire, Jacob thought. Underneath her hooded, gray silk cloak Jacob could see the bulk of the angel wings that the healer had told him she had.
She lifted the hood to view him better and Jacob nearly gasped as large, pointed, furry ears like a cat's or fox’s, and the same red-golden shade as her hair, protruded from her head and twitched. He also noticed a pure, celestial white light surrounded her and a divine angel’s halo of solid gold hovered above her crown.
“Yes,” she said her high-pitched, fledgling voice sounding exasperated, “what is it? Bear in mind we don’t shelter people from the beast here, so if that’s why you’ve come you might as well just go away and leave right now.”
“That’s sort of why I’ve come” Jacob replied, “but I’ve also come to give you something your majesty.”
The girl’s soft dark eyes stopped blinking but alighted with ample curiosity when Jacob said this and her sullen frowning demeanour somewhat uplifted. “What is it commoner boy do show me.”
“What is it?” She inquired this again with a barely concealed illustrious excitement when he refrained from an immediate answer.
Jacob called softly in the direction of the now setting sun; “come on out, come on out my little fox-kitty.” The fox-cat’s red-gold, magnificent ears twitched and it bounded on long, graceful legs into view, where before lain hidden beneath the shadows of the great, black-barked silver-leaved trees.
“Oh!” Said the girl beaming. “You got it! I knew someone would be able to catch him if I offered a reward of a great enough magnitude.”
She bent over to pet it, and as animals in this world (at very least according to Shiore the healer) responded to the queen with the same awe and recognition the citizens did, the fox-cat emitted a soft yipping sound and lowered its head to let her pet it, her porcelain hands stroking it gently. “Good girl, I’ll call you Eve,” she said to the creature ignoring Jacob.
She stepped outside the castle and proceeded to pick the delicate dark blue and dark violet flowers from the silvery bushes at the palace’s entrance and twirl them round and round in her hands. I’ll put these in my new long, silver vase E.M.R sent me,” she murmured to herself in a lovely, soft, clear voice.
“Can I come in?” Jacob finally asked her politely. ‘You promised anyone who would capture it would be allowed to stay here with your majesties at the royal palace.’ Jacob averted his eyes discreetly and spoke these words to the young queen, in a rather tentative and demure manner. He suspected that a certain amount of deference and reverence to the royalty in this world was expected of a commoner such as himself.
“Oh yeah sure, a deal’s a deal kid,” the young queen burst out laughing in a bored, haughty way.
The way she talked had the effect of surprising Jacob somewhat, as its casual tone and her colloquial, modern-day speech seemed out of sorts with this medieval-seeming realm. I have the weirdest imagination, Jacob thought to himself in disbelief.
The little girl put the flowers in her hair’s red-gold furlings and picking up the fox-cat with one arm, beckoned to him to come inside. Jacob walked in as she flourished the door open to let him in. Profoundly grateful for the shelter from the demon beast he let out a small sigh of relief. He was also relieved as he was keen to go indoors and get warm but, in this endeavor, he experienced a mere wave of unmitigated disappointment. The frozen, shivery air blew just as much within the palace walls as outside of it.
The girl noticed he was cold and seemed amused. “Only the front hall is frozen enough for glacial icicles to make their icy home in, so don’t worry. The servants have lit multiple raging fires in all the other rooms and they’re most warm like just-made cocoa,” she said. Incidentally will be having that, the cocoa I mean, after dinner. You may join us for dinner then Allelic the butler will show you to your choice of rooms.”
She said all this with that imperious yet sulky air, laced with unbridled contempt of someone impeccably spoilt and petulant but she did seem fairly relaxed about him staying with her and the young king so that was the main thing.
Jacob as he followed her began to ponder for the umpteenth time whether he would ever escape this place. The drugs he’d taken should have left his system by now, snapping him out of this nightmarish world and transporting him back to Monovalent realms or even just plain old reality. The girl-queen pointed to a vast, winding, stone staircase with intricate patterned banisters and they proceeded to climb it and despite how fit he was, Jacob started to feel rather out of breath.
“Did you hear about the latest sacrifice commoner?” The queen asked him suddenly, shocking him out of his reverie.
“No, I didn’t but Shiore a healer friend of mine and I have discussed them before”, Jacob answered.
‘Ahh yes, the healers. Well, they're just relatively skilled doctors and specialists who seem to theorize that their superior prowess with understanding and treating the human body is a talent the Shiverla imbued them with, as it doled out all talents. “What was I talking about before…? Oh, the sacrifice. Yes, it was an older woman this time,” said the queen with a surprising relish to her voice. “People keep sacrificing sinners to the Demon Beast in the hopes they will appease it and send it back to hell for good but so far it takes the sacrifice first and then kills anyone else it can sniff out just the same.”
“Its nightly rampages if anything have gotten even bloodier and the nightly death toll rises ever higher. Eradiates however, has told me (and you should well know this) because I announced it to all the citizens eleven nights ago during the televised palace gathering, that it might spare this fragile city if enough sacrifices were made. So far that claim has not come to fruition or bore any of the fruits of truth.” Jacob noted she was starting to sound more like an old-time queen now.
“As a nymph creature (the beautiful maidens and half-deities of this world) I get to go to heaven and become the goddess of beauty and animals either way, so I don’t actually care kid,” the Queen continued. “It is regrettably though my dull but divine task to watch over the city until that day happens. I order all the sacrifices from the balcony during the palace gathering and usually, I’m supposed to be present at them, but I’ve been ill, so I was exonerated the last three nights. Illness is the only legitimate excuse a royal person has to order the head priest to make the holy sacrifices in her stead. A young, curly-haired boy it was last time, one of the times I missed. Dressed him up in a flowing white robe of linen they did and sacrificed him on the black marble altar; crying tears of fear and all.”
“His long dark curls were so pretty,” the Queen added wistfully, ‘I know because I watched from here (as the church is close to the castle) as they slit his throat. It’s a young boy of great sin on a blue moon and a young woman barely older than a child whose faith in the Shiverla has waned when the dark blue moon turns yellow. On an icy silver moon, it’s an old man past his time of laborious and societal worth, and on a death’s black moon (which really just means a moonless night she explained informatively) it’s a barren middle-aged woman thought of lowly by the community.’
She looked at him just as to Jacob’s furtive relief, they had finally reached the top of the huge, winding staircase and preceded down an enormous dark hall. He followed her continuously with high hopes that one of the rooms closer by was the kitchen.
She was a very graceful walker her steps soft and light, she seemed to flow almost float from one area to another like liquid or mist. Her elegant state of dress, fey air, and unearthly beauty made him feel proud again. Of his imagination for creating her despite the nasty things she was saying.
“We initially performed sacrifices every month and had for centuries as homage to the great Eradiates last of the gods and god of Shiverla city” she went on as Jacob traipsed behind her. “To have any chance to ward off the onslaught of the beast, unfortunately,y Eradiates has ordered we must now perform them every three days. We give them a chance of course if they can answer three riddles, we let them go free. That’s a very ancient lore of ours. The Shiverla does so value and commend a quick wit and mind, one which is intelligent and seeks logic, creativity, and reason. So, it rewards those who have them with a second chance at making amends in life and getting into heaven.”
“A stupid man isn’t worth his bread; an intelligent man can accomplish a thousand times more with his head and demand only equal bread.” She sounded as if she were quoting something. This suspicion of Jacob’s was confirmed when she said, “that’s a famous passage from the book of Shiverla in case you didn’t know, and it pretty much means that an inventor or artist cannot be replaced: his input is immeasurable but a stupid person who performs a menial easy-to teach function can.”
“It doesn’t really fit with our philosophy of equal treatment and living standards for all (except the royalty like me of course) but the Shiverla states sacrifice is an exception to that rule. Someone has to be sacrificed, and judgments must be made. It’s not so much about killing the stupid as protecting the bright that have lost their way but could still do countless good for the city and its community.
She tossed pretty, autumn locks scornfully and said, “Though I don’t actually care who they use as a sacrifice myself as the people in this city are truly pathetic. Gallivanting about and conversing in their inane, vacuous chatter. Heaven will be so much more fun and enlightening than this stagnant, dreary hovel of a place.”
Jacob looked down at his feet to hide his intense dislike for the sulky and supercilious little brat. He noticed the woven, silken rug he walked upon, was soft and delicately fine. To the refined eye. it was utterly rich, vivid yet translucent. Dark blue like a river of night water. It’s flowing made up of not one shade but a myriad: sapphire, deepest midnight, slate-gray blue, robin’s egg blue, cobalt blue, and ocean sea blue all woven beautifully together in a gleaming. Patches also had hints of the dark velvet green you find in trees in a forest.
“The rug’s pretty, “he said in a complimentary fashion to the queen.
“Everything in the castle is pretty,” said the queen with a sniff of delicate, rose-red lips “After all it is mine.”
Jacob was reflecting ruminatively on exactly how unamicable a little bitch she was, such an unpleasant snob, when suddenly she smiled or rather beamed at him. “You can call me Queen Ember,” she said. “Or princess Ember as I think princess sounds cuter.” She had a very nice smile, beautiful actually and Jacob couldn’t help liking her more for her smile alone as it was not only rather aesthetically pleasing but there was also something sweet, vulnerable, and innocently hapless about it.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
He gained some hope that she might have other attractive little quirks and redeeming qualities like this and a somewhat softer side to her nature. That would make him more partial to her and making them living together more bearable.
They walked further down the hall with its unpainted, ebony-black walls and pillars and heavy, midnight blue curtains, passing several paintings of two beautifully fair, immaculately dressed in white youths in elaborate silver crowns. One was the queen herself the other he presumed to be the king. The nicest one he decided was of the two of them out in a wood somewhere having a picnic. There was a little running stream nearby, the painted food looked delicious and the red blanket they sat upon was a deep, dark maroon Jacob’s favourite shade.
Paintings of scenery such as medieval castles, dusked sky pouring with dark rain, the city of Shiverla covered in a winter of frosted snow, the smoky mountains of the upper lands, and various mythological creatures also adorned the stone walls. There were paintings of hell and demons and the heavens with its celestial creators themselves.
Jacob had much time to take in the particulars of the interior of the castle as the young Queen walked so very slowly. It was almost as if she were carefully counting and calculating every step she took and as a result, they were still not yet halfway across the vastly spacious hall. She also stopped several times to check upon her beautiful reflection in the numerous hall mirrors. Jacob wondered sourly what potential hazard she thought could have greatly lessened the attractiveness of her appearance since she last looked. Lack of modesty was a trait this girl-child had not been endowed with.
She stopped suddenly (startling him somewhat) and addressed Jacob imperiously; “oh by the way, your sleep may be disturbed tonight as the unearthly spirits of people sacrificed and those killed by the beast are wandering around outside the castle. Don’t be too alarmed though they can’t harm you: they’re completely insubstantial like mist in human shape or form. The spirits also can’t physically enter the castle as its holy ground and they're stuck in a sort of limbo or purgatory because of their sins in life.”
“They normally dwell in ghost land but since the shadow beast was released the veil between the land of the damned and Earth has thinned, so they come here. The night of a lunar eclipse, used to be the only time they came to Earth, and they would masquerade as shadows or mist, to steal the souls of lone travellers under cover of midnight,” she said ghoulishly.
“On these nights the citizens and I would dress in bright colours and don masks to appease the spirits. Masks of white like a ghost's face or dragon masks or gargoyle masks. I donned the mask of the firefox; named so for its body made of red-gold flame except its eyes, made of dark shadows. We did this Festival of the Phantom Malice Appeasement until the Shiverla beast took the spirits' mystical powers away including human and animal spirits as well as the ghosts of rivers, swords, and trees leaving them all helpless.”
“I’m sure you must have seen the specters, boy” she then said with some curiosity. “As more and more people die and get stuck here in limbo, we do have an ever-growing number of them.”
Jacob explained he had indeed, and they almost seemed to be trying to communicate with him, waving their arms about madly, when he and the other citizens walked by. Opening their pale mouths as if in speech or a scream but nothing came out. They even put their ghostly white hands on his shoulders trying to hold him still. The queen did not seem perplexed by any of this. “They probably are trying to communicate with you,” she said thoughtfully nodding her fair head.
“They are possibly even trying to warn people about something to do with the beast. Unfortunately, it is well-suspected that some kind of barrier is preventing us from communicating with one another. My people have told me they tried in vain to ascertain what the spirits wanted but to no avail. The spirits showed no signs of understanding or responding to their outreach” she informed Jacob.
‘How come we don’t see them during the day your majesty, is it true the spirits only appear at night?’ He asked the young Queen when they had walked a little further still in their never-ending journey across the vast hall.
She gave him an oddly approving look once he had asked and replied, “I’m glad you asked me commoner boy. Best thing your presence has contributed since the acquisition of my new pet,” she said with contempt.
‘It’s actually quite interesting a story; something I and the king only know because the great but capricious Eradiates decided on a whim to inform us of this fact. He said we alone are privy to this sort of higher knowledge usually reserved for full-gods because we are the most sacred of demi-deities. As well as being pure-blood royalty and the imperious family of Shiverla city, who reign supreme and someday will be true rulers of heaven.”
A self-satisfied smirk of a smile appeared on her small, disdainful, scarlet lips. “The disembodied spirits who have departed this life are indeed around during the day commoner,” she said.
“They start their ascent to the heavens but around the level of the clouds, the gates of hell pull them back down to purgatory and they fall from the sky like rain back unto the earth. As they have no form in sunlight, however, they don’t look like spirits in the daytime and appear as a substance similar to mist or vapour.”
“During the day many people therefore don’t realize the rain-mist is actually them the spirits. They are very light and visible only in those mist clouds that cover the city’s grounds. In some sense, they’re more similar to ice or snow only not solid.”
“You must surely have noticed the fog that surrounds and permeates the city?” She queried this looking at Jacob expectantly.
“Yes. lady Ember I have,” he said.
“If you reach out to touch one of the rain mist people, your hand should slip right through them like fog,” she told him. “If you try to catch one between your fingers as King Felton and I have for fun they should slip right between them,” she then said with another unpleasant grin.
“Have you seen the rain mist spirits falling from the sky today commoner boy and, have you walked in your travels amidst them?” She inquired.
“You must have,” she answered herself before he could reply; “the air grows ever denser with their presence. I was watching them from my window in the turrets today and they fell with more abundance than even the hail and snow that covers our fair city head to foot. Did you have any inkling, that the vapours falling from the sky were ghostly apparitions of the city's dead. The spirits of the deceased who before night, cannot take on their human shaped form little boy?” She asked this all very condescendingly.
Little boy! Jacob bristled. What is wrong with her? He thought. This conceited little hellcat of a child looks more than several years younger than me. No matter how she holds herself with calm, adult repose or how convoluted, self-possessed, and contained her speech is.
“Or” the girl queen went on loftily, “that even when they are invisible at daytime the spirits still try to communicate with the living and continue their long search for heaven?”
“Of course, you would and shouldn’t know commoner because only the divine like me would normally know something like that,” she then said with something like pride or triumph in her voice.
“I have seen the rain mist,” said Jacob finally after a lengthy pause of considering how to phrase his answer to best sound like a humble average Joe citizen. “I have yes, even walked amongst them in all their great abundance today. I did not know princess Ember though that the rain mist was really spirits ascending then falling back to earth.” The queen Ember‘s expression lightened, she seemed largely satisfied with his answer to Jacob’s intense relief.
“That’s what I would have expected,” she said with a curt nod. “I suspect King Felton and I are the only ones who know,” she said dreamily.
“Eradiates loves me….” Queen Ember spoke suddenly her voice soft and solemn. “He stalks me, watches my fair face from heaven's green meadows, and lusts after my beauty. It was prophesied I would grow to be the most beautiful woman ever conceived like Helen of Troy whose beauty destroyed a nation. I have a spectacular painting of her the one by Rossetti, in my room which I’ll show you. Moreover, I have one of The Lady of Shallot by John William Waterhouse.”
“You know the woman locked in her tower and forced to watch the world through a mirror only to drown to death when she left her room. Incidentally when I perish ivy shall adorn, and purest flowers bloom any place I ever walked upon. Eradiates wife, Adonea, the goddess of the sea perished herself, long ago and now despite my ties to Felton my sinful baby is….well that’s not for you to know commoner. Let’s just say that gods are mated for life too and when I did not want to leave Felton, Eradiates cursed me to bear one demon-spawn child and be barren thereafter.”
She’s now referring to more Greek-style myths what the hell? Jacob thought.
Ember smiled her ravishing smile again and then suddenly without forewarning broke into a skip and then a semi-dash across the rest of the room. Jacob who originally had to drag his feet to match her pace found he was racing after her so rapidly to catch up, that he soon tired out and ended up collapsing in front of the doorway to a room, breathless. The queen looked back at him also out of breath.
“Guess my adrenaline rush petered out,” she said with an apologetic sheepishness. “We’re at the dining hall now, on the plus side of things,” she said. “So, we can just go inside and sit down and rest.”
Jacob walked over to where she was standing and noticed for the first time the large double doors she was leaning against. The door was large, unpainted, dark mahogany wood and it had a heavy silver handle which Ember the princess or Queen or whatever she was, turned and opened. Ethereal music was playing within, the sounds of a cello and a trumpet and a clarinet, the high-pitch of a flute, and once again the chiming of a delicate violin solo, and this time Jacob also heard a voice of exquisite, harrowing beauty a young boy soprano’s that sang along to the tune. His voice he could seeimgly-alter from a very high and sweet soprano to a darker, lower tenor.
The room was both enormous and magnificent: the ceilings were so high as to make the room appear as if it were not enclosed but rather hidden beneath skies of black or indigo. The glittering stone walls were the same raven black as everywhere else in the castle. The dining table could have fitted a good fifty people and was finely carved but solid, made of smooth, dark reddish-hued, mahogany wood and it was wax polished and in a well-kempt condition.
A tall, mid-teenage boy with his head adorned by the same silver crown as Ember’s was seated at this vast dining table. He sat upon a large, golden throne carved with fanged, silvery dragons with deep emerald-green eyes and snaking, scaly bodies writhing across its metalwork. He appeared at first to be a remarkably pale person this boy, with frost- pale skin and ash-blond hair however when one got closer, they could observe rich, full scarlet lips and tempest-purple eyes. He was also pure, sweet, and infantile of face not to mention very handsome. Like a male, kingly version of Ember herself. Even down to his pale, animal ears.
He dressed beautifully in black linen pants, a dark-blue, finely-cut jacket, and a white silk top with long sleeves. He had curved ivory horns, and long, floppy silken ears, and Jacob realized glancing down, the white, black-hooved legs of a goat. A faun like from Narnia or Greek mythology, he thought.
A long, beautiful, scarlet-red snake inked with deep -blue and ebony-black spots was twisting itself across his arm. As Ember and Jacob moved toward him, the king watched and listened to them his furred ears twitching. Ember’s silvery-white wings were visible through holes in her velvet cloak and fluttered foliage-like feathers as she smiled and said hello and the faun boy looked up from the roast chicken he was eating with slow careful bites.
“You didn’t tell me you were bringing a lover over Ember honey,” he said with a jeering smile.
Great Jacob thought wryly. Just what is needed. Another snooty, precocious adolescent.
“He’s not my lover Felton,” said Queen Ember scathingly as she clenched a clawed hand. “He’s just a commoner boy who just so happens to have obtained for us the fox-cat.”
The boy King Felton raised his head in interest. “He found the fox-cat?” He said with a slight nod in Jacob’s general direction.
“Well, he doesn’t look anything special to me but if he managed to catch the elusive and unbelievably rare fox cat, I must admit I’m intrigued,” King Felton continued, his tone sneering. ‘After all, it really is seldom seen or heard. It’s only been spotted about twenty times in the last hundred years or so and by less than twelve people. Most of those times it was spotted by the animal breeder Eil, when it came to replenish itself at the grasslands sanctuary he attends to.’"
“Forget the rarity of it I am most dumbfounded by his capture of it. Why there is no one else who has been able to tame the creature for three centuries now nearly four,” Queen Ember said. “Not since the famed Farlen cultivated that once barren, northern wasteland that is now an animal sanctuary. Back in the day, she used it to breed and trade the fox cats as rare and exotic pets.”
“That’s why we included it in the compilation of quests to allow commoners to gain entry to the castle. In the unlikely event anyone could succeed, we’d be given something we covet yet most likely everyone would fail, and we do like our privacy.”
Jacob sighed as complimentary (in a manner of speaking anyway) as what they were saying was, they spoke about him as if he literally were not there. After a lengthy pause in which Ember’s voice had trailed off and Jacob too couldn’t think of anything else to say or if he were even allowed the luxury to speak freely, Felton decided to fill the void of silence by looking at Jacob.
He turned to blankly stare at him with a look of intense, appraising scrutiny. His eyes glazed and wandered off after a bit however and returned to the table. He then looked at himself in the mirror hanging off the wall for a full three minutes before eventually turning back to gaze at the face of Queen Ember.
Though his eyes still remained on Queen Ember, he finally acknowledged Jacob himself by saying contemptuously to her, “Well, aren’t you going to invite our guest to sit down?” Ember glanced up at Jacob, her eyes reluctantly leaving their post of gazing upon her very own reflection with rapture. It was as if she were seeing him for the first time. ‘Yes, sit down commoner boy,” she said finally. “And tell me and the king your name when you have.”