primrosella | Quest 228

Quest 228

The blonde girl sits silently at the foot of the bed, her defeated posture echoed in the hollow look that has consumed her eyes. The door has shut, the lock turned with a resounding click; she is trapped. What's more, she is defeated. Her quest ends here, in the tower room that belongs to her husband-to-be, and her failure will be sealed twofold at dawn: with her unwilling marriage vows, and with the deaths of her father and the queen of the fairies. Lolotte has won; she has lost. She has endured dragons, trolls, ogres and hags, zombies and ghosts--

And here, in the end, her ultimate defeat comes from a simple locked door.

She has been sitting numbly for what seems like an eternity, fragile and withdrawn as the exhaustion and bitter realization begins to descend upon her, when the sound of faint scratching at the door rouses her attention. Slowly, as if walking through a daze, she forces her limbs to work and goes to the door to investigate. And there, lying against the floor, lies a red rose with a glint of gold in its petals.

She pricks her finger scrabbling for it, not daring to believe. But the key concealed within the rose fits in the door's lock, and turns smoothly without protest.

Freedom!

No, not yet. Not so long as the witch still lives.

It is the dead of night; the castle is dark and gloomy, and the twisting stone steps that lead down into the tower are narrow and treacherous. She barely dares to breathe as she descends with the greatest of care, making her footfalls as silent as possible against the stones and praying that the sound of her heartbeat thudding in her chest is not as loud in reality as it seems to be in her ears.

The guard sleeping at the bottom of the steps stirs as she makes her way past; terrified of being discovered, she presses herself against the wall, praying that the shadows will conceal her. She holds her breath, and he stirs, but does not wake. And she moves on.

Step by perilous step she goes, past more sleeping guards, traversing the rooms one by one with nothing but shadows and prayers on her side. In the kitchen, she finds her possessions stored in one of the cupboards; as she reclaims them, she touches her fingers to her lips and presses them to the tip of her one remaining arrow--Cupid's arrow--in silent blessing. This is her final arrow, and she has already picked its target. This one has Lolotte's name on it.

More shadows carry her to the throne room, and this is where the voices begin to whisper from the walls. Familiar voices, pleading voices, drawing her attention to the shadows of the room. These are the voices of the people she knows, will know, will someday lose. She nearly stops to listen to them, searching for the source of the sound, but then the sleeping guard shifts at his post and fear of discovery drives her on. On again, on again. On to the other tower, the twin of the one in which she was imprisoned.

Stairs again. The voices whisper more insistently as she climbs them, pressed against the wall, willing herself invisible in the shadows.

Rosella, please.

Oh, god, it hurts so bad.

Don't look, Rosella.

Breathe, Rosella.

Halfway up the tower, there is light through a doorway. A hallway that leads to torture chambers. Here, the guards are awake. Here, she will be discovered.

She must go up. Up the treacherous stairs, up into the shadows. Up to the room at the top of the tower, where the witch waits to die.

The little gold key fits in the lock there as smoothly as it did in her own.

When she moves, it is quick. The door swings open, turning silently on its hinges; she steps into the room, pulls back her arrow, and lets fly in one smooth motion. There is no hesitation as she fires Cupid's arrow straight into the witch's heart, though her fingers are trembling and her eyes are still hollow and dark.

The witch awakens with a scream, sitting straight up in bed as her spindly green fingers instantly go to her pierced heart. "What have you done to me?! The pain! It burns!" she howls, her eyes red as blood as they fix on her murderess, the bowstring still quivering on the bow in her hands. "You! I'll get you, peasant girl! You'll die for this!"

These were once Lolotte's dying vows. But this time, to her horror, the witch does not die. Instead, her bony arms rise and her mouth opens in a vicious howl as six more glowing eyes open in her hideous green face and spider's legs erupt from the bedcovers. The bow drops from her fingers as she recoils backward, as skeletal hands emerge from the walls, as undead lurch from the shadows. They are fast, and they seize her, and the tower echoes with Rosella's screams as the spider-witch lurches forward from its bed, and the room goes pitch-black.

[OOC: All threads will be treated as individual iterations of the dream unless otherwise specified/arranged; visitors, feel free to drop in at pretty much any point in the dream. Also note: visitors are welcome to fight the witch, rescue Rosella, or otherwise attempt to interfere with the dream, just please take it up with me here, on my OOC Dream Thread, first! Also, any type of action is fine--brackets, prose, whatever works best for you. ♥]

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"They come out of the--oh, rats," she answers in a rush, her free hand digging in the pockets of her skirt and finally producing a small black shape--a scarab, carved out of obsidian. She shoves it into Penny's hands, her eyes frantic with fear, and continues to hurry them both down the stairs. "Take this. Don't let go of it, it'll--it wards off the undead, don't let go of it, they can't grab you if you have it."

One might wonder, in a less panicked moment, how the amulet can truly be said to work if Rosella had it herself and yet still ended up grabbed, but nightmare or not, this is her dream, and the certainty with which she says it makes it clear that it will work for Penny, perhaps because it didn't work for Rosella herself.

"They'll be everywhere," she adds after a moment, which isn't really an answer, but more of a vague prediction--even as the shadows begin to creep at the edges of the stairs.

"Out of the what?" But she doesn't question Rosella's logic or hesitate to take the stone scarab. Penny clutches it tightly, frantically searching the shadows for more threats. "...What about you? What'll protect you?"

"She doesn't want you!" Rosella fairly shrieks, as the witch-spider finally skitters out the door of the tower chamber, heaving and squeezing to make her bulk fit through the space. "Go! Run!"

"Which kind of makes me being protected kind of dumb! Come on, Rosella." Penny grabs Rosella's arm with every intention of hauling her away. The spider-person isn't that mobile. Surely they can outrun her or squeeze into a space she can't fit in to...

"All the way down," she gasps out, letting Penny take her arm as they continue to go, and gesturing wildly with the hand that still holds her bow. The hallway that leads off of the landing is the way to the torture chambers, and oh, she remembers going there. It's not a place she ever wants to return to, much less when she knows she is being pursued by a vengeful witch. The ground floor won't be much better, she knows, but at least they'll stand a chance; it may not be safe, but it's better than this tower.

Anything is better than this tower.

Penny just nods, out of breath in spite of the fact that she doesn't actually need to breathe. She bypasses the lit hallway and continues moving down as fast as she can, spurred on in no small part by the movements she thinks she sees in the shadows.

"Then where?"

"Out," she answers, seeing the doorway at the bottom of the tower--and, with a wrench of her stomach, the flying monkey guarding it. "Into the throne room and out the front way--hurry!"

How can it be, that there is a spider-shaped shadow lurking over them when there is no light source to cast it? Dreams are strange that way, but so it is.

Penny gets to the bottom of the stairs as quickly as she can, but comes to an abrupt halt when she sees the flying monkey. It looks considerably more menacing than the ones in The Wizard of Oz.

"Rosella..."

"They don't want you!" she cries again, nearly crashing into Penny as she comes to a halt herself. More guards are pouring into the stairwell now, and the shadow is looming larger on the ceiling, and if Penny doesn't get out soon--

"Go! Just run! Go!"

Far be it for Penny to not run from hordes of flying monkeys and giant spider shadows. She's still determined to drag Rosella along with her, however. "What do they want from you?!"

"I'm supposed to--" But she stops abruptly, because explanations of marriage and hunchbacked sons seem ridiculous to her now, with these horrors bearing down on her and the sound of wingbeats beginning to fill the air. "She swore she'd kill me," she answers instead, her eyes stinging with tears--not for herself, but for the people she's failed. She can't bear to let Penny be one of them, not on top of all the rest. "They're all going to die!"

That stops Penny in her tracks... but only for a moment, as running still seems like the most prudent course of action to take. She enters the throne room, looking for the way out. "Who all? Rosella, no one's going to die!"

With the flapping of wings growing closer, however, Penny isn't entirely certain. It might not be a dream. It may not be harmless.

Is there time to explain? It's a very good question, it's true. But a better one is, will it really matter, even if there isn't? Perhaps there is no way out of this. Perhaps Lolotte has won, perhaps it is already past dawn. Perhaps they're all dead already, and soon she'll be dead--or married, or worse.

"Here," she says frantically, rushing for the doors at the front of the throne room, forcing them open as if desperate for a glimpse of the sky outside--how long has it been?--as much as she is for an escape. "Daddy--Genesta--they'll both die at dawn if I don't--oh, hurry!"

Now Penny is following Rosella, still not understanding the situation in the least. It's a relief to see the doors (perhaps they'll lead to someone else's nightmare?), but Rosella's words aren't very encouraging.

"If you don't what? Die?" The logic here is not the sort of logic that Penny can follow. "Come on. We'll both go, okay?"

There is a wooden stable a little way down the path, near the entrance to the castle, and Rosella is running for it like a girl possessed--because while this is wrong, all wrong, and this wasn't how any of it was meant to go at all, she still remembers bits of how it should have been, and there is something in that stable that she remembers. There is something there that can help, she thinks, even as a small green hunchback begins to call her name plaintively from one of the castle windows, and the wingbeats grow louder in the air as the structure seems to shake on its very foundations.

"Hurry! In here!" she cries, wrenching open the door and motioning for Penny to enter, her eyes fixed on the castle for fear that their pursuers will show themselves at any minute.

Much to Penny's dismay, outside doesn't seem all that much safer than inside. She doesn't pause to look back when she hears Rosella's name called in a strange voice, fear getting the better of curiosity. She enters the indicated door with all due haste.

"Rosella, what's going on?"

"I think there's a way out in here," she answers as she follows Penny into the stable, hauling the door shut behind her. And whether or not there is an exit, the one undeniable thing is that there is most certainly a unicorn penned up in here, huge and beautiful and radiating a lovely pink-silver sheen from its horn and mane. When it sees Rosella, it turns its large, dark eyes hopefully toward her, and the love in them is evident. The arrow she shot into its heart is still working, after all, and it is still enchanted by her.

But Rosella is ignoring the unicorn in favor of the rest of the stable, pacing hurriedly and kicking over boxes as she tries to find the exit she thinks is here. "It seems like--like there ought to be one, a way out, so long as we're in here."

Penny is entranced by the unicorn. She has seen the ones at the zoo in the City, of course, but never up close like this, and this unicorn is exceptionally beautiful. She approaches the creature slowly. "Maybe he knows a way out."

He, of course, being the unicorn. It's a ridiculous suggestion, maybe, but the unicorn looks so intelligent and benevolent. It looks like it should be able to fix everything that's wrong in this nightmare.

"He's trapped here, too," she says, shuffling some boxes out of the way as she begins to scour the floor. "I had to capture him for her, so I made him fall in love with me. Poor thing..."

"You had to what?" Penny isn't following this story, Rosella. She gives the unicorn one last look and then begins helping Rosella in her search for something escape-like. "Can we take him with us?"

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Quest 228

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