“Calia, wait!”
The young princess of a freshly turned sixteen, dressed in her best finery (albeit not the lustrous gown her mother would’ve preferred, having chosen a princely vest and pants her brothers would wear) paused to give a primly exasperated green-eyed glare over her shoulder towards the young man that’d called for her. Her dark hair was coiled tight in a circlet braid without nary a strand out of place, and when she placed her hands on her hips she gave an impatient tap of her boot to the dirt.
“What is it now, Derrick? I am already late for my own party,” she huffed.
Derrick with his platinum blond hair and too-wide mouth worked as an apprentice horse trainer, and by the looks of him had been rolling around in the dirt somewhere. Hopefully not in the stables themselves. He was an absolute irritant where ever she went, especially with all of her riding lessons as he was constantly around.
If he weren’t so pretty to look at, Calia would be sick of seeing him.
“I found something interesting and I want you to see it,” he explained, instantly spreading into a knowing grin as he rocked on his heels.
“I don’t have time for your nonsense today, they’re waiting for me,” complained Calia. She hated when he smiled like that, it was so very difficult to think when he did.
“It’s your own birthday, it’s not like they can have it without you,” he retorted. “I’ll give you a kiss if you come along?”
Her scoff was immediate and yet her feet were already moving to follow. “That’s not the reward you think it is,” she grumbled.
Calia followed Derrick down the winding rocky road away from the mountain castle, giving question after question to try and get him to spill the beans on this mysterious thing he found. Across the bridge that lay over the stream that surrounded the boundaries of the castle grounds. Turning away from the village to take a small dusty road off towards the fir forest where Derrick lived alone in his own little stone cottage. The man refused to give even the slightest hint until they were past the threshold and tucked away inside.
…where he then gestured with both hands towards something covered in a cloth leaning against the wall. Calia huffed again as he gestured for her to do the unveiling herself – all too wide smiles and beaming with pride. With a quick snatch of fingers she yanked the covering away and found herself staring at… well, herself! A filthy mirror that stood a good foot taller than the both of them. It’s frame was covered in layers of dust, but somehow was still a glistening, eerie shade of obsidian black.
“Wow. Amazing.” came her deadpan response, before she sighed and cast a bored look to Derrick. “A mirror, really?”
“Not just a mirror,” he explained with excitement, bustling over to a table to retrieve a leather bound tome that appeared to be in just as terrible of shape as the mirror. When he handed it over to her and she slowly started to thumb through the yellowed pages, Calia’s dark green eyes slowly began to widen further and further.
“Where in the seven hells did you get this!”
“I found it in one of the old mining caves. The mirror, the book… some other things. Isn’t it fantastic!” he proudly declared, taking the book from her hands to flip through it himself. “A style of sorcery without the weakness of mages. I’ve already practiced a few of the spells.”
Staring at him in horror, Calia wasn’t sure what to say at first. Until she finally found her stammering words. “Magic isn’t something to be playing about with–“
“What do you know about magic?” he interjected with a brutal laugh, causing the princess to huff again, ready to launch into a proper lecture. Derrick waved a hand at her before she could get a word out. “Let me show you, you’ll understand.”
“Derrick- I swear to the old gods if you–“
A few whispered words straight from the book was all it took and Calia could practically feel the prickle of something not right sending goosebumps up her arms. The tiny room of the cottage dimmed as if someone had set shudders on all of the windows to shade out the sun. Then something skittered. Lord knows, she didn’t see it or where it came from, but she could certainly hear it! Scrabbling across the wooden floors and then up the walls. Until it ignited into a burst of red fire – blinding enough she had to shield her eyes for a moment, and then it was all too easy to see! Watching the flaming lizard dart and jump and zoom it’s way around the cottage, catching everything it touched into flames so quickly that even Derrick found himself startled. The young man frantically now flipping through the pages of his cursed book trying to figure out how to control this very beast he’d summoned! Smoke and flames filled the room so fast there was no telling which was right or left.
Then in an instant – a panicked quick motion of her foot stomping to the floor – the fire was doused in a quickly growing spread of frost. Crystalizing and leaping across the floor, up the walls, chasing the fiery little demon up to the very ceiling until it was engulfed into the ice and fell to the floor in a shattering of pieces.
The pair stared at each other in a long agonizing moment. Calia both furious and frightened. Derrick stunned in a state of pure mystified awe.
“You’re a mage,” he gasped.
“No. It’s just- It’s magic. …and it’s dangerous you stupid fucking ass!” she shouted back. “You could have killed us both!”
“How do you do it?” Derrick marveled. “Where did it come from? Does your family know?”
Calia shook her head. “I don’t know it just is – and of course they don’t know! I’d be sent off to north with those senile old wizards. It doesn’t matter, we need to destroy that stupid book before someone gets hurt.”
Before she could snatched it back from his hands, Derrick held it aloft and shied away from her.
“Are you kidding? This is the greatest thing I have ever found. It’s actual power, Calia. Greater than any clan lord or king. Greater than the wizards in their towers, or the crones in the woods. Think of the things we could do with it! You could do anything you want!”
“I can already do anything I want!” she shouted back. “So can you! I don’t see you suffering, Derrick. You have a home and good work. You life could go in any direction you wish.”
He laughed again, though this time it was a sort of mean-spirited chortled she’d never heard from him before.
“And what if I wanted to be a king?” he demanded to know.
“Then go find yourself a princess that likes her man to be pretty and stupid,” Calia spat back. Perhaps at one time Calia might’ve been that princess, she’d certainly entertained the thought enough times. This though… this was not a good sign. And her mother did not raise a fool. “Destroy the book or I’m going to tell my father.”
“Tell him and I’ll tell him about you.” Derrick threatened in an instant, only just as quickly softening his stance and expression after catching the horrified look on her face. “…Calia, I’m sorry. I got- I got a little carried away. You don’t understand what it’s like to be someone like me. I need more than…” He gestured and the now scorched and frosted cottage around them. “I won’t be reckless anymore, I promise. I just want to study it, to learn more about it and where it came from.”
Calia didn’t like this. Not his sketchy, creepy book. Not this new bold way he dared to snap at her. Nothing about it felt right in the slightest. Still… she found herself caving to the pleading look.
“…do as you wish.” she finally said, turning on her heel and stalking for the door. “I want nothing to do with it. Or you.”
She left him there. With his evil little book, spooky mirror, and who knew what else. Her statement not being an empty threat, as she did as promised and avoided him from then on. Not a word, not a look. As far as Calia was concerned, he no longer existed in her world.
In time that turned out to be a terrible mistake.
Several years later…
Dusk was falling on the horizon by the time Princess Calia led her horse into the stables. It would have been simple enough to hand the mare over to one of the stable hands, but the quiet woman much preferred the task of doing so herself. Using the simple task of removing the horse’s saddle and bridle and brushing it down as a means to wind down for the day. To collect her thoughts and be at peace in her own company. With such a large family, sometimes it was difficult to hear one’s own thoughts!
These days the princess cut a striking figure. As tall as her older brothers, lean and strong from years of riding and sword training. While she shared the same coloring as her elder sister, Calia was no sweet and delicate little faeling. There was a regal elegance to her that came as naturally as her confidence.
A whinnied neigh and the stomping of hooves raised her hackles and alerted her to a new presence in the stables. Turning to see what had caused this disturbance for all of the equine beasts to find a figure in the threshold, dressed in robes of all black. When the hood was pulled down, it was a great surprise to see Derrick – that same too-wide smile, though now his face had this sunken angular set to it. A sharpness that wasn’t just due to aging years.
Calia ignored him, guiding her mare into her proper stall before closing and locking up the gate.
“That’s no way to greet an old friend,” he said, voice sounding far more gravelly than it used to.
“You look a fool dressed like that,” came her rejoinder. “I was certain you left the valley after you sold the cottage.”
“I’d never leave without you, Calia, you know that.”
Her scoff was dismissive. They’d not spoken in years and even if they did, those feelings she might’ve had once upon a time when she was young and easily swayed by a pretty face and relentless attention were no longer there. Derrick was a stranger now and by the way all the horses in the stables seemed to be uneasy, he was not a stranger she wanted to rekindle relations with.
“I need your help,” he added on when she didn’t respond. “I’ve gotten myself into some trouble.”
Calia grimaced. “…you didn’t listen did you. You’ve been fooling around with that stupid book! Well you can forget it. Whatever hold you’ve dug yourself, you can lie in it.”
“Please, Calia. We were friends once, weren’t we? Help me now and I’ll never ask again.”
She nearly spat back a resounding and resolute NO. Whatever trouble he’d gotten himself into, it couldn’t be good by any means and it didn’t take a genius to realize there was something incredibly off and strange about him now. Still… she’d remembered how easily he’d lost control of it back then, and if he’d been playing around with dark magics all this time… Calia felt obligated to be sure he hadn’t done something truly stupid.
So at his beckoning, Calia followed.
Without a need to resaddle her horse, she trail close behind him across the castle grounds, away from the stone-built-into-stone monolith to head down the winding steep roads deeper into the valley. Along the craggy cliffside there were always open caves – most being nothing more than hollowed out dens for bears or other creatures, but many were old mining shafts or ancient trailways and tunnels through the mountains to reach other valleys without having to climb and scale the snowy hills themselves.
With the sun setting fast, by the time the reached the mouth of one of these caves it was already dark. Making the trek inside the tunnel opening a little disorienting and hard to see. Until the warm glow of flame at the end heralding an opening into a wider cave chamber. Calia found herself entertaining what she could only describe as a lair. Lived in for quite some time by the looks of it, complete with that blasted spooky mirror, a wall of what looked like herbs and strange concoctions. Strange symbols had been drawn all over the walls in a mixture of charcoal black, ruddy brown (was that blood, what the hell?!), and gilded gold.
This was a mistake. Coming here was a mistake.
When Calia turned back to Derrick he had a knife of black onyx in his hand, grinning so wide he looked positively deranged.
“I need your blood, Calia. Only a few drops – I promise it won’t hurt at all!”
“Shit,” she hissed out, which was about the only word she could get out before Derrick was lunging at her, swinging that knife like an absolute psychopath. The princess was quick on her feet however, and while she didn’t have her sword on her, she did have a dagger of her own. Fast to parry and defend in an instance.
There was a flurry of thoughts in her mind, from explicit curses to regret that she had left him to his own devices. Whatever naive reasons she’d had in the past to allow his bullshit to continue, they were surely all gone now. This foolishness was going to end tonight!
Pressing her foot to the ground, Calia had every intentions of swiftly ending this fight before it got any further… but when she summoned up that little inner spark to cast her magic, it wasn’t frost that spread across the ground. Those scribblings of a large circular sigil on the ground lit up bright red. Derrick suddenly cackling. He’d been ready for that, it seemed.
In the moment, Calia didn’t think – she acted. One didn’t need magic to win a fight with a madman and she darted after him with all the leverage in her body. He didn’t have that same quickness as her and found himself swiftly on the defense. Yet, in his years he’d seemed to have learned magic of his own. Whispering words she didn’t understand until that blasted mirror took to swirling a strange shadow inside of it.
Fuck that. Calia turned away from Derrick in an instant, flinging her dagger with trained skilled. Hitting the mark of silver backed glass to send it shattering into a thousand pieces. Unaware of the magic that lied inside to know the result would be an outwards expulsion of the shards! Even despite throwing her arm up to help shield her face she could feel the cuts, the stinging pain of something catching her in the eye.
Something was dizzying. Numbing. Calia didn’t know if it were from the shattered mirror or some other flung spell, but her vision was going blurry fast and within a blink she was flat on her back, struggling to focus and not drift away. A vision of Derrick standing over her with that deranged grin and grabbing her wrist being the last thing she saw before the world went a cold dark black.
When Calia awoke, groggy, still bleary eyed, she found herself in a pool of blood still laying there in the cavern chamber. Too much blood to simply be her own. Feeling an aching burn on her wrist that wouldn’t go away even when she rubbed her hand over it. She pushed herself up to her knees.
In a blink of her eyes she was outside, stumbling her way up the gravel covered road towards the mountainside castle. Though it was night, there was a bright glow of red ominously highlighting the outlines of the castle.
Another blink. All around her was screaming, shrieking, terrible monstrous bellows of beasts. She didn’t know when she’d claimed a sword, but she wasn’t hesitating to run it straight through the heart of a tall, nasty looking thing of dark red skin and long black horns.
A deep breath and she was dragging her sister Araminta up off the bloodied ground, shouting for her brother Haaron help take her. Head to the western pass. Get everyone to the western pass. Calia heard the words said in her own voice, yet it felt so very far away.
Exhaling and there was her father. Dead. Derrick, laughing and laughing. Holding out something in his hand that was covered in crimson red and frosted ice. That was hers. That was hers, how did he take it…!
The darkness came for her again and Calia was gone, falling, falling, falling.