by Liz Braswell
She kept her eyes on the ground to prevent tripping. The shadows were imperceptibly fading along with the light. Some colors in the background stood out more, though, like bright little poisonous mushrooms and the quick tail of an orange salamander. But everything else became shades of black and white and gray.
Sounds grew strange. If her heel crunched dead leaves, sometimes it seemed silent; sometimes it echoed loudly off rocks and logs.
“When are we going to get there?” she asked, trying not to sound whiny. Her throat still hurt.
Phillip sighed. “Honestly, if today is entirely event free—no more demons or sudden ravines or that many of your, um, spells—which are completely not your fault!—then just another half a day or so, I would guess. A few hours.”
“All right.” She took a deep breath, trying to be brave and stalwart like a prince.
But it wasn’t long before the fog began to settle in earnest. At any other time, she would have been simply fascinated. The girl who was trapped in a castle had never seen anything like it, really, and the girl who was raised in the woods wasn’t afraid of anything from the natural world.
But now…there was something creepy about it.
They passed through thick patches of gray clouds whose colony droplets were so large she could almost make out each individual one. Water seeped out of everything like magic; she saw a bead of dew appear and pull itself together at the tip of a pine branch like a living thing. For a moment she had a glimpse of the black-and-white world reflected in it, in reverse, before it fell silently to the ground.
The fog found its way through her clothes, which became heavy and damp. And then hot and itchy and freezing and itchy as her legs and body moved beneath them.
A few times it was so hard to see that they almost stepped off the path. Phillip let out an unprincely oath as he twisted his ankle on an exposed root.
The land began to slope downhill and the fog poured down beside them, rolling like a slow-moving liquid. Tendrils shot out before the rest of the clouds, as if feeling out the way. It curled and rippled around obstacles like trees and stones.
The princess began to be genuinely frightened.
“Here,” Phillip said, stopping. “You look miserable. Take my cape—it will keep the worst of the damp off.”
She turned to argue with him. Wondered if he would think less of her if she reached for his hand.
But fog quickly filled the space between them. The prince’s body already seemed to fade and dissolve into gray. As he took off his cape and swirled it, the fog flowed along, blanketing him completely.
“…not cold at all the splurble burbly…”
His words sounded strange and distant.
“Phillip?” she called out uncertainly.
“Right here.” He sounded odd, like the words died inches from his mouth, like the mist stopped them and they fell to the ground. “Hang on, the…”
Whatever he said next was muffled.
“Phillip?”
She walked several feet to where she thought he was.
There was nothing but a wall of swirling white.
“Phillip?!”
She spun around. The fog made little trails behind her skirts and hair.
Finally, there was a muffled response, a little exasperated sounding.
“Where are you?” she demanded.
Her heart began to pound. She could hear it. She could hear that and the breath in her own ears and nothing else. Not even the noise of the pebbles she knocked around as she spun desperately looking for the prince.
She knew she should stay where she was. Somehow she knew that, from either growing up in the woods or some long-buried instinct that every child is born with. She should stay still like a fawn and let Phillip find her. If both of them moved around, they would be lost.
Harrumphhh.
There was a strange noise, like a grinding or a whuffing. Woods Aurora—Rose—thought it sounded a little like an angry bear. But it wasn’t quite. It wasn’t an entirely natural noise.
“Phillip?” she whispered. She wasn’t sure whether she should scream so he could find her, or stay silent and let whatever that noise was pass by without ever seeing her.
Silence all around.
Heavy silence.
The silence of hiding under the stairs in a castle when everyone was looking for her—her parents actually looking for her, for once. All she had ever longed for was her parents wanting her, searching her out…but when suddenly it happened, she felt uncertain and had to ask why. Why now? Fear of the unknown reasons. And so she had hid, and the castle was mostly silent except for angry yells far away and the stomps of footsteps close by.
But they never saw her.
That kind of silence.
Her mind filled the empty, swirling fog with images.
Eyeless, leering, toothy smiles. The piggish bodies of Maleficent’s demon guards. The strangely black and fluid forms they took out here—which would fit in so well with the fog.
And still there was silence.
And then the nearly silent scrape of gravel on the path.
“Phillip?”
Nothing.
Then: Harrrummmppph.
The princess ran.
She aimed for what she thought was deeper into the forest; it didn’t matter—it was all around her. She would feel safer under the trees. Things didn’t look for princesses, for people, under trees.
Right?
She looked behind her; white streaked with gray to mark where she had come from, like a sticky shadow.
She looked ahead. It, too, was blank white and—
Thunk.
She smashed her head into the thick and spiky branch of a dead pine. An offensive, white-hot pain exploded from her forehead. She reeled backward, hitting her back on another tree.
Her right eye was clouded; when she tentatively put up her hand to see what was wrong, it came away covered in hot, fresh blood.
Harroomph.
She bit her lip and wiped the rest of the blood out of her eye.
“Phillip!” she cried halfheartedly.
This was like nightmares she used to have when she was very little, of being pulled away from her aunts, separated from them forever.
She watched the clouds twirl and swirl in front of her. Something was making them move. Something was making them slide and bubble, like foam on top of a pot being boiled clean.
She saw the smile first.
The black, toothless smile, wide and wider and then impossibly wide. Two yellow eyes above it opening into existence. And long, unlikely, skinny black arms, rising up to reach around and drag her in.
She screamed. A long, piercing, terrible scream—
—that never made it past her lips. Her mouth was open, and she felt her throat working and her lungs lose their breath, but no noise came out. Utter silence, despite how hard she screamed. No one would ever hear….
The thing smiled even wider.
Aurora stumbled backward, hands out to either side, feeling for trees. There was nothing she could do. She couldn’t run blindly deeper into the woods. She didn’t have Phillip or even her own voice. She had nothing.
And then the last tiny part of her that was still Aurora Rose, angry and rightfully terrified, remembered it was her dream. She could have anything she wanted. If she knew what she wanted.
A sword appeared in her right hand. Without looking, she knew it was an exact replica of Phillip’s. There would probably be a nick on its left edge.
The demon swayed sickeningly from one side to another, like a snake trying to decide which way to pounce.
Aurora Rose screamed again to give herself strength. But again, nothing came out.
The thing suddenly rushed at her. Inhumanly fast, with no warning.
She raised her sword.
In complete silence:
—Aurora Rose slowly bringing her arm down, her blade into the monster
—the thing twisting in surprise, spiral
ing around and around, turning its long neck and body back to regard her full-on
—her trying to scream for Phillip again, unable to make her lips shape the words, rocks in her mouth. Gripping her sword more tightly
—the demon dipping easily around her attack and circling her calmly. Two, three, four times as long as she thought it was. While she was trying to fight its front half, its endless tail forming coils about her legs
—bringing her sword down again on the flesh closest to her, sinking it all the way through with a strange, unlikely sound—
And suddenly, there was light and speed and noise again. The demon screeched and howled and whipped its forked tail around. The princess swung her sword again, trying not to lose her advantage by staring at where she had sliced the thing in half: the flat, raw wound and white-and-black ichor that issued from it. Its tail kept wiggling on its own while its head and body squirmed and drifted through the mist.
Sunlight slashed through the fog and suddenly her scream turned on, hoarse and ragged and horrible, and everything was bright and painful.
When her sword connected this time it made a ringing metallic noise—as if it had crashed against something equally metal and dangerous.
“ROSE!” Phillip cried out as he saw her raise her sword again.
It was his sword she had struck; it was his body she was aiming for. The fog had thinned some, and she could see his confused, defensive stance.
“You almost struck me…” he started to say, then noticed the piece of demon on the ground that twisted and sprayed viscous black blood from where she had hacked it off.
“But where…” he started.
The other half of the demon flung itself out of the fog at the prince’s face. Phillip immediately deflected the attack, hitting it to the side.
Before she could even think about it, Aurora Rose raised her sword and hacked at the thing again. While her blow didn’t cut cleanly through this time, it did injure it, causing it to scrabble and scream on the ground, grinding its head into the dirt. Phillip took careful aim and stabbed the demon in the throat.
The two watched, heaving, as the thing hissed and died.
Phillip shakily ran his hands through his hair. It was unclear if he was recovering from the brief fight, the surprise attack, or Aurora Rose’s almost killing him by accident.
“Nice job,” he finally said, pointing at the two halves of the creature on the ground.
She looked at him—he was a little pale, to be sure, but he spoke as if she had just recited a poem from memory or some other little mundane thing. She didn’t understand fully how he could be so…blasé.
“Thanks for the help,” she said, trying to match his tone. Maybe it was the princely thing to do. “We…make a great team.”
“We do indeed—although it seemed like you were doing pretty well on your own. A princess and a monster slayer. They’ll be singing epics about you!” he said with a grin.
She gave a courtly curtsy in response. “All in a day’s work.”
“Nice sword,” he added. “Where did you get it?”
She looked at the sword in her hand, which was balanced so well she had honestly forgotten it was there. It was almost a part of her already.
“Oh, this old thing? I, um…summoned it?”
“Handy,” Phillip said, nodding.
The last bit of blood from the demon bubbled up and hissed into the ground. Its body faded.
“I wonder if there was a real demon in the real, waking world that matched this one,” the prince said. “I wonder if it’s dead over there, too.”
“Well, it’s dead here now. But there may be more. And we won’t see them coming,” she said, shivering. The fog was cold and swirled around them again. Icy little tendrils caught her ankles.
“Hey,” Phillip said with a grin. “You know what wind is like, right?”
“Of course I know what wind is like! I didn’t live in a windowless cave in either life. I’m not a…”
“So summon one and blow this all away!”
She stopped her rant and thought about what he had just said.
Of…course. Of course she could.
She closed her eyes.
She imagined the little bit of breeze that had managed to come through when she cracked a window in the castle. The hot and dry—but not ostensibly tainted—air of the Outside. She remembered the bailey of the castle, the tiny dust devils that would sometimes wend their way across it, among the scattered and guerilla garden plots.
She remembered being in a meadow at the edge of the forest in the fall, feeling chilly but unable to stop watching the birds play in the growing ferocity of the air. The strong fliers, the jays and the woodpeckers and the crows, cavorted like eagles.
She felt something tickling her cheek.
She opened her eyes.
There was a small dust devil in front of her: it was lifting up twigs and leaves and scattering them, playing at her feet almost like a cat.
She arched an eyebrow—unconsciously imitating Maleficent.
The wind grew, widening its invisible arms and sweeping more detritus into its center. Then it shot straight up into the air. It stretched into the sky, its long, powerful tail whipping behind it. Everything loose and small was dragged up into its vortex: leaves, pebbles, the ends of the princess’s hair and the tips of Phillip’s cape—and the fog.
Great swathes of heavy gray mist funneled into the sky, turning the whirlwind dark.
The princess shielded her eyes as the sunlight grew clearer and brighter, all of the darkness pulled away into the whirlwind.
In the forest surrounding them there were distant strange cries of demons being caught in the cleansing light.
It wasn’t horrible, the princess realized.
It was strangely satisfying.
The winds grew wider and wider and slower and slower until they seemed to fill the sky…and then they gradually slackened, leaving the sky as clear and blue and perfect as a summer’s day after a sudden thunderstorm.
Phillip was grinning like a boy watching a really good magic trick—even laughing out loud when it was over. He grabbed her and impulsively kissed her on the cheek—quick and hard and a little sloppy and wonderful.
Then he saw the blood on her face, the gash in her head.
“You’re hurt!” he said, embarrassed that he hadn’t noticed it before.
She shrugged. It hurt a little when she wiggled her brow; she could feel the skin pulling and cracking. Otherwise, it was almost unnoticeable.
“I was killing a demon,” she said. “It happens in battle sometimes.”
Phillip grinned.
“Right you are. Well, shall we?” he asked, indicating the path. She nodded and began to move forward, wishing she had summoned a belt and a sheath for her cumbersome sword. But she didn’t have a good picture of what those things looked like from either life—and frankly, she was a little spent from summoning the wind.
“You know,” he began casually, “even though the fog is gone, I think it’s still safer if we hold hands. You know. Just in case. Don’t want to get separated again.”
“Of course,” the princess said with a smile.
Somehow their footsteps were lighter now—despite the fog, the demon, the fear, and the blood. Somehow everything seemed easier and better.
She might not be able to remember her past correctly, and she still had to defeat Maleficent and deal with her parents…but she could summon and move things with her mind and had just killed her first demon. She could do it.
That was pretty great.
THE WOODS WERE definitely changing: Aurora and Phillip could no longer see the sky at all because of the ancient tall trees that stretched far overhead. Pines and other shaggy-barked species shot a hundred feet straight up on massive trunks, some of which were as thick around as a small house. The canopies that spread out at their tops blocked out most of the sun; only a rare dappled shaft made it through. But it didn’t feel claustroph
obic. The absence of light kept the underbrush low: moss on ancient fallen logs, puddles of shade flowers, mushrooms and tiny lilies. It was airy and endless like the largest cathedral ever imagined.
The prince and princess walked with light hearts, tiny figures in this primeval world, seemingly the only ones in it.
“We are now getting close to the heart of the forest—where the cottage should be,” Phillip said cheerfully. “It doesn’t exactly look like it does in the real world, but it’s close enough. We should get there by late tomorrow morning.”
But the more deeply they progressed, the more her memories came back.
Like suddenly being whacked in the head by a small rock, a crystalline image would explode in the insides of her mind, and she would reel for a moment:
—a hand that looked like hers but smaller, reaching for a perfect late-spring flower. A surprisingly large and yellow pollen-covered spider suddenly dropping out of its hiding place in the blossom’s center
—her aunts not understanding the innate fear she had of a loud, violent thunderstorm, impatient and almost looking like they might rather be out there themselves but rocking her nonetheless, cuddling her close, uncomprehending but loving
—a sudden glimpse on one of her forest walkabouts at the edges of things: the end of the forest, the turrets of a castle…
Not only did the images come faster and longer, but each one raised a host of immediate questions and realizations that Aurora couldn’t stop.
Why was I never brave enough to travel all the way to the castle?
Holy crow, that was my castle!
Wait, the real one. Without the thorns…
And then the headaches would begin in earnest.
Sometimes it wasn’t a single image but a string of memories connected by a feeling or a thought. These hit her less like a rock and more like an angry bull, slamming her head and grinding her innards with its sharp hooves.
Like her studies, one of her aunts’ whims. Several months of practicing beautiful runes that became gold no matter what she drew them with: ink and quill, chalk on rock, stick in mud. No problems at all remembering and copying them. Some flurry of realization from her aunts and then a replacement: twenty-five ugly letters that stayed the same color as the ink. These were just as easy to remember as the golden ones, though, and it was all a game….