Banished

3: Girl in the Iron Mask

"Rule #91: Once the villain is vanquished, they are gone and never coming back to get you. So stop looking over your shoulder and think happy thoughts!"

-Definitive Fairy-Tale Survival Guide, Volume 1

3
Girl in the Iron Mask
Rexi

The walls of my cell were bare, unless you counted the slime. Not exactly quarters fit for a king. While I was used to forest accommodations after living in Sherwood with Robin Hood and the Merry Men, castle living had made me soft. Or being linked to the pampered Dorthea had infected me. Regardless, by the third night of my imprisonment, I would have traded everything I'd ever filched for a hexed stack of straw. No Rumpelstiltskin or spinning wheel required, just something to make the granite floor bearable.
I wouldn't mind a book either.
"Spells bells, now I know I've lost it. I'm actually asking to read." Anything would be better than trying to amuse myself by drawing pictures in the slime-for the thousandth time. I also longed for someone to talk to. I kept hoping a mouse might pop by to keep me company. But the worst part was the torture device that devil woman had locked onto my face, the metal mask.
My nose had been itching for days.
Light filtered into the tower cell. It only did that once a day when the second sun was at its peak. Nearly lunchtime. I turned to the small, barred square they called a window and let the sun shine on my face. After breathing it in for a minute, I opened my eyes. A furry blur streaked by. For a moment my chest froze, hoping it was Kato and Dot here to rescue me. But I knew that was impossible. Solitary confinement must have rotted my brain. I'd seen Morte take over Kato's body, turning him into a shadow host. And I'd shot Dot myself with Excalibur in pen form, filled with the holy grail ink to cure her homicidal pyromania madness. In the end, the reasoning didn't matter. She was still gone. Kato and Dorthea were both gone. And it was time I admitted they were never coming back.
Besides, the chimera that flew by the tower had a graying mane. And the only old-timer I'd seen like that was Bob.
Bob!
I clutched the iron bars and pulled my face forward, the metal mask clanking against them.
"Bob! Bob! In the tower," I yelled. "It's Rexi. Help me!"
I called and called. And while I heard his wings flapping, he didn't pass by the window again.
The hope that had sprung from my chest deflated, leaving me more depressed than before. No one actually cared that I was locked away. I spent the first day expecting Mordred, but he never came. Which made sense. I didn't have Excalibur or the grail anymore, and those were the only reasons he'd hung around. Now there was nothing special about me. I couldn't blame him for looking out for himself.
Verte, the real Hydra, Dot, even Oz, all of my friends... Gone. I may as well have been gone too since I was stuck up in this tower. A forgotten nobody. Though looking on the bright side, my imprisonment wouldn't last forever. Because any day I expected the evil Lady of the Lake, Blanc, to finish building her shadow army and kill us all.
I sighed. "That's me, Rexi, the king of silver linings."
Footsteps sounded outside the thick wood and iron door. Someone was climbing the steps to bring me the glop they called food.
"I'm sorry, I have strict instructions from the queen. No one passes through this door but me," the guard said in his gravelly voice.
It was the second voice that perked my attention. Because the voice sounded exactly like mine. "Surely, Gwenevere could not have meant me. After all, does not a king outrank a queen?"
The guard stumbled over his words, carefully trying to avoid cause to be hung for treason. "Yes, sir. I mean, Your Highness. I mean, let me unlock the prisoner's cell for you."
"Please do," the voice that was mine but not mine said.
The door opened slowly, its weight making the old hinges groan in complaint. My double walked in, turned, and dismissed the guard. "Leave us."
"Yes, sir. Your Highness, um...yeah." The guard's boots clomped down the stairs, growing softer with each thud.
I relaxed against the wall, trying to appear far more at home than I was. "What brings you here? Oh, wait. I know. You need help. You can copy my face, but people are starting to notice that the real Rex doesn't walk around all stiff like a king with a sword stuck up his-"
"As of five minutes ago, the situation may have changed. So I suggest you hold that impertinent tongue of yours, or I will leave you to decay in peace," he said, starting to back out of my cell.
He was the first person to talk to me in days. I tried not to beg. I failed. "Wait, wait! Don't leave me alone." I launched myself toward him.
"That's better," he said, stepping back inside and shutting the door behind him.
"You said something changed," I said. "What? Why are you here?"
"You had a visitor."
Bob.
Mic tossed a small package at my feet. "He brought this for you."
I popped an eyebrow. "And you are playing courier out of the goodness of your heart?"
"No," Mic grumbled. "That chimera recognized immediately who I really was by my smell. But he didn't call me out. He made me swear to give this to you."
"Really? And why didn't you just keep it for yourself?"
Mic picked at his fingernails and mumbled out the side of his mouth. "It's enchanted so that only you can read it."
Ah, that made far more sense.
I bent down and retrieved the book, dusting off the cover. I'd seen it once before. In the Chimera Mountain. Blanc Pages. It was one of the few surviving e-books-enchanted books-that showed events that have happened. And sometimes events as they are happening.
After opening the book, I skipped the sections I'd already read, the parts where Blanc was the Lady of the Lake and lost Sir Lancelot to a nasty curse laid by Gwenevere. In revenge, Blanc declared war on the Storymakers, who were trying to rewrite her story-never mind erasing everyone else's in doing so. She was stopped and imprisoned for a long time-that is, until Dorthea and I let her out again.
I skimmed that whole part. I didn't need to be reminded of my stint working for team evil to save my own hide. Needless to say, when Blanc escaped, she took up her mission anew. And now she had Morte, the Grimm Reaper of the underworld, at her side.
I found the page I was looking for. The one just before the empty pages. This page grew in color, the story unfolding right in front of us.
A black chimera stood in the background, looking completely at home among a field of glowing embers. The ground held few traces of the village it used to be. Sooty slaves dug deep into the earth, making a pit while flames licked the wooded sign that read Nottingham's Museum of Magical History-Academy of Villains.
Blanc, the woman in white, stood out like a diamond in a pile of coal.
"Are you pleased, My Empress?" the chimera that stole Kato's form asked. Morte looked like a breathing shadow, a beast all black from wings to horns except for his glowing eyes and a silver snake that acted as a second tail.
"Pleased?" she sneered. "Why ever would I be pleased with this disgusting, dirty display?" She raised her hands to the skies. The heavens opened to greet her, pouring her element, water, all around her. The liquid snuffed out the remaining sparks of the fire, the air growing hazy with smoke and steam. She breathed out deeply. "That's better. Now you best explain why you robbed me of my army of villains. Not that they were a very capable army, but I gained strength from taking their life sources with my powers. Now I have no minions and nothing to snack on."
Morte's gaze flared, a spark through the smoke. "There will be time for that. For now, we must eliminate the only power that can stop us."
Blanc waved a hand dismissively. "It was already taken care of."
"It is that attitude that has kept you from grasping what is yours. Ours," Morte corrected.
"And how will your ashes solve anything?"
"Behold."
He raised his wings to the sky, mimicking Blanc's gesture. But instead of water pouring from the sky, the ground shifted. The ashes on the ground coalesced and liquefied into ink. Then like reverse rain, the ink rose into the sky.
Morte grinned, exposing some teeth. "With the last relics of magic kept here, I finally have enough power from the dark grail to send a few spies to the other world."
"Are you saying that your mindless spies will have more success than I had in besting that child princess?"
"No, I have gained other powers too. And my spies won't be going alone." Morte pulled back his muzzle, showing full fang in a menacing smile. With a whip of his claw, he cut the silver serpent tail from his body. It writhed on the ground, gasping for air. Growing, changing until the snake molted. It shed its old body like a skin, leaving a naked woman behind.
Blanc slowly crouched down, extending her hand toward the woman. "Is it truly?"
"Shh, ssssister," the snake-turned-woman hissed. "We are not alone."
Morte shifted his gaze away from his work, his eyes going dark, staring straight out of the pages. Staring straight at me. "Ahh. Little hero. Is that mask meant to make you fiercer? Or simply to hide your fear? I suppose I shall see you in person and rip it from your face soon enough. Then I can find out for myself." He nodded to Blanc, who wrung her hands in a complicated pattern. Water started flowing out of the pages of the book, blurring the picture like a watercolor that had soaked for too long.
"Don't let her in. Shut it now!" Mic cried, hands shaking as he reached out.
Yeah, he didn't need to tell me that. I'd slammed the book closed before he could finish his sentence.
Hurriedly, he took the book from me, whispering some words like a prayer before sitting on the book. "The grains of sand are just running out. Continue with your original plan. Remove Gwenevere from power and return Hydra. Hydra will help you go and get her."
He reached up, and with the touch of his bare hands, my mask fell off. He covered his own face with it, taking my place.
I should have run out of the cell without argument, but I had to ask. "Wait. Get who? Are you seriously that big of a coward that you're willing to swap me places and stay here in prison just so you don't have to face that snake, Griz?"
"No," he said, his voice muffled from the mask. "No, Griz is not the one you need to get. Don't you see? That portal goes somewhere. And Morte sent those abominations through it because she still lives. My Princess Dorthea is alive. And because of Excalibur and the grail, you are the only hope of bringing her back."