Arabesque

by Hayden Thorne

  It was a strange revelation all around.

  Roald raised his eyes and once again found his dark nobleman. Like the princesses flanking them, the spellbound youth watched Roald from his seat across the table; unlike the princesses, however, his gaze was empty and dreamy, an expression of a mind lost in a fantasy that would never end unless the right hero exerted his strength of will and overcame the wily princesses’ attempts at keeping their secret safe. If Roald were to drink the philter, he’d join his dark nobleman in that accursed palace. He’d be forever at the beck and call of any princess who’d care to dance with him when the moment arrived, forever a puppet to their whims, forever lost to the world and its reality of hard labor, injustice, obscurity.

  Ah, but he’d also be forever at the side of his beloved.

  Beloved? Who again? Alarick?

  No. All blessings on dear Alarick, and much love to that boy. It was simply time to move on.

  If Roald were to reject the drink and break his goblet, he’d be shattering this dream world, saving all those trapped in its golden web and ensuring a return to a life they all once knew. They’d be free to do as they pleased, their dignity restored, their minds once again mastering their own paths. Given that, Roald also had no guarantee that the dark nobleman’s heart would follow the same puzzling lines as his. And what would he have left?

  Roald watched his new beloved for what felt like an eternity. Things should have been much easier, he told himself, the voice in his mind fading quickly when his resolution began to form, and his heart grew surer of itself. The dream-witch had lied to him. The world had lied to him. They’d obviously forced him into something for which he was clearly unsuited, but he now had a chance to take the path shown to him by his developing nature.

  Reality, as he saw it, had laid claim on him, and he saw no princesses in his future. They’d never been a part of it. And Alarick had shrunk back into the nebulous fringes of his mind, no longer real, for grief had taken root in his heart, and he believed himself to be powerless against its despairing power.

  “This is it, then,” Roald said, not at all caring who’d hear him. Without moving his gaze from the glazed, dark-eyed figure before him, he raised the goblet to his lips and drank the philter.

  Roald vanished from all knowledge in the world beyond the enchanted palace and its perpetual ball. Wasn’t that a part of the plan, after all? Weren’t all heroes required to suffer for their prize?

  * * *

  From her shrine, Liebella watched the events unfold with a rage that she could barely control. She stared at the silver wine in her crystal goblet, for it was her means of keeping an eye on humanity whenever she saw fit to do so. The silver wine served her like an enchanted looking-glass, following her will and showing her exactly what she demanded.

  “Fool!” She seethed, her grip on the goblet nearly breaking the stem. “What a stupid little—”

  “Love and grief both can turn the most sensible man into a mindless wretch,” Weisheitta broke in, her voice calm and even. Liebella glanced up and snarled at her sister, who sat on a marble chair that was flanked by a pair of blue rose trees in marble pots. “Come now, Sister. You’ve been resentful of the way Kummerene treats the boy, yet here you are, condemning him for falling in love.” Weisheitta sighed and shook her head. “I really don’t know how to reason with you both.”

  “Humph,” Liebella snorted, looking back down at the silver wine. “Look at him. He just sacrificed his love for another just to experience something new.”

  “It’s best to let him go as his heart dictates, Liebella. How else can you expect him to find himself again? You’re no better than Kummerene, the way you’re making all these unfair demands on the boy.”

  Liebella finally set the goblet down on her altar and turned away with an indignant flounce. All of a sudden, all the offerings laid in her shrine by mortals who were deeply in love, who’d lost love, and those who desperately sought it, felt meaningless. She didn’t know why she’d grown fixated on this unfortunate young man, but she felt herself deeply enmeshed in his adventures in ways that confounded her.

  She paced around her shrine for a moment, waiting for her temper to cool. When she realized that nothing came of her efforts, she stopped and sighed, rubbing her temples with her fingers.

  “I’m sure Kummerene’s having a bit of a histrionic fit, watching how her protégé isn’t moving in the direction she wants him to,” Liebella noted.

  Weisheitta shook her head, bemused. “Oh, I assure you, she’s not at all paying attention to what her protégé is doing. She never has been, you know. She’s caught in the brambles of her own making, whether she realizes it or not. Go to her shrine and surprise her at random times, and you’ll see that I’m right.”

  Liebella frowned. “What on earth is she doing all this time then?”

  “What she does best—devouring men’s grief.”

  “How irrational.”

  Weisheitta raised a brow. “And you aren’t?”

  * * *

  As it happened, it didn’t take long for another man—a peasant this time—to appear before the irate king and take the challenge of the twelve dancing princesses. Fortunately for him, the goddess-witch’s predictions had found their right target, at long last, and he’d successfully broken the spell. His reward: the youngest princess. Because youngest princesses were notoriously easy prizes for enterprising young men, according to those saucy nursery tales, but they were proven correct in this case.

  Roald, for his part, realized his mistake too late. Once he’d drunk the philter that fateful night some days ago, any resolution he might have had regarding continued control, however little, of his faculties after the spell had claimed him, was gone in a breath. He was just one more doll for the princesses’ pleasure—another mindless dancing nobleman who’d guide his beautiful partner around and around the ballroom till he’d literally collapse from exhaustion.

  He could see, as though through the foggy tunnel of a never-ending dream, what went on around him. He was also unable to do anything with regard to being with the dark youth he’d sacrificed so much for. He couldn’t move without being summoned by one of the princesses. He couldn’t speak without being drawn into conversation by the same. As though encased in a glittering cocoon, he was helpless from start to finish, a fitting punishment, his conscience soon told him, for being so weak-willed and contrary. As with the rest of the men caught in the spell, he was no more than a toy.

  When the next challenger appeared and successfully broke the spell, the enchanted palace shuddered and then vanished, melting in puddles of colorful glass that flickered pitifully in the moonlight before disappearing completely. Everyone—noblemen and princesses alike—were thrown into confusion as the last remnants of the spell evaporated from their souls. Some collapsed to the ground in a momentary swoon. Some staggered about, heads in hands, groaning and sometimes cursing. Some stood and gaped stupidly around them.

  Roald immediately caught sight of the young man with whom he’d fallen in love. He ran to the latter’s side as he lay on the ground, groaning and confused.

  “Are you all right?” Roald asked—a silly question, he knew, considering where they’d all been. He raised the dark nobleman up gently, an arm secure around trembling shoulders.

  “I—where am I? What happened?”

  Roald, taking advantage of the continued noise and confusion around him, also allowed himself to be swept away by his infatuation as he cradled the half-delirious fellow against his chest, murmuring reassurances. When the young man’s gaze cleared and met his, Roald bent close and kissed him.

  A bad idea.

  Within moments Roald was on the ground, in pain, his face burning from at least a couple of punches thrown by the horrified and disgusted nobleman.

  “Pervert! Sick, filthy animal!” the dark youth screamed again and again, his fists flying, his feet swinging as he kicked at the fallen Roald till a few people had to throw themselves atop him and
drag him away from his victim.

  “Are you all right?” Roald heard nothing but that question being asked countless times.

  Humiliated, in pain, and sickened, it was all he could do to stagger off, waving away any offer of support as the group of revelers tried to find their way back to the princesses’ palace. Roald chose not to appear before the king with the others. Before dawn broke, he found himself mounting his faithful horse.

  “Fuck eternity,” Roald sighed as he stared at the long stretch of road before him. His horse—bless the old fellow who’d purchased his stallion sometime ago for agreeing to part with the animal for a measly handful of silver—neighed in agreement.

  “Don’t you ever do that again, you stupid gnat of a man!” the horse seemed to say, given the greater-than-usual expression of impatience from him.

  Roald couldn’t help but chuckle weakly, and he stroked Warlock’s neck. “No, I won’t,” he replied. “I’m very sorry for treating you this way—for allowing my judgment to be clouded.”

  A sudden dull pain coming from one side of his face put an immediate end to his gloomy thoughts. He grimaced as he gingerly touched his left eye, which was still bruised from that unexpected—though it should have been expected—drubbing he’d received from that dark nobleman. Yes, the same one he’d foolishly called his beloved and for whose cause he’d willingly sacrificed Alarick.

  “How could I have known?” he asked, turning his face to the morning sky. It offered him no answers.

  No, he wouldn’t have known without risking the kind of humiliating battery he’d just suffered in the hands of the same young man he was willing to give up a normal existence for.

  Roald knew where he was headed, and he half-dreaded the outcome. No, after a strange, protracted length of time sunk so deeply in enchantment, he’d learned his lesson and knew his path truly lay. How would the goddess take to his adventures, he wondered? Probably badly, if her purpose for sending him to the palace in the west were, indeed, what he suspected. Yes, he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d consider him to have failed. He blinked the fog from his eyes and looked back at the world before him.

  “Let’s go,” he urged Warlock, and they soon trotted idly down the dusty, solitary road back to the town with the little market, back to the lovely woodland glad where that strange marble statue awaited him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Things were changing around him. For the next few days, whether or not those were truly days or quantifiable chunks of time, Alarick caught a glimpse of what these were. His senses had grown more sharpened—more acute. He now heard things more clearly, and he smelled things more vividly. He even believed that he was seeing shapes in the wood grain—shapes that moved and followed him wherever he went, skulking in the shadows whenever they got the chance. They watched his every move, he was sure, gauging his every response, anticipating his every word.

  When he drew near to make out these shapes, they melted into the wood, and he saw nothing more than the usual grain and odd patterns. Frowning, it was all he could do to run fingers over those weathered panels, searching and feeling, his mind alternately chiding him for letting his imagination get the better of him and spewing execrations out of annoyance.

  And yet sometimes he thought he saw a man caught in the wood—a man who watched over him and who directed his every move, sipping idly from a goblet or sampling something from a bowl. But it was also one of those things that could easily be dismissed as nothing more than a “trick of the light,” for this wood-man tended to appear—or at least make his presence felt—whenever shadows skittered across the walls when Alarick lit candles or moved them around.

  “Is anybody there?” he called out, wide-eyed and startled, as he held a candle aloft, but its puny flame could barely set the room alight, and any magical wood-man hiding in the walls could easily take advantage of the shadows to hide himself from Alarick’s searches.

  Was this the voice he sometimes heard in his head, especially after he awoke, shaking and stunned, from yet another twisted dream that had battered his weakened defenses?

  Alarick had already given up on freedom, for the door remained solidly blocked, as did the windows. He’d already come to the point where soul-eating loneliness now haunted his steps, and every once in a while, he felt nothing but intense loathing for the cottage that kept him, a hungry yearning for Roald and happier times, and a deadened resignation to what surely awaited him in the future.

  I’m going to die here. If the cottage can’t change me with stories and corrections of my dreams, it’ll eat my soul while battering away at my defenses. Someday there’ll be nothing left of me but a withered husk.

  Alarick glanced down at his body and took note of the bruises, both fresh and faded, that had bloomed up and down his arms and legs from all those bizarre instances of what he now called “the cottage’s revenge” for his obstinacy toward its agenda. The strangely moving pieces of furniture when he wasn’t looking, the accidental turning of a knife against his hand as he tried to cut something, the sudden breaking of glass as he held it—those and dozens more had led to his injuries. The cottage was terribly displeased with him and his resistance, and those incidents had spiraled.

  When Alarick refused to sit before the hearth to listen to any more tiresome stories, the cottage would taunt him with whispered slurs, calling him every colorful name for the kind of limp-wrist poof that he was.

  “Pretty little cocksucker, pretty little ass-eater,” it would hiss in its chorus of a dozen graveyard voices, some of which dissolved in uncontrollable giggling. The effects were chilling at the very least. “Weak as a girl, always eager for a fuck like every other cocksucker born…”

  “Fucking cowards!” Alarick cried, whirling around and balling his fists, his body shaking in fury and fear, his eyes wide and darting back and forth as he rode the cresting waves of defiance and helplessness. “Are you hungry? Come on, eat! Swallow me whole!” He spread his arms out at his sides. “See? I’m not armed—why haven’t you taken advantage of that since the start?”

  The cottage responded with more whispers and giggling. Alarick, buoyed by the release of pent-up rage, hurried to a wall and gave it a hard kick, yelling.

  “Go on! I’m alone! I’ve got nothing! Fucking my mind isn’t enough for you?” He picked up a nearby chair, swung it hard, and hit it against another part of the wall, breaking it, though it left no marks on the wood paneling. “I know what you want, you miserable shit! Go on, take me, then!” He swung the battered chair, whose legs barely clung to its seat, and struck it against the wall once again. “Isn’t that the way with hypocritical shits like you? Show me the right way, eh? Why won’t you now? Tell me how to live, while you indulge in what you condemn me for!”

  Was this the madness he’d inherited from his mother? If it were, he couldn’t experience anything more gloriously cathartic. Screaming, kicking, and destroying another chair against the cottage walls, Alarick attacked and let loose every ounce of fear, hate, loneliness, and despair that he’d miraculously managed to subvert for so many days in favor of a mask of surrender and complete subservience to a force that was far greater than he’d ever imagined.

  Seeing the second chair hanging in broken bits of wood in his hands, he threw its battered remains away and ran to the bedroom, tearing his clothes off and throwing himself on one of the beds—naked, bruised, drenched in sweat, and wild-eyed.

  “Go ahead, you pathetic hypocrite! Fuck me and get it over with!”

  The wooden man, watching this remarkable display in amazement, could only stare at the thrashing body on the bed. If he could be seen in such a state of debasement, one wouldn’t miss the bulging eyes, the slack mouth, the hands reaching out for the naked prince who offered himself to him. The cottage creaked from the wooden man’s efforts as he fought against his own prison, his hunger and desire so powerful that he was literally tearing himself apart as he tried to separate himself from the wall.

  He couldn’t even ar
ticulate his need—his want. Like a wounded beast, he groaned as he clawed desperately at the air, fighting in vain to reach his victim, feeling tree sap dripping from his open mouth as he salivated for the feast that was right there. And when he couldn’t touch Alarick, he howled, his voice soundless within cottage walls but reverberating through the forest, shaking leaves, scattering shadows. His erection strained under his clothes. The cottage continued to creak as he tore against it, the agony of ripping flesh—if one were to call his wood-grain skin and clothes—shaking the cursed structure to its foundations.

  “What’s the matter?” Alarick snarled. “Why so modest all of a sudden? Playing the virgin, are you? Then let me take care of things, myself!”

  The cottage groaned more loudly now, drawing a quick burst of manic laughter from Alarick, who took himself in his hand and pumped, enhancing his performance with exaggerated movements. He threw his head back, closing his eyes while groaning, his body arching, his legs spreading, while his hand worked feverishly. Even in his rapidly spiraling rage-pleasure, he could feel the cottage strain against its foundations, contracting its walls as it desperately sought out his body, eager for a feast. Every inch of wood creaked and splintered, letting out hollow, sepulchral moans of its own as it found its nature laid bare by that audacious prince, and it fought against itself now. Hungry for Alarick’s body while reasserting its power over him, it struggled against a new and completely baffling predicament—a war against its masquerade existence.

  “I’m a devout man!” the watcher continued to howl even as he salivated and fought against his prison. “I know the path to virtue, and I can guide him!” He lusted and abhorred, lusted and abhorred, repeating his shrill protestations of purity to the cursed forest while fighting to reach Alarick and fuck him senseless.