Talystasia: A Faerytale

by Haadiyah Cardinalis

  Pain slammed into her knees, shooting into her spine as if she’d been forced to kneel. Gravity rolled, smashing her violently across an unseen surface, punching the wind out of her lungs. Her spine screamed the pain she couldn’t voice, broken, jarring syllables breaching her consciousness.

  The voice spoke again:

  … Your heart.

  She fought for breath, hacking and coughing until her lungs filled again—but it felt like they were filling with water, not with air. With a tremendous effort, she managed to turn her head. She couldn’t see a thing. But whatever she was looking at was everywhere.

  “Who … what are you?” she choked. I can’t take any more of this …

  Do you honestly think you don't know?

  "You live in the W-Wall ...?"

  No. I live in you.

  You weren’t there in that void. There was nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing—

  I was.

  She screamed aloud, nearly jumping out of her skin. "Y-you can hear—my thoughts—How's that possible!"

  She struggled to sit up and resorted to weeping; she couldn't move more than an inch in any direction, but the tears came all too readily. The air pressed down like solid rock walls, and it was black again, like it was in the void. Her ribs were a cage of agony. And that voice, like a headache—

  Of course I can hear you … I am what you are but a shadowy reflection of.

  “No! I'm not you."

  A rasping disembodied laugh from all directions.

  —Do I not speak with the same voice that you’ve heard in your head your whole life …? The person you call ‘you’?

  Whoever or whatever was speaking waited for her brain to catch up. The crushing sledgehammer of mental clamour distorted the voice into a cruel, growling parody. But underneath it all, it was recognizable. It was her inner voice.

  How is that even possible—? What is happening to me!

  Words coalesced in her head, unbidden, her own thoughts twisted and turned against her:

  You have a destiny, Roselia Loren.

  She was shaking inside with fear and fury at the violation, but she still couldn’t move. Weeping, apparently, was all she was capable of. Was she being held here by this thing, or was she paralyzed again …?

  You will get out of this trap—today. Because I want you to. I want you out in the world, living your life.

  “What …?” she croaked in disbelief.

  That's right—your life. Not some comatose horror. Not an endless scream.

  “I don't believe it—! You’re hurting me.”

  A breathless, horrible pause; seconds like hours. Rose struggled to throw off her unseen bonds, the blackness constricting like a vise. It seemed entirely futile.

  "It’s NOT possible,” she gasped. “I don’t care if you’re speaking inside my head, or that you can hear what I’m thinking; you’re not me. I've never even been here before! And I'm never coming back again. I'm getting out of here, no matter what it takes, and then I'm going to tell my father. And we’re going to tear this place to the ground, and I'm going to forget that it, and you, ever existed! And I'm going to go on about my life. And I'm going to be happy."

  I’m never going to be happy again.

  The laughter. All around her—inside her skin. She clawed at her neck, her arms, her face, crying. This couldn’t be happening; it had to be some kind of a nightmare. So why can't I wake up—

  Your father has been here, the voice informed her.

  "My father has been here?”

  Silence.

  “No, you’re lying,” she refuted, “There’s no way—”

  But there was. Even as she said it, she remembered the disturbance she’d seen in the dust on the floor.

  Don't act so confident, so contrary, so certain of yourself. What can you possibly be certain of anymore, when there's this—

  —The void and the madness. Devouring, eternal—behind every surface, underneath every lie of happiness—

  —and you never even noticed it before. Poor Roselia Loren. What an unbearable weight to carry. Only now do you feel the symptoms, but the disease been festering away inside you since you drew your first breath.

  The knowledge, full and flawless, was like maggots in her skull.

  With a shriek of effort, like a swimmer clawing toward air, she flipped over onto her stomach, dragging herself forward across the floor. But it was the floor too; she was only edging across the surface of her own terror. Whimpering, she crawled on, one raw, crushing inch at a time. Her hand closed over something on the ground, small and cold.

  —I'm going to give you a gift.

  Gold light burst inside her head, explosive agony rocking her backward. An afterimage seared itself across her mind of bones in shattered wreckage, flesh in fragments, and hopes and dreams gouged into dust.

  Through the hideous, unbelievable pain, the loathsome imitation of her voice still sounded:

  —I'm going to show you your true self.

  She shrieked, sobbing in anguish as the walls slammed in and crushed her weeping heart.

  ~~~

  Swimming at the edge of her vision in a cold grey murk was a gleam of gold. Groggy, her mind spinning, she groped through the fog and grabbed the shining thing, lifting it up to the failing light.

  It was a key, small, plain, and unadorned.

  “Am I dreaming?” Rose murmured woozily.

  … No. Her aching body was testament to that.

  If this wasn’t her bed, or even her room … then where was she? Beneath her fingertips, she felt … rock.

  Something must’ve happened to me …

  Transferring the key to her pocket, she felt up and down her body.

  What in God’s name was she wearing? It was indecent. And why was it wet ...?

  Lifting her fingers to her eyes, she gave a long shriek.

  Blood. Blood everywhere. She lurched to her feet, gasping.

  She was alone inside some kind of shallow cave. The dark crevasses in the walls leered back sightlessly. Frantically, she swept her hands up and down her arms, legs, abdomen, and breasts, then felt at her back and neck. There was no sign of injury, nothing to explain the frightening quantity of blood.

  A flash of white lit up the cave, and she stumbled outside into a barrage of rain. Thunder rumbled overhead. The world spun as she did, struggling to get her bearings in a dark, stormy, wild place. A tangle of thorny bushes convulsed as the wind assaulted them, white roses luminous in the fading glow of twilight. Boulders and trees slick with rainwater stood out starkly against a deep blue sky. The rain gusted fierce and cold in her face, soaking straight through the thin, flimsy dress.

  She dodged back into the shelter of the cave, her teeth chattering. She’d never seen this place, and she had no memory of coming here.

  What do I remember …

  A jumble of images converged in her head—her father, withered and frail in his armour, so like a steel coffin, Alix's fiery, reckless smile. Their disappointment in her doubts; the rumble of the departing cavalry through the splattering mud. A break in the clouds; the last gleam of a fading western star in a watercolour morning.

  … What then? Rachel, in the dressing room. Yes, this was Rachel’s frock, transparent and glued to her skin, streaked with scarlet stains that the rain wouldn’t wash away. She shuddered, wanting to rip it off.

  … What next …

  She must think of it, before it was lost forever—

  But the memory receded down a dark tunnel even as she snatched for it, like a nightmare fleeing before the dawn, melting into the full sun of consciousness.

  Steeling herself again for the bone-cold downpour, she raced back outside across the blustering clearing.

  The ground fell away in a sharp descent. Heart in her throat, she slipped to catch herself, falling hard on her bottom.

  Night was descending like the curtain of rain across the world. Dizzyingly far below, the sides of buildings and cobbled streets glistened, the sp
uttering flames of torches reflecting in the puddles on the streets.

  … I made it up here somehow, she realized, remembering now the errand she’d left the palace on, a fool’s errand. I must’ve fallen … hit my head.

  This then, was Talystasia’s summit, the highest point of land for more than a hundred miles in any direction. For a moment, she felt a sense of vertigo brought on by more than just the height. She didn’t recognize anything of the layout, couldn’t spot a single familiar dome or turret. The walls down there were stucco and timber, roofed unimaginatively with thatch or tiles, bare of ornamentation and built to withstand harsh weather. Then a burst of lightning outlined an assemblage of parapets and embrasures, a tall defensive structure towering up from below, and she understood. This was Talystasia East—and that was Telyra’s castle. Behind her was her father’s district, concealed from view by tall, blustering conifers.

  The next flare scalded into her retinas with harsh malevolence. Black, gaping sores gouged the cityscape—the twisted and mutilated wreckage of burnt-out buildings. Dark movement spasmed between them, shapeless and frenzied, like black blood welling, spilling, convulsing. At first, it appeared meaningless, a chaotic, malignant mass spreading through the streets. Gradually though, she realized what she was seeing through the darkness and the downpour was a crowd, moving together in a huddled mass—running, fighting, or gathering for some other panicky purpose—she couldn’t be sure.

  On the city walls however, she could make out what looked like black ants crawling over one another in cannibalistic fury. Soldiers! The reflected lightning burned intensely from the plate mail on their backs. She caught her breath, inching backwards in the rain. They were fighting and dying … right before her very eyes.

  She whimpered involuntarily with the remembrance of her father’s cold lips on her forehead. It was he who had smote the city with these ruins, who had broken the truce. Those men crawling over each other in the rain, massacring one another, were dying because of him.

  … But Father was a kind man. He had always been a kind man.

  “Oh, grow UP!” she reproached herself above the fury of the tempest.

  He was a kind man. It was pure naivete to think what was happening right now had been anything short of inevitable. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen this kind of devastation before. She had, plenty of times. She’d seen her own aunt’s home torched by Telyra’s pillagers, the white marble cracked and blackened, the ornate rooms torn open to the never-ending rain.

  Be thankful this time it’s over there and not over here. That’s why he’s doing it.

  Wrenching away from the blasted city, she turned her gaze to the right. At the very base of the mountain, far below and distant, almost indistinguishable from such a height, she could make out bright deadly blooms across the veiled southern fields, their edges disrupted by harried, chaotic movement. The firelight flared even in the downpour, consuming the living and the dead.

  To the north, the shoulder of the mountain on the far side of the outer wall was just visible. Amid the trees was the faintest glimmer of movement. That had to be Alix’s company—

  Again she choked. Just inside the gate, a division was gathered in anticipation of his arrival. Her father’s brazen assault to the south had done nothing to draw Telyra’s soldiers away from the north wall or buy Alix time or a clear path through the city walls. A line of archers behind the battlements had already notched arrows to bows. They waited now for the order to unleash death down on her brother’s men. She shouted a pointless warning into the roaring wind, her voice dying in her throat as the archers fired. She could picture the arrows plunging down through the angry dark like a lethal rain. The gate opened and Telyra's forces spilled out into the trees.

  They were coming this way, making for her father’s district.

  Sudden terror gripped her, wrapping icy fingers around her heart. What if there were soldiers here on the hill? Would they see her through the trees and shoot?

  Deep breaths … Deep breaths.

  “Nobody comes here. Not even now.”

  Except me, apparently.

  "—I've got to get back, I've got to warn them—"

  Bursting through the thickets as thunder crashed overhead, cold rain battering her to the core, she swept underneath the trees to the far slope and stopped short.

  "What was I thinking...!" she wailed, peering down past her toes into the steep dark.

  Grabbing a tree root for support, she slung herself down, cautiously clinging to the rocky slope. Through the trees, she could just glimpse the lights of her father's district. She shut her eyes. How had she even gotten up here—?

  Forcefully, she opened them and started down again, carefully negotiating a way between protruding thorn bushes and sharp, spiteful rocks. One foothold at a time, one handhold at a time—

  She slipped, her feet flying out from her under her. Her stomach fluttered in her throat, and she tumbled over backwards. The world became a whirl of black and blue and muddy pain as she grasped desperately for something to break her fall.

  A jolting, brain-shattering impact.

  She opened her eyes and slammed them shut again.

  Overhead, branches, clouds, and rain spun like a pinwheel. Her head was splitting, like the sky above torn open by the mangled arms of the trees. Nighttime had metamorphosed them into creaking, groaning monsters, the illusion of their malevolence whetted by her vertigo.

  Lying still, she listened to the night sounds, waiting for the pounding in her head to subside and straining not to cry. The rain was pattering softly in the mud beside her and crickets were chirruping in the thickets, undisturbed by the night’s bloody proceedings, oblivious to her pain and confusion.

  Distant shouts. She had to be close now. Hugging her poor injured body, she dragged herself to her feet, grabbing onto whatever it was that had broken her fall.

  It was a huge boulder, over half her height. Craning her neck, she looked back up through the trees to the heights above, but she couldn’t make out how far she’d fallen. But the ground here was fairly flat, which meant it’d been quite a ways.

  … That should've killed me.

  If the shouts were any indication, she was pretty sure which direction to run in. It couldn’t be that much further. But it felt like miles. The hammering at least had abated a little bit. If she could just make it back …

  If Telyra’s forces were on their way here, did that mean Alix had died out there as she’d watched helplessly from her perch on top of the mountain tor? What if Father was dead too? Who would she have left?

  Oh God, I can’t take this …

  Cautiously, her head still spinning, she started down the grassy slope between the trees, resisting the urge to run.

  A few minutes later she was flying through the east gate and across the palace lawn, her feet too numb with cold and injury and her brain too addled to feel anything but relief. The turrets and minarets emerged from the darkness like glittering beacons, rain and torchlight melting along their jewelled facets. When she reached the path between the orchids, she paused a moment to catch her breath.

  Why were there no guards …?

  There were no guards when I left either …

  Shrugging, she raced the remaining distance and clambered up the slippery stairs and into the bright, warm light of the hall.

  ~~~

  "What's all this BLOOD?! And mud? Get yourself back to the scullery and get cleaned up, girl—! What've you got yourself into?"

  "I'm Roselia Loren, stop calling me that—wait—clean off blood in the scullery? That’s unsanitary. When my father hears about this—OW! Stop it! I've already got a headache! I'm NOT A SCULLERY MAID; YOU WORK IN THE KITCHEN, YOU SHOULD KNOW—LEAVE MY EARS ALONE! AREN'T YOU THE HEAD COOK?!"

  "Hey now," interrupted a soft male voice. " ... What's this?"

  The cook lowered her hands from either side of Rose’s head. Stumbling away, she ducked gratefully behind the newcomer. He wore the scarlet dre
ss uniform of a lieutenant of the guard, trimmed with elegant gold cord and polished brass buttons. The left breast of his uniform was a small but dazzling display of colourful ribbons and shining medals, gleaming brighter even than the gold-washed walls. Short-cropped blond hair framed a stony expression at odds with a wide, pleasant face.

  "This is Miss Roselia Loren,” he indicated kindly. “Perhaps someone should be getting her a glass of water instead of trying to box her ears?"

  "No, no!" she exclaimed frantically, jumping in front of him. "But you have to listen to me—!"

  The lieutenant’s eyes widened, but he didn’t move an inch.

  "Telyra’s army is on its way here right now. We're beaten. We've got to get ready to defend the palace. We've lost precious time.”

  His eyes gave the slightest flicker. "I couldn't do that, Miss Loren,” he stated blandly.

  "... Whyever not? I'm giving you an order! I am the lord's daughter!"

  He lowered his head sympathetically.

  "I already have my orders," he replied evenly, "from General Delvorak, your father's first-in-command, the one whom he has entrusted to make these kinds of decisions, whether or not you … or I … agree with them. The general has fielded nearly the entire standing army and about half of the reserve. Lord Telyra has fielded less than a third of his standing army and hasn’t even touched his reserve. We’re a little understaffed here.”

  He smiled sardonically.

  Then he winked.

  Rose gawked at him, at a genuine loss for words. At least the cook and all the rest were simply too stupid to recognize her in Rachel’s work clothes. That was some excuse for effrontery. But this moron …

  "Wh—wh—you're infuriating!" she spluttered. "Who cares about the general? We're all going to die! I'm begging you—"

  "Here, have a glass of water,” he said indifferently.

  Snatching it out of his hands, she drank like a sailor lost at sea. Most of it spilled down the front of her dress and onto the floor. The head cook, still looming several feet away, grunted with dissatisfaction.

  "Are you hurt?" he asked sympathetically. “Were you attacked?”