by Liz Braswell
Maleficent threw her head back and laughed, yellow eyes narrowing.
That was the only thing, perhaps, that saved Phillip from an eye-level blast of hellfire.
He ran away, past the dragon, zigzagging over the ruined castle floors, through what had once been the kitchens, the chapel, the treasury. He stopped on the other side of the pit and taunted Maleficent—trying to draw her attention away from Aurora Rose. He clanged his sword against his cuirass and hooted.
“Too slow, Maleficent!”
The dragon was now entirely out of the pit. It snaked after him, moving and twitching and shuddering like it hurt to stay still.
Aurora Rose pushed her hands apart. She imagined opening up the earth like a giant book.
The dragon ran headfirst straight into a hill that suddenly rose before it. It staggered, stunned for a moment.
But then it rose, shaking its neck and head—and wobbling a bit—and immediately scrabbled over the ground after Phillip again.
Aurora Rose looked around in desperation. What else could she do?
The trees.
With a sad twinge, Aurora Rose remembered seeing them for the first time when she escaped the Thorn Castle, how amazed she was that they still existed.
Now they pulled themselves out of the ground with creaking, groaning screams. Branches flew off as an invisible hand stripped their trunks to deadly points.
She sent them after Maleficent.
The first one slammed the dragon squarely in the back. It swung its head around in annoyance, brushing it off like a twig and fluttering its useless wings angrily.
Aurora Rose threw a dozen more after that, one after another screaming through the air like large, deadly arrows.
Maleficent roared, then scampered toward her on ugly, flailing legs, doing little to avoid the trees.
The wooden tips blunted, the trunks cracked in half, the missiles bounced off the armor of her skin. When they hit, she merely flinched.
Twigs and leaves cannot hurt me, you silly girl!
Phillip was chasing after the dragon again, slashing at its tail to get its attention.
Maleficent’s head whipped around faster than seemed possible and she belched a river of green fire at him.
Aurora Rose screamed.
Ugly, hissing black smoke rose where Phillip had been.
It drifted, ghostlike, over the piles of rocks and boulders.
The dragon threw back its head and roared out laughter like bile.
Then it turned with a certain regal slowness, as if savoring the next bit.
Aurora Rose swallowed a sob. She had to not think about Phillip. She had to think about the hundreds of people who depended on her, everyone who needed her to live, and win, and wake up. So they could live.
What kills dragons?
“Think, Aurora,” she said aloud, panicking. “What kills dragons? Phillip—”
Phillip had his magic sword….
Aurora Rose imagined a dozen of them.
They rained on Maleficent from the crazy sky like metal drops, plinking against her skin.
The dragon’s flesh shuddered, crawling and puckering, where each one hit. A few scales, the size of war shields, fell. But no blood was drawn.
No weapons of man can destroy me! I am a mere fairy no more. I am the greatest thing in this world!
The dragon’s tongue, forked and giant, came out and raked over its lips in expectation. The beast slithered slowly up on Aurora Rose and raised its deadly claw, each nail twice as long as the swords she had summoned and as black as death.
And then, suddenly, Maleficent’s neck snapped back. She screeched in pain—a horrible sound that carried across the world.
Standing under her, looking grim, was Lianna. She had her little bodice knife sunk deep in the flesh of Maleficent’s ankle and was twisting it.
“But weapons from hell can take back what they are owed.”
There was a very faint but definite smile on her lips. She pulled her dagger out and sank it again, this time in the flat of the dragon’s foot.
Maleficent roared with rage and spasmed, shaking her leg to free herself. But the dagger stayed stuck.
She turned to bite Lianna in half.
Suddenly, Phillip was there, popping up from behind a boulder. His hair and clothes were singed and there were burns across his face, but otherwise he seemed unharmed.
He cleared the distance between him and Lianna in seconds. He grabbed her around the waist like she was no more than a ball in a game, and kept running.
Maleficent whipped her tail like a club. The tip just touched his side, but it was enough to knock him down. He landed with a sickeningly heavy thud and Lianna fell out of his grasp.
As fast as a cat with a mouse desperate to escape, the dragon leapt over Phillip to pounce on the handmaiden.
“No!” Aurora Rose cried, trying to summon the earth to move, to make a canyon between the two.
It was too late.
With a look of pure hatred, the dragon ripped its front claws over Lianna’s face and body. Their needle-sharp tips shredded her flesh and opened her innards to the light of day.
And then, as if it had merely been an annoying task to be dealt with, the dragon was done. Maleficent spun around and faced Phillip and Aurora Rose, not even bothering to gloat over her kill.
“Lianna!” Aurora Rose cried.
“Sorry…” her old handmaiden wheezed.
Then her black eyes froze in place.
It was too much. From friend to betrayer to friend and savior. To gone. Aurora Rose couldn’t process all of it.
Stop, she told herself. Mourn her later. THINK NOW!
From somewhere unseen, a clock began to strike the hour.
Phillip and Aurora Rose and even Maleficent paused in confusion.
There was nothing left to the castle. Except for the forest, the whole world looked destroyed and grim, flat and featureless in all directions. Yet the distinct bong of a clock could be heard, eerily and perfectly, everywhere at once.
Cold dread washed over Aurora Rose.
Maleficent reared up on her hind feet, the left one splayed from the dagger. She laughed.
Midnight on the day after your sixteenth birthday, Aurora! Now you die—and I live again!
Aurora Rose thought desperately. What could she do? All this was because of the curse. All this was because she pricked—
Suddenly, she knew. She knew what she had to do.
Although she had only ever seen one once in the real world, she could bring up a perfect image of it in her memory.
The spinning wheel.
Bits and pieces of the ruined castle—chairs and tables and beams and other chunks of broken wood—began to fly through the air. They spun and interconnected and wiggled until each piece fit, sucking together like lodestones. Aurora Rose frowned, concentrating hard to get the trickier bits in place.
They made an ugly, enormous spinning wheel.
Maleficent laughed and belched green fire.
The spinning wheel caught flame immediately and started to burn away—all but the spindle, the bright black nail with the sharp tip.
The dragon looked confused for a moment.
Aurora Rose drove the spindle into its heart.
The dragon screamed.
It spewed fire that changed different, hideous colors: bloody red, sickly black, hellfire yellow.
Purple and scarlet and black ichor throbbed from the wound in a giant-sized echo of what had happened to Lady Astrid. Aurora Rose watched with a grim, horrible satisfaction.
The dragon clawed at its wound, trying to pull the spindle out, perhaps—but all it succeeded in doing was ripping out patches of scales and flesh.
It toppled, falling so hard that the ground shook. The princess was almost thrown off her feet.
The dragon writhed and scrambled on the ground as if trying to claw its way back to life. It shuddered and hissed and convulsed.
Its wings and legs and sca
les and tail billowed and fluttered and seemed to shrink, to become raggedy flaps of cloth. These finally shredded and collapsed around what would have been its giant body—except that there was no body anymore, either.
Just a black and purple and yellow stain on the ground, with little pieces of silk flapping in it like a dying butterfly.
AND THIS WAS WHEN, Aurora Rose was pretty sure, everyone was supposed to wake up.
“I’M STILL HERE,” the prince said—rather unnecessarily, Aurora Rose thought. He ran a hand through his thick, dirty mane; chunks of broken and burnt hair came out. “At least I hope I’m still asleep.”
Aurora Rose regarded the pile of filth where Maleficent had died. In the middle of it, like it was the only real thing left, lay the giant spindle, still gleaming and sharp.
Lianna lay nearby, broken and torn apart. Her black eyes were open to the apocalyptic sky above.
A cold wind blew over the degrading landscape. Aurora Rose took comfort that someplace beyond the trees, her people were safe.
“They said royal blood would break the spell,” Phillip continued. “You killed the evil queen…what’s going on?”
“She wasn’t a real queen.”
Her voice was strangely flat because of the desolate world, the lack of anything for sound to bounce off.
She took a deep breath and winced when it hurt her ribs and chest.
“Hey, look,” Phillip said, pointing to the only other distinctive thing among the piles of trash and rubbish. It was the image of the real Aurora, asleep on her bed. He approached it and tried to walk through, like a door. But he just pushed through it like it was air and wound up looking at it from behind.
For just a moment sleeping Aurora stirred, and dream Aurora felt hope rise in her chest.
But all sleeping Aurora did was drop an arm over the side of the bed. Her fingers uncurled as she relaxed back into deep sleep.
A single crimson drop fell from the tip of her wounded index finger.
“Royal blood,” Aurora Rose murmured.
Royal blood.
She knew what to do.
Aurora Rose squared her shoulders and straightened her helmet.
Then she turned back toward the spindle.
“Don’t you dare,” Phillip said uneasily. “Rose—what are you doing…?”
She ignored him.
“Rose, stop!”
He leapt up just as she reached the sharp, ugly black thing.
But all she did was touch her finger to it.
Phillip sighed in relief.
Aurora Rose stiffened.
The pain that ripped through her body wasn’t that of a single pinprick. It was as if fire climbed up through her veins and then out through her ears, through her mouth, through her nose, into the world.
She gritted her teeth and tried to ignore it. That was what a queen would do.
Cradling her bleeding finger, she walked slowly and carefully to the image of the sleeping princess.
She looked at herself. The hollow cheeks, the beautiful hair, the slender neck, the spotless gown.
“What a mess,” she murmured.
The little girl—the young woman—who could figure out an escape from her fake life and arranged marriage only through death. Who had never known enough to question anything.
She took one last look around the bleak, terrible world where she controlled everything. It could be a paradise if she just imagined it.
She took another deep breath, reached through the image, and held her own hand, touching blood to blood. The last time she had pricked her finger, it was to sleep. Forever.
This time it was to wake up and live.
PRINCESS AURORA ROSE WOKE, suffocating in heavy corseted gowns. She had sworn she would go right to work but was surprised by her own skin.
“I was older in the dream,” she said aloud, surprised by her own voice. Several years had passed with Maleficent. Here she was still sixteen.
She swung her uninjured, younger legs around to the side of the bed, where Phillip was stretching and yawning.
“Wake up, Prince,” she said, clapping his shoulder. “We have a lot to do.”
Their moment of peace and transition ended quickly. Screams, inevitable but still shocking, began to ring out from different areas of the castle. Some people were not waking up. Some people were as dead as they had been in the dream.
Three tiny creatures, red, blue, and green, buzzed into the room and rapidly became familiar, very welcome little ladies.
“Aunts!” Aurora Rose cried, surprised by how glad she was to see them—the rush of feeling that overcame her—despite their betrayal mere hours before in this world. She leapt up and gathered them in her arms, squeezing tightly.
“Rose!” Fauna cried happily. They all had tears in their eyes, even Merryweather.
But still.
“We,” Aurora Rose whispered in Flora’s ear, “will talk. Later.”
“Well, yes, of course, my dear, but—”
“MY LADY!”
One of the faster, smarter guards—Aurora Rose made a mental note to review him later, with a possible eye to promotion—appeared at the door, face haggard and aghast.
“The king and queen—your parents—are dead! Murdered! As well as countless other nobles and servants…here…” he added, a little unsure of himself. None of the others who had slept had the advantage of knowing the full story of Maleficent’s true intentions and the point of the dream. Doubtless they would be confused and terrified.
“Thank you,” she said politely. “Sadly, I am already aware of the situation. This is all the result of the evil that Maleficent wrought.”
Phillip was finally upright, still stretching and grim with the loose ends of the adventure.
The guard’s eyes kept flicking to the prince’s.
“I need you to take as many guards as you can and scour the castle for any remaining of Maleficent’s servants,” Aurora Rose said. “Kill them all. Afterwards we need to send a unit to go to her lair and destroy it utterly. Set fire to it and all its contents. I don’t want a repeat of…recent events. We must make sure that every aspect of her is dead and gone.”
“Absolutely, my lady,” the guard said. He looked relieved that someone was taking charge of the situation—but hesitant about carrying out those orders. “Perhaps Prince Phillip or your cousin the prince of Fendalle—”
“Can both help out with the search,” Aurora Rose said, putting some spit into her words. She changed her mind about his promotion. “If they are up to it. All able-bodied men with swords are welcome to do so. Nay, encouraged.”
She moved purposefully out of the room, still with the infinite grace she had been born with. But there was iron immobility to her shoulders.
Fauna sighed. “Already a queen, that one.”
The three fairies, and Phillip, hurried after her.
In the real world she had been in the castle as an adult for only a few hours. But it was, with some superficial differences, nearly exactly the same as the Thorn Castle. She had no trouble finding the throne room. If nothing else, the sounds of chaos would have led her there.
For just a moment Aurora Rose caught herself, viewing the room she had destroyed just moments earlier in her mind. The real one was different in ways that made her queasy: lengths and heights of things were changed; colors and decorations were off. It was set as if for a party….
My wedding, Aurora Rose realized belatedly. She stood halfway down the grand staircase she was supposed to have descended with Phillip, her arm in his, to greet their parents. Gold and blue tapestries hung everywhere; shiny horns with pennants hanging from their bells flashed in the light.
But this was not the scene the musicians had prepared themselves for. Beautifully dressed ladies dragged their priceless gowns through pools of blood and wept. Men tried to comfort them or each other, or they themselves wept. Bodies sprawled on chairs and the floor in terrible poses.
“PEOPLE,” Aurora Rose s
houted, trying to channel King Hubert’s lusty call from the dreamworld. Only a few looked at her. One, however, was a horn player. Aurora Rose impatiently gestured at him.
He complied immediately. Like the guard before, he was only too happy to have someone giving orders.
He played a loud royal flourish—and could perhaps be forgiven if it wasn’t perfect.
At that the crowd turned around. Strange noises, murmurs of recognition and astonishment, rose from them. They remembered her from their dreams. They remembered the battle, her facing off against the dragon.
“Noble ladies and honored gentlemen,” Aurora Rose said as demurely as shouting would allow. “It is a sad day for our kingdom. My heart goes out to all we have lost and those who loved them. I know that no words of mine can stem your grief.
“Even so, there is much work to do. Those who aren’t in need of immediate assistance, please return to the rooms in which you are staying. Our servants will care for your every need, and we will send for you all as soon as things are…tidied.”
There were a few mumbles of protest, but otherwise everyone who could leave seemed glad to do so. No one went alone—all were in little groups, whispering and discussing and sharing what they remembered, the strange experience they had all endured while asleep.
A man in severe black robes and a soft hat strode over to Aurora Rose. Other men in similar robes followed behind him. They all wore thick golden chains with heavy gemmed pendants on them. Ministers or secretaries or some such, Aurora Rose decided. Like the ones who had yelled at her in her dream within the dream.
It seemed that, sometimes, sleep did indeed mirror life.
“Your Highness, it is very good of you to take this under your own personal direction,” the first man began. “But as you are new to the kingdom and have had no experience with such matters…”
“And are a woman, moreover,” another man put in.
“And a woman,” the first man continued. “Your delicate constitution may not even survive the viewing of your parents, much less what else needs to be done. What I’m saying is perhaps you should leave the sorting-out of things to us, your father’s advisors…and maybe your uncle Prince Jaundry….”
Aurora Rose regarded him mildly, trying to conjure memories of the beautiful girl full of grace everyone was supposed to fall in love with so easily.