The Goblin's Crown

Chapter Fifty Seven: Riddles

The owl witch, Athane, smiled sinisterly at me the moment I agreed to her game of riddles and truths. The look on her face, with her mouth stretching and contorting its whithered features into an expression of demented delight, caused my stomach to twist with dread and made me wonder whether or not I really wanted to hear her truths.

Some things were better left unknown.

"Wonderful!" Athane clapped her hands happily. "It's been ages since I've played this game." Rising from her chair, she began to pace, waddling around the room. She tapped her chin. "We should begin with something easy, I think. Hmm, what should I start with? Ah, I know!" Her eyes brightened with a strange joy as she began to recite the first riddle.

"Even when you feed me I am starving. You may reach for me but beware my tongues. They give life and death in equal measure," she said. The riddle echoed through the room, despite the cramped space.

I was expecting a much harder riddle from her to be honest, though she had said she was going to start off with an easy one. "I've heard that one before," I answered almost immediately. "The answer is fire."

"Correct." She said, her raspy, crinkling voice softening to the coo of a much younger woman. The fire in the hearth exploded outwards. I screamed as flames engulfed the room, burning away the walls of twigs and the hoard of junk. The flames wrapped around Athane like a blanket, swallowing her up in its red and gold light. Beneath it, like a caterpillar within a cocoon, her form changed, transformed. Her wrinkles were washed away, her nose shrunk and her thin, dry lips became supple pink petals. Her body stretched and molded itself into that of a voluptuous, beautiful woman.

The flames vanished, leaving a vision of unearthly loveliness in its wake. Over her ample curves, the flames left behind a gown of moon pale feathers. Her hair, which before had hung greasy and limp, flowed around her like a river of silver starlight. Yet for all her beauty, her transformation had not changed the bleak greatness that resided in her pitch black eyes.

She extended a pale hand towards me, offering it palm up. "Come along then, take my hand, and I will show you your first truth."

My hands clutched the tie of my cloak at my throat. My heart pounded against the skin beneath it. "Show me?"

Her soft lips curved. "I find that some things are easier to explain if one can see it with their own eyes."

Hesitantly, I laid my trembling hand into her own.

Her skin hummed beneath my touch, pulsing with immeasurable, omnipotent power as she waved away the world around us with a dismissive sweep of her outstretched hand. She wiped it away like dust from a precious thing, revealing another image, another place and time.

We stood in a bedchamber. There were only three walls. Where the other should have been, were a series of pillars, leaving the room open to the outside air. Rose vines heavy with soft pink and cream colored flowers climbed up the pillars, inching their way inside. Similarly colored fabrics covered a massive bed at the center of the room and draped down from the ceiling, fluttering in a pleasantly cool breeze that cut through the stifling summer heat carrying with it the scent of salt and sea. on a lounge among the tangled vines, Aurora reclined with her chin propped up on folded arms on one end of it and her small feet tucked up beneath the fabric of one of her usual barely there dresses. Her hair flickered dimly like a dying fire as she stared listlessly at a fully open cream rose, her eyes as dead as that of a three-day-old fish. My gaze, however, only lingered on her for a brief moment before it slid over to the other two faerie women occupying the room.

Titania, as always, demanded your attention. Her power, hidden beneath a thin veil, was hard to ignore. Even as she sat on the large bed, the magic that exuded from her very being called to me. She watched a young girl, a smaller version of herself, rummage through a wardrobe near her. The girl, like Titania, had darker skin and curling hair that seemed to ungulate around her like calm ocean waves. She had a sweet, pretty face with large eyes the color of a summer sky. There was no doubt in my mind who's child she was. She may have been Titania's spitting image, but it was a power like her father's that beamed out of her. She held in her soul, bright, blinding sunshine, not her mother's ferocious storms.