31 Oneshots, from October 1st to the 31st, featuring assorted characters, settings, time periods, and worlds across the mythos of Narnia.
Challenge by @magic_of_narnia. All original prompts listed at the beginning of each oneshot.
TIMELINE DISCLAIME...
underland // year 2350 prompt: "colorful" word count: 1,129
xXx
Grey walls glowed with sickly green lamplight, hollowed stone carved in curious shapes and engraved with ancient incantations that none could read but their maker.
She who now stood in their midst like a maiden carved of that same stone, desaturated in the ghostly light and draped in silks of poisonous green even more unnatural than the color of her lamps, tresses of flowing black hair falling around her shoulders like a shroud of night, though day and night were meaningless words in her domain.
The Green Lady stood, not in her grand halls, not in the streets of her vast and silent city, not even in her own innermost chambers, but in the humble yet finely draped quarters of her dearest and most hated pet, her final pawn, her knight, her pitiful plaything.
Prince Rilian's eyelids fluttered but he did not wake, exhausted from his hour of lucid thought, now dreaming only of his Lady's designs as her slender fingers trailed through his golden hair, relishing the complacent, babyish nature she had for so long cultivated in him, almost as if raising a child of her own.
White bandages bound his wrists where he had only an hour ago strained so violently against his bonds as to tear his own flesh, those hideous wounds of rebellion now shrouded in the gentle caress of soft cotton, wrapped by her own hand with the care of any doting mother.
This young knight, one moment growling every promise of death he could imagine from the restraint of piercing bonds, the next falling asleep to the touch of his captor.
A grateful slave to her every whim.
Surely he had never been so submissive even to the parents of his own blood.
She traced his jawline with sharpened fingernails, his life so small now, pulse beating unaware beneath the tip of a knife.
She smiled at the thought as if it were the most pleasing strain of poetry ever crafted by mortals, releasing him from her feather-light touch and turning to glide soundlessly out of the room, but something flashed in the corner of her vision. Something that made her hesitate just enough to turn back, an itch of hatred setting her nerves on edge before her keen eyes even landed on the offending object.
A single red leaf, lying alone on a small silver side table, like a drop of blood on the tip of a blade.
The Narnian Prince often plucked growing things wherever he could reach them on their rare Overworld outings, sometimes a sprig of evergreen, sometimes the odd flower if any had managed to cling to life in the unforgiving mountains, dragging his little tokens down to the world of stone like a dog with its bone, or a crow collecting coins and string for its nest.
And she had always humored him, as far as she could, questioning his collection with ringing laughter, teasing but never forbidding, indulging his harmless fancies just as one ought with a spoiled fool.
Very rarely did he cross a line she could not entertain.
But she could not abide Red.
If anything, the Prince seemed to have developed a particular fixation with it, that vile, bloody hue. That rebellious stain of life, that defiant Narnian standard, the Red Lion ever taunting from their flags and shields and lances, not yet hers. She might almost have believed he remembered it, in the darkest corners of his mind, in the shadowy cobwebs of another life that even her strongest magic had yet to sweep away.
She pinched the stem of the leaf with talon-like fingers, as if to touch the color would be to stain her pure, pale skin, now greyish and deathly in the light that only seemed to enrich the foul scarlet token.
He would forget it by the time he awoke. Just as he forgot the shiny apple and the ruby ring and the cardinal's feather he'd picked up as if in some subtle act of defiance, even out of his mind, even buried and locked in the dark, he managed to grasp for every discarded scrap of brilliant color tossed his way, a love for vibrance that no dull black armor could ever seem to cage fully.
That ugly, rebellious hatred was gone from his face, but still she saw it in her mind's eye, the creature that snarled and cursed her every night for that single violent hour, the creature that crept always in the shadowy corners of his mind, ever a reminder that she had not yet finished taming him.
Even when he didn't remember why he loved that extravagance, even when he didn't remember the grand balls and wild hunting parties he'd been born for, a life of blazing sunlight and burning nights, of brilliant greens and purples and golds, of sky blue and shining lemon yellow—ever they pressed against the walls of his dungeon, spilling out into tapestries and bright colored fruits and the gold around his neck, as if some part of him were always scrubbing the black veneer of her influence away to reach the flecks of memory beneath.
She had twisted his laugh, but still he laughed.
She had drained the sanity from his shining blue eyes, but still they glittered.
She had stolen his memory of afternoons in brilliant red forests, but still he dragged them home.
Still the spots of ruby color seeping through the delicate bandages around his wrists taunted her even in his stupefied complacency.
For a moment she imagined the satisfaction of slitting his throat here and now, claiming that last ounce of power his unconscious mind refused to hand over, crushing that flicker of rebellion before he could even remember how to fight back, but not before he knew who had bested him. Not before that childish bewilderment mingled with a deeper knowing. A deeper loss.
Yet even as the fantasy arose, well traveled in that cavernous chest where no human heart had ever dared to beat, she steeled her nerve, let it slip through her fingers.
The pains she had taken to put this scheme into place were too great to waste now, no matter how he tempted her with that ivory skin, so easily pierced, that well of hateful red blood so easily spilled.
He shifted in his sleep, innocent and witless to the dark musings of his mistress above him.
And the Green Lady turned once more, sweeping out through the hall and away from those wretched tapestried chambers, crumbling the vile red leaf in her hand with a burst of green flame, singeing scarlet into ash.
But the feeling of it lingered long after she had brushed the soot from her pale fingers.
The knowledge that it had once been red.
xXx
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