“Which I would undo by releasing them.”
“No. You’ll make the punishment more acute.” Cherub sat up completely and took both his hands in her own. Her voice quivered with rising conviction. “They will wake with their whole lives gone! Their strength gobbled by age, their beauty gulped up by time, their most invigorating years disgorged from their grasp. They’ll be reduced to feeble old men, doddering laughingstocks if they dare try to wield axes now overgrown with grass! Do you not understand? Waking them now would be a worse vengeance than never letting them experience what they’ve lost. You would flaunt what you took from them for the goblin king.”
“Perhaps. But I cannot release the souls even if I wanted to.” He curled into himself, perhaps ashamed, perhaps unwilling. “It wants one who has the ability to speak freely in the goblin realm to call the souls, which means I need someone who has never let a hurtful lie cross their lips. And it wants the hand of an innocent to open the door back to our world, for the goblin king will not open it, and no human the goblins have corrupted will be able to open it, and no innocent would dare set foot in that place. When I remarked that first day on the things you do not value, I listed the very things I lack, the very things that prevent me from saving a single soul at all.”
Cherub firmed her chin. “Then take me to where they are, and I will speak the words you cannot, I will call the souls you require, and my innocent hand will open the gate you’ve shut.”
Not for a Skipped Heartbeat
They stood before the door in the hill, their wings folded behind their shoulders, hers in concentric rows of golden feathers, his of glossy, leathery black. The moonlight glistened on the dewy grass by their feet, and Cherub’s lungs inhaled deep of bravado she knew she lacked.
She had made Waif turn her father’s tears of blood back to tears of salt, and now she had one final question yet to ask before they entered.
“Why does the goblin king want all these souls? Besides vengeance, that is? He could have gifted you a goblin army and had you bring him live captives to feast on, and yet he requested their souls instead.”
Waif stared up the hill, intent on the answer. “He’s lonely. He locks each soul in a chest, and every day, he opens one of them and forces the soul to join him for his daily routine. To break his fast with him, to join him in his rounds checking on his realm…”
“But the goblins—”
“Cannot match him in intellect. Humans may be gourmet fodder for goblins, but their minds match the goblin king’s whereas the normal goblins have the hive mind of a bee. He can see from their eyes and hear with their ears, but he cannot make them do aught but mimic his own words back at him. It’s like discussing art with a puppet.”
Cherub nodded. “Very well. Then shall we…”
“Cherub.” He closed the remaining step between them, the only person she’d ever been near, his hot human heart beating so close to her own, and despite what he’d done, still her hope twisted within her in an ache for more, for proximity and forgiveness and was it so bad that she still wanted his kiss when he’d stolen her mother’s soul? They had danced and—
His hands framed her face, the velvet gloves sinful on her skin. “If I—if we save your mother, will you…”
“Kiss me,” she whispered. Before I can regret it.
“I can’t.” But he leaned in closer as if thinking about it, his gaze riveted on her lips, their rapid breaths laced together. “Kissing a murderer is a sin. I don’t want to ruin your only chance to save your mother.”
“You’re not a murderer. Just a soul stealer.” And he was. Her lips touched his—for a jump of heartbeat and a whirlwind spinning of her mind at her impetuosity—then she pulled back, feeling wicked but also right. “Now you have to help me save the souls,” she murmured, “or else you truly will be a murderer and I won’t be able to open the door to leave again. You will have trapped me there forever.”
“Never.” He pulled her to him for another kiss—this one not for a skipped heartbeat, but lush and deep in a dance of mouths for one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three…
Is this what it felt like to be lost and wicked and foolishly in love with someone who might still be wrong?
They pulled back while their exhalations steamed their cheeks in the icy air. Winter crunched the grass around them, but summer bloomed in the rose blush on her cheeks and the apple-red of his lips.
But seasons end, and winter encroached, and every door must be opened sometime.
Chipped Teacups and Raggedy Dolls
The goblin realm was like something once beautiful to behold now fallen to rot, like a tea party left to molder.
Waif’s hair lit the scene near them.
Plants in broken pots spilled across a cracked flagstone path, their waxy leaves glistening with slime. Fungus sprouted beneath upholstered pink chairs, overturned. Chipped teacups and delicate porcelain saucers lay tipped over on rotting tablecloths. Corroding spoons lay next to spilled sugar crystals, like pretty glitter drifted from the skin of a corpse.
Only titters and indistinct chatter filled the shadows beyond.
Then the spun-spidersilk castle loomed before them, glowing from an inner light.
How many rooms would she have to enter? Cherub wondered. Which chest would hold her mother?
At the entrance to the castle, the cowled figure of the goblin king loomed up, a tall staff in his hand, his gray talons clenched around it. “You come to set free what is mine.”
Waif stepped before her, his boot crunching a raggedy doll underfoot. “Your possession is debatable when it was not your hand that took them.”
The goblin king leveled the staff and shot out a bolt of lightning.
Waif raised his hand and a blast of purple light clashed with the white.
Cherub cried and ducked into the shadows.
Waif leapt the opposite direction, leading the goblin king away.
Cherub darted into the castle, into a place of spiders and sticky filaments that clung to her toes.
She knew how to slink and she utilized it now, darting from shade to shadow and large room to small. She opened every door she came to, and there was the first with a trunk!
She flung open the lid and out drifted a soul—white but with a man’s features and bushel of a beard.
Not her mother!
Her nimble feet arrowed her from the room to the next—another bushy-bearded man—and the next, the next, the next.
All the while, she heard the distant shout of the goblin king and the smashing clash of his and Waif’s magic battle.
How long would they hold?
And where was her mother?
She slammed shut the lid on another bushy-bearded man. How many invaders must she spare before her sweet mother appeared from the cramped confines of a trunk?
Cherub’s bare feet scurried faster, her hands lifted harder. Lids hit walls, her bare feet pattered on spidersilk. Her breaths came harder as the racket between magic clashes dimmed. Was Waif tiring?
Mother, where are you?
She reached the end of the hall—up another flight—and more bushy-bearded warriors.
Mother!
Was Waif still fighting?
Up another flight of stairs. Her calves ached and her feet stumbled on the filaments of floor.
One tower—empty. Another tower—more trunks of invaders. The third and last tower—the goblin king’s bedroom!
It reflected the rotting beauty of his entire realm, a king’s canopied bed with bedcovers of decomposing silk, crumbling wooden chairs carved with gorgeous figurines, mildewing divans of once-rich brocade.
And a trunk.
She flung it open—empty!
Where to now?
“Cherub!”
Waif! She flitted breathless to the wall—but there was no window! She dithered, unsure.
“There are no more!” he shouted between blasts of magic. “Come now!”
No more? But her mother! Where was her soul
? Had she released her from a trunk and not noticed? No, she would have recognized her! They’d all been men.
Waif must know no more souls resided in the castle, though, for he could sense them. He’d told her so.
Her heart breaking and a keening cry tearing from her lips, she tore down the sticky spidersilk stairs and out the castle door.
“Where is my mother?” she cried. “Waif, where is she?”
“She was the one he took out today!” Waif cried, dodging another magic blast and barely missing an upended tea table. “She’s already by the door. You have to open it—and hold it open until they’re all out!”
Mother already by the door?
Cherub ran, racing as if her life depended on it.
She darted past teacups and ragdolls with stuffing coming out, between an army of bushy-bearded men all aglow and lighting her path and the dozens of crumbling tea parties.
She flung open the door and the souls surged out. Bushy-bearded men one after the other.
Then finally—finally—her mother!
“No!” The goblin king lunged for her mother’s soul. “She is my favorite!” He caught her arm—her mother so like herself! “I’ll not let her go unless you give me something of equal value in return!”
“No, Cherub, run!” Waif screamed, running toward her. “Close the door!”
Cherub, agonized, looked upon Waif and then her mother. Her mother who had been captive of the goblin king for too many years. Her mother who had never met her child and not enjoyed her husband beyond the first year of their marriage.
For her father, Cherub would have sacrificed naught, but for her mother? Her innocent, sweet mother?
“Take me!” she cried.
“No!” Waif leapt for her door as the goblin king grinned and hurled her mother’s soul out. Claws grabbed her wrist and yanked. A whoosh of leather wing snapped past her cheek.
The door slammed shut.
All of Her as White as Snow
Aqueen awoke, her hair, once ginger-bright, now silvered with decades and strewn across a pillow long threadbare from neglect.
She slipped from the bed, all of her as white as snow, her hair falling to her knees, and she knelt before her weeping husband. Her hair blended with his beard as she framed his face with her elegant hands. Her thumbs wiped away his tears while his pale eyes, wept free of color, strained to focus on her face.
Her voice called to the lost part of him, luring it to the surface of his sorrow.
And there she knelt! His beloved, his only!
His laughter rasped out through the tears, hoarse from disuse. His heart beat like a lark’s wings set free from a cage.
But her laughter did not break free. How could it? For although she’d recovered her captured soul, she had lost her only child, and now, even as they knelt in the last puddle of his tears, it was but the beginning of her own.
The String of His Captive Heart
The door to the goblin realm opened but once, to spare a kingdom a queen’s grief.
He flew the night on leathern wings, his heart held captive on a string leading all the way back to a girl with feathered wings, waiting in a homespun of spider’s silk.
In the human realm, he alighted beside a white-haired couple entangled in a restive embrace, the sheets soaked with the queen’s tears, the king’s slumber restless from her sorrow.
Leather wings folded behind their killer’s back, then his hand passed across their breasts and – like that – he stole their souls.
To save a kingdom, he released them into the starry sky, allowing them to evanesce into twinkling lights. Their bodies expired on quiet breaths in their silken bower.
Then he followed the string to his captive heart back into a secret realm, to a girl with crystal tears on her cheeks, and he swore he would have centuries to kiss them away.
Softly, People Creep
Even today in those goblin hills, softly people creep upon that moor. And rapidly their hearts beat at dusk, for fear rides adrift on those winds, and eerie whispers sigh seductively in wayfarers’ ears.
Those wanderers who emerge unharmed, however, recount the faint strains of a phantom song in their dreams. It is always strummed with the same melody, always sung with the same lines, and those listeners of wistful natures and starry-eyed fancies ascribe it to the lovers whose hearts were bound in a subterranean realm, where a goblin king never unclenched them from his claws.
We hold on tight, ablaze at night,
Our waltz alight in soft moonlight.
Shine bright, starlight, long past twilight
On velvet gown in threads of light,
On silken suit spun from midnight.
On lovers in resplendent blight.
*
Let scorch and bane and slashing rain
Try crushing us with strikes and pain;
While knives may slash, our skin may scar,
And scalding hate may singe and mar,
Still, let us spin beneath our star,
In a suit of ash and a dress of char.
About the Author
Born in Texas but somehow having escaped without the accent, Sonya Lano currently lives in Prague, Czech Republic with three cats and a bunch of dust balls, spiders and story manuscripts. Her full-time day job testing software pays the bills while her nights are mostly filled with living in other worlds… vicariously, of course.
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Mara
by Kat Stiles
Chapter One
It’s a little-known fact that interdimensional travel is possible. I’ve done it twice.
The sensation is prickly at first, and then the light comes. So much light. Enough to drown in, if you let it. It took me a few seconds to recover the last time, before I could even see anything. But now I’m getting ahead of myself.
Excelsia. A land of fairy tales and magic. Princesses and happy endings. Hell, I even saw a unicorn once. And all of it protected by a powerful wizard called the Wise One. It was a place little girls would imagine in their most favorite dreams, a perfect cupcake rainbow bliss utopia.
Unfortunately, it was also my home.
To set the record straight, I have nothing against unicorns or fairy tales or even happy endings. I had unusual problems, sure, but everyone has their issues, I get it. It’s just that I’ve never felt comfortable here. My earliest memory on, I was always out of place. From my jet-black hair and warm complexion to my tendency to dress in dark clothes, I didn’t belong. Like a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit, from an entirely different puzzle.
Since blending in wasn’t an option, I learned to defend myself. Every kingdom had an underside, and Excelsia was no exception. There are three types of people in Excelsia: aris, vils, and coms.
Aris are perfect, shining beacons of beauty, kindness and love, destined for a glorious happy ending.
Vils are the opposite of that—witches, trolls, sorcerers and other unsavory types designed to thwart all the pure hopes and dreams of the aris.
Coms like me are pretty much everyone else. We aren’t mentioned in fairy tales so much because we’re not essential to the story. If the baker sleeps in and the castle doesn’t get bread, life goes on.
But damn are we everywhere. In bars, in alleys, in small homes with not enough food for the children. Fighting was just another skill to be mastered, and there were enough miscreants around to get a decent education.
There are two things you need to know about me, for all of this to make sense. Number one is my curse. I have this ability to kill people simply by touching them. A single touch starts an irreversible chain reaction of decay. I know, makes it kind of hard to date. Which leads me to number two: I’ve never orgasmed. Not once, and i
t’s not for lack of trying. Sex requires human contact, and by the time things start to get interesting, well that’s when my partner stops breathing.
So yeah, you could say I’ve got some issues. I learned to stay away from people, to keep them safe. The only friend I had was a hawk I called Artemus, because he just didn’t look like a Martin.
My hope is that if I write this all down, from the beginning, then maybe it can help someone else. Maybe they can avoid my mistakes, make better choices. There are others, so many others like me. Knowing that gives me a sense of peace somehow.
Dreams of Darkness: An Anthology of Dark Fairytales Page 10