Ash's Kingdom

The Princess

The iron smothered her. It had snuffed out the
fire in her veins, as surely as if the flames had
been doused.
She could hear the water, even in the iron
box, even with the iron mask and chains
adorning her like ribbons of silk. The roaring;
the endless rushing of water over stone. It
filled the gaps between her screaming.
A sliver of island in the heart of a mist-
veiled river, little more than a smooth slab of
rock amid the rapids and falls. That’s where
they’d put her. Stored her. In a stone temple
built for some forgotten god.As she would likely be forgotten.
It was
better than the alternative: to be remembered
for her utter failure. If there would be anyone
left to remember her. If there would be
anyone left at all.
She would not allow it. That failure.
She would not tell them what they wished
to know.

No matter how often her screams drowned
out the raging river. No matter how often the
snap of her bones cleaved through the
bellowing rapids.

She had tried to keep track of the days.
But she did not know how long they had
kept her in that iron box. How long they had
forced her to sleep, lulled into oblivion by the
sweet smoke they’d poured in while they
traveled here. To this island, this temple of
pain.

She did not know how long the gaps lasted between her screaming and waking. Between
the pain ending and starting anew.

Days, months, years—they bled together,
as her own blood often slithered over the
stone floor and into the river itself.
A princess who was to live for a thousand
years. Longer.

That had been her gift. It was now her
curse.
Another curse to bear, as heavy as the one
placed upon her long before her birth. To
sacrifice her very self to right an ancient
wrong. To pay another’s debt to the gods who
had found their world, become trapped in it.
And then ruled it.

She did not feel the warm hand of the
goddess who had blessed and damned her with
such terrible power. She wondered if that
goddess of light and flame even cared that she
now lay trapped within the iron box—or if the immortal had transferred her attentions to
another. To the king who might offer himself
in her stead and in yielding his life, spare their
world.

The gods did not care who paid the debt. So
she knew they would not come for her, save
her. So she did not bother praying to them.
But she still told herself the story, still
sometimes imagined that the river sang it to
her. That the darkness living within the sealed
coffin sang it to her as well.

Once upon a time, in a land long since
burned to ash, there lived a young princess
who loved her kingdom …
Down she would drift, deep into that
darkness, into the sea of flame. Down so deep
that when the whip cracked, when bone
sundered, she sometimes did not feel it.
Most times she did.

It was during those infinite hours that she would fix her stare on her companion.
Not the queen’s hunter, who could draw out
pain like a musician coaxing a melody from
an instrument. But the massive white wolf,
chained by invisible bonds. Forced to witness
this.

There were some days when she could not
stand to look at the wolf. When she had come
so close, too close, to breaking. And only the
story had kept her from doing so.
Once upon a time, in a land long since
burned to ash, there lived a young princess
who loved her kingdom …

Words she had spoken to a prince. Once—
long ago.

A prince of ice and wind. A prince who had
been hers, and she his. Long before the bond
between their souls became known to them.
It was upon him that the task of protecting
that once-glorious kingdom now fell.
The prince whose scent was kissed with
pine and snow, the scent of that kingdom she
had loved with her heart of wildfire.
Even when the dark queen presided over
the hunter’s ministrations, the princess
thought of him. Held on to his memory as if it
were a rock in the raging river.
The dark queen with a spider’s smile tried
to wield it against her. In the obsidian webs
she wove, the illusions and dreams she spun at
the culmination of each breaking point, the
queen tried to twist the memory of him as a
key into her mind.
They were blurring. The lies and truths and
memories. Sleep and the blackness in the iron
coffin. The days bound to the stone altar in the
center of the room, or hanging from a hook in
the ceiling, or strung up between chains
anchored into the stone wall. It was all
beginning to blur, like ink in water.So she told herself the story. The darkness
and the flame deep within her whispered it,
too, and she sang it back to them. Locked in
that coffin hidden on an island within the
heart of a river, the princess recited the story,
over and over, and let them unleash an
eternity of pain upon her body.
Once upon a time, in a land long since
burned to ash, there lived a young princess
who loved her kingdom …