Quest 228

[primrosella]

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She has been sitting numbly for what seems like an eternity, fragile and withdrawn as the exhaustion and bitter realization begins to descend upon her, when the sound of faint scratching at the door rouses her attention.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. ♥]

Comments

[primrosella.livejournal.com]

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.

[horrible-penny.livejournal.com]

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?"

[primrosella.livejournal.com]

"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."

[horrible-penny.livejournal.com]

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.

[primrosella.livejournal.com]

"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..."

[horrible-penny.livejournal.com]

"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?"