Once Upon a Dream

by Liz Braswell

  It might not have been quite in time.

  A thing appeared. It was black and half-formed, with sunken red eyes that glowed like the last embers in a dying fire.

  It looked around once and then charged.

  But instead of heading for Aurora Rose, it made for closer prey: the residents of the castle.

  The poor prisoners had just begun to realize that without Maleficent’s servants guarding them, they were free to escape—but were faced with gargantuan piles of rubble and stone blocking the exits, a floor that didn’t exist in places, and now a giant demon-thing that hungered for their blood. Servants, children, once-dignified ladies and noblemen all began to run from one end of the room to the other, looking for a way out. There was a lot of chaotic spinning around and screaming.

  Aurora Rose started to gather her concentration again.

  “I’ll deal with that,” Phillip said, interrupting. He drew his sword. “You take Maleficent!”

  The evil queen was already taking another deep breath and gesticulating with her staff again.

  Aurora Rose tried not to close her eyes.

  She pictured the roots she had often sat on or napped between when she lived with the fairies. Big, strong tree roots, friendly and ancient…

  Almost like a retort to the sickly black vines that had held her, healthy brown oak roots grew quickly through the stones of the floor and the doors and windows of the room. They even came down the chimney. Little green leaves sprouted here and there, as if they wanted very badly to become a tree.

  Maleficent lifted one foot and then the other, swiftly, trying to avoid being tripped up as they slipped around her.

  But physicality was not Maleficent’s strong suit.

  In a matter of moments, stout brown ropes twined up her middle and began to squeeze, hardening. Little twigs crept across her face but couldn’t quite make it over her mouth.

  A loud huff from Phillip broke Aurora Rose’s concentration; she turned to look.

  The half-formed demon had clapped him on the side with a ridiculously large and stumpy hand, knocking his breath out. Possibly cracking a rib. Phillip staggered, then turned that into a stunning riposte in which he drove his sword up into what passed for the creature’s belly.

  While Aurora Rose watched, distracted, Maleficent managed to finish another conjuration.

  It would have been almost funny if it hadn’t been something out of Aurora Rose’s worst nightmares.

  Standing before her was a three-legged, seven-foot-tall attenuated and unnatural monster with two heads. It looked like a child’s poor drawing, a joke of a demon.

  Except that one of the heads was her mother’s, the other her father’s. They wore crowns.

  They gibbered meaninglessly at her, their long arms swiping the air.

  But she could understand their words in her head.

  Is this how a princess behaves?

  You are no queen!

  “I am,” Aurora Rose said, swallowing, forcing herself to look into their insane, brightly colored eyes. “You’re dead. You’re not real.”

  It takes more than death to make a queen.

  We can help you….

  Take our wisdom and love.

  Aurora Rose made wood and stone rain from the ceiling between her and the parent monster. Then on the parent monster. Each time the thing was struck, it howled and their strangely familiar, distorted, and pale faces contorted and pouted.

  We love you.

  Come here.

  It was a mistake.

  They put out their long, sinuous arms.

  Maleficent rolled her staff, spoke to the blood.

  And Aurora Rose had the faintest moment of doubt.

  Would it be so bad, really, to die, believing she was finally in the arms of her real parents? Believing that they truly loved her? It would be the only chance she ever had. Everyone died eventually. Did it matter when? Did it matter how? She would probably die in this battle anyway. At least she would be blissful for that last moment.

  The hand on her mother’s side brushed her arm.

  Aurora Rose reacted without thinking, a sword suddenly in her own hand and the creature’s arm suddenly on the floor.

  Her doubt was over; the spell was broken. The evil fairy had been controlling her, causing her not to care. Pulling on her overwhelming desire to be loved.

  But Aurora had parents already. The three fairies were the ones who had raised her.

  And Stefan and Leah were gone.

  Now she was queen. She had to survive and save everyone else.

  The parent monster hooted and howled.

  Ungrateful child!

  Hide behind your prince!

  DIE, LITTLE GIRL!

  With terrible, gargling cries, it bore down on her, flailing oversized hands at her head.

  Sick with anger, Aurora Rose willed the rest of the ceiling to pour down.

  It funneled onto the parent monster like a giant whirlpool, sucking at it. The whole floor above was eaten away in their destruction.

  “You’re sick, Maleficent,” Aurora Rose spat.

  Through her rage she felt the world around her again, the world that was a part of her. All of it was a weapon.

  Eyes closed and chanting, Maleficent ignored her.

  More things were appearing as she summoned them: scaly, many-footed creatures with long beaks full of teeth. They ran off, snapping and rending and ready to kill, the moment they appeared.

  The castle dwellers crowded into the remaining corner of the throne room as Phillip tried to protect them.

  Aurora Rose desperately imagined all the stones in the castle, reminded them who they owed their allegiance to.

  Boulders and cornerstones ripped themselves from the walls and the towers.

  The evil fairy flung out her staff.

  The stones stopped in midair and flew to the side, blocked by an ugly green wall of flames that curved around Maleficent, protecting her.

  She grinned in nasty triumph as the bones of the castle were engulfed by her fiery wall.

  But the light on the staff’s orb was growing dimmer.

  The shrieks of men and women and children rose as Phillip attempted to drive off the beasts that were attacking them. Aurora Rose tried not to let her concentration falter, tried to focus on what she needed to do. Killing Maleficent was the only way to save them.

  One of the demon-beasts rose in front of Aurora Rose. It snapped its jagged black beak in her face. The stench of decay and rot enveloped her. Its claws raked across her chest. Sparks jumped from its talons.

  If she hadn’t been wearing armor, it would have torn her open from rib to belly.

  Then she remembered: she also had a sword.

  She brought it up between them. The demon leapt on her anyway and knocked her to the ground.

  The thing tried to take out her eyes with its beak, slavering and whistling insanely as it thrashed. Its body was hot and slimy and all over her, its weight crushing.

  Aurora Rose tried to protect her face with the hilt of her sword. The monster’s beak snapped over the blade with a terrible clang, shattering orange cartilage everywhere.

  Far from stopping it, the pain only drove it madder.

  She panicked, flailing violently. All she wanted was for it to be off her. She didn’t think of magic. She didn’t care what happened to Maleficent.

  She screamed.

  “GET OFF OF HER!”

  And then the weight was gone. Phillip was above her. He had the creature in his bare hands, was throttling its writhing neck, sword forgotten. His face was a mask of fury, his eyes flashing red.

  “DIE, beast of hell!”

  He knelt and smashed it on the floor. Again and again and again, he crushed its head against the stone.

  It fought its death in unnatural silence but for the scrape of its claws against the floor.

  Finally, it went still.

  “You all right?” Phillip asked gruffly.

  Aurora Rose nod
ded.

  “I love you,” he said—and then he was away, after another demon.

  Aurora Rose staggered to her feet, hand on her face where blood flowed and her skin burned from the demonic creature’s spittle.

  Maleficent was laughing.

  “Aww, look at the little princess who needs a prince around to save her. Can’t even fight her own fights.”

  “Needing someone once in a while doesn’t make me weak, you pathetic harridan. It makes me human. Who is on your side, Maleficent?”

  And in a fit of pettiness the princess hadn’t even realized she had, a cage of roots grew out of the throne and around the fairy’s raven before it could even squawk.

  Aurora Rose imagined the blue fairy muttering, “Birds of a feather…” and then she smiled, knowing it was something she would say.

  At first glance, Lianna seemed to be watching this with mild interest, either waiting for a similar punishment or merely intrigued by the concept. But she was also gripping the back of the throne, her white knuckles revealing that the fight had finally stirred some sort of survival instinct in her inhuman psyche.

  The castle was in ruins now, most of it obliterated in the battle with Maleficent. A strange sky glowed overhead, scraps of blue and white and rips of midnight black, complete with stars. The people in the castle howled in despair as the world literally crumbled around them.

  Phillip wrestled with the last of the monsters; Aurora Rose hurried it along with a wisp of a thought. One of the remaining castle walls collapsed on top of it, neatly avoiding the prince.

  Maleficent was chanting again.

  “I said no incantations,” Aurora Rose repeated wearily. The ground buckled beneath them, rolling and churning like the surface of the ocean in a storm. She wondered vaguely if she had ever seen an ocean in either world. She couldn’t remember. Well, it was like a giant mole pushing up the dirt. That worked.

  The castle floor broke, a puzzle ripping apart along its edges. A single finger of stone heaved up suddenly, right under the queen.

  Maleficent was tossed into the air unceremoniously. She landed with a surprisingly violent snap on the ground in a heap.

  Better make sure.

  Aurora Rose closed her eyes then.

  The walls of the outer keep, now visible through the ruins of the castle, flew apart like apple blossoms caught in a wind, and paused for a moment, swirling over Maleficent.

  Then they crashed onto her body with a satisfying and delicious crack.

  FOR THE FIRST TIME since the battle had begun, there was a hush: the demons were all dead. The people in the castle looked around at each other, guardedly hopeful. Aurora Rose let out a deep breath. The excitement of the fight, the adrenalin high of survival, was leaving her. She slumped, feeling exhausted.

  Her dreamworld was destroyed. The Thorn Castle was no more, torn down to its very elements in the battle against Maleficent. Distances were messed up; things that were far away were too clear and large, as if they had been drawn in wrong. Clothes and beds and golden bric-a-brac littered the ground like an oversized dollhouse had been smashed by a giant child.

  The remaining denizens of the castle looked pitiful and few now exposed to the mad sky. They pressed against the crumbling remains of the giant thorns that were the only things left to mark the borders of the castle walls. The vines no longer prevented anyone from leaving—but neither did they offer any protection.

  The raven began to caw; it might have sounded piteous to some, but to Aurora Rose it sounded like fingernails on slate, and it took all her willpower not to crush the bird in its woody cage.

  “I don’t think she’s done yet,” Lianna said unexpectedly.

  The evil handmaiden had spoken neither excitedly nor disappointedly; she was just making an objective observation. She looked interestedly at where the body of Maleficent lay buried underneath the giant pile of debris.

  “Obviously, Lianna,” Aurora Rose said disgustedly. “We’re all still here. Not awake. She’s not dead.”

  Lianna looked shocked, maybe even a little hurt, by the princess’s tone of voice.

  “You’re right, of course. I hadn’t thought. I thought logic didn’t work in dreams,” she said a little philosophically.

  “Yes, and you also thought I was a lot dumber than I really am, and…”

  Then, across the silence of the strange world was the tiniest noise of pebbles shifting.

  Of dust sifting down through an unseen blackness.

  A clink of small rocks being shoved aside, one at a time.

  A laborious shifting of weight, one rock grinding painfully against another.

  A single piece of rubble fell off the top of the pile, ominously bouncing and sliding its way down to the ruined and uneven castle floor.

  Then everything was silent.

  Aurora Rose turned to say something to Phillip…

  …and a hand shot up out of the pile, stabbing its way to the light.

  A big, clawed, black hand.

  “No…” Phillip whispered.

  As if it was gaining strength from the sheer possibility of release from its stony prison, the creature underneath the rocks began to shift and move. Waves and waterfalls of boulders and rubble tumbled heavily to the floor.

  Aurora Rose quickly used up what was left of the castle trying to crush the horrific thing that was slowly emerging. Giant beams, bedrock, furniture, statues, the walls and windows and turrets, the very tower she had jumped from. It all converged on the spot, forced itself into impossibly small spaces as she imagined crushing the life out of Maleficent. Stones screamed and exploded. Burning, liquid scree filled in gaps in the stones, sealing it.

  There was nothing left.

  A hot, dusty breeze scoured the desolate plain that had once been a castle. The only things that remained unbroken and upright were the throne and the strange hovering oval that showed the real, sleeping Aurora. Her face was twisted, contorted, her dreams of battle and violence causing her to react in her sleep. But the dreamer made no noise.

  Everything was silent.

  And then the dragon burst forth.

  It rose from its cracked, stony prison like a lizard from its egg. The thing rose higher and higher into the sky, enormous, nearly as tall as the castle had been, black and purple and yellow. Not like a proper storybook dragon at all: too skinny here, too lumpy there, wings that were little more than useless flaps on ugly, blackened stumps of shoulders. Long, narrow beak-like mouth full of teeth, like those of the demons Maleficent had summoned. It screamed, the terrible noise ripping across the empty land.

  Horrific. Like something from the end of the world.

  It shrieked and shook rocks off its seemingly endless scaly back and continued to grow into its new skin.

  “Get out,” Aurora Rose said to Phillip without moving her eyes from the dragon. “Get everyone out of here.”

  “I’m staying with you. Princes kill dragons. That’s what we’re all about.”

  “You didn’t kill her enough last time. Help me after you get everyone away.”

  Phillip opened his mouth to argue but was interrupted by a shout from behind.

  “GOOD SUBJECTS OF HOUSE STEFAN!”

  King Hubert stood on the path that led to the forest, as tall and unmovable as a mountain despite the ragged clothing flapping around his ankles. On his legs and arms were fresh wounds: deep, ugly gouges still weeping blood.

  But his good eye, clouded before, was clear and icy. He clasped his stone as if it were a royal orb, and his stick a mighty staff.

  “Father,” Phillip whispered in wonder. “You’re alive….”

  “COME TO THE SHELTER OF THE FOREST!” Hubert ordered. “FOLLOW ME, AND AWAIT THIS BATTLE’S END OUT OF HARM’S WAY! NOW!”

  As if just waiting to be told what to do, the straggling crowd immediately ran to him. He stood aside and gestured them past with his stick like a stern shepherd. And so Aurora Rose’s subjects fled into what must have looked like a different ki
nd of death to the dreamland sleepers: the forest they had been told was dangerous and deadly.

  The princess felt a surge of warmth and gratitude, something she had rarely felt for an adult other than her aunts. People could be surprising. Not everyone in the world was untrustworthy and disappointing. Not everyone lied to you or failed you.

  Quietly pleased, Phillip watched his father with a smile.

  As the last little child ran past him, the king turned—and gave a big old-Hubert-style wink. He shook his stone and stick and whispered: “I’ll defend them with my very blood.”

  And then he was off behind them, shouting exhortations and marching very precisely.

  Aurora Rose put a hand to her head. Maleficent’s transformation had taken an absurd amount of power, and the blood magic resonated soundly in the princess’s body. It was her power the evil fairy stole. She was weak and not ready for what would come next.

  The dragon reared up. It belched a wide stream of ugly green fire from its beak.

  Phillip grabbed Aurora Rose and swung her to the other side of him, then stood in front of her.

  Lianna still stood, strangely uncowed by the fire that seemed like it could have just as easily consumed her.

  As the flames neared them, Aurora Rose whipped up a wind that swept the fire aside and into the sky in a vortex of smoke and ash. The dragon shrieked in frustration.

  But how could she defeat it? What would disable it? What would, at the very least, trip it up?

  Gorges. She remembered them from her time in the woods. Steep and narrow. At the bottom were shallow, pebbly streams….

  The world fell out from below the dragon.

  The ground caved into itself and tumbled into the bottomless pit that opened up. The giant lizard shrieked and fell backward, clawing desperately to try to stay upright.

  Aurora Rose felt a tugging inside her head.

  Give up. You cannot defeat me so easily.

  The dragon was slithering its way out of the pit, tail and legs moving so quickly and strangely it was like it was climbing the air itself to get out.

  Prince Phillip ran toward it, sword out. Just at the edge of the pit, he stopped and sliced at the thing’s neck, which was now level with the ground.

  It didn’t even scratch a scale.