Eternal Sleep [On Hold but Not Forgotten]

Trickery At Its Finest

"This is absolutely insane," Phillip whispered in my ear, trying to usher his voice softly enough so that my father wouldn't hear his reservations.

My father had yet to explain his scheme to us, but Phillip was expressing near blatant doubt that it would be possible to trick Lilith into telling us where my body was; I was equally as unconvinced as we strolled at painfully brisk pace through the inner castle corridors to yet another secret room buried even deeper within the castle walls. My father was about privacy to the extreme. Lilith's raven was an excellent reason to vouch for such ridiculous, grandiose precautions. I would have buried myself three times as deeply within these walls were it to guarantee I wouldn't see my mother again.

Phillip seemed to sense my discomfort and placed a sturdy hand through what should have been my shoulder and cursed aloud.

"My bloody horse has better luck touching you than I," he muttered. "And I'm supposed to be your prince."

My father and I chuckled together as we finally found ourselves in a study decked in the most careful splendor that I had ever beheld in my life. Sweeping red curtains adorned windows that overlooked a walled-off secret garden and threads of gold wove their way throughout the fabrics that dressed the chairs and carpets placed strategically throughout the room to draw the eye into their depths.

But there was no time to get caught in the sweeping webs of scarlet and sunshine. We had to get my body back first. What a strange thought. Getting your body back was not a phrase I thought I'd become so familiar with, let alone my personal situation.

"Okay, now that we're settled somewhere more secluded, we first have to understand what Lilith wants and who she is as a person."

The thought struck me all at once and the knife of dread pierced me with the full force of an oncoming carriage drawn by mad horses. We knew nothing of what Lilith desired except one thing.

"She wants me," Phillip said aloud, affirming my darkest fears all at once.

My damned mother just had to have an affinity for the person who could save me. Somehow I knew that he would become an even more crucial player in this game of ours than I could ever want. This was the worst idea in the history of ideas, but before my father could give his grim nod of understanding, I knew that it would be the only viable solution that we could muster given all of the other factors in play.

Her darkness was verging on the edge of the kingdom and the time for luxury was over. We would have to plan to deceive Lilith using my own fiancé as bait. Not only was it demeaning to Phillip, but it was a huge slap in the face to everything I had finally come to terms with. Just as I had decided that Phillip wasn't out to use me as breeding chattel or that my father wasn't using me to unite kingdoms, my mother would come around and try to take him away, along with any chance to save the kingdom from her eternal darkness and suffering.

I hated that witch. I couldn't deny it at this point, my rage boiling over within my mind and into the recesses of my very soul to marinate and set a new fire to consume her with. If Phillip didn't manage to get us out of this mess, I would personally hunt her down and use all of the force I knew how to use to try and slice her in half. Maybe she would never even make it to Hell to regenerate this time. Maybe I could destroy any evidence that she had existed at all. After all, defeating her today only to know she could come back tomorrow again and again offered little comfort to me. She had to be extinguished permanently.

"How do you mean that she wants you, Phillip?" my father asked, tearing through the silence with his ignorance to the matter at hand.

Phillip and I exchanged wary glances as the fury within me threatened to burst through the dams of my eyes and salt the earth with my pain in a memory ne'er seen to be so tragic. I could lose the only person I could trust at this point. I loved my father at this rate, but how trustworthy could he be, given that he had once loved my mother? How did I know that he would not lead me to some separate doom, if not join forces with the witch once again to make me fall and to take the kingdom in a new era of darkness?