It was a month before her marriage to Aladdin when the ghoul came back for her. He had waited for an opportune moment, a day when Genie and Eden were away from Agrabah, to snatch her from the palace and take her to the underworld. Crowing in mad glee along the way, he declared that he would rule hell with her as his first consort.
The aura of death grew ever more oppressive as they passed through the many gates of the netherworld. Each time their surroundings grew darker, the memory of color fading further, the air growing ever more stifled and still, until the act of drawing breath seemed a violation of nature.
Time was not present in the depths of hell. Perhaps she had been gone less than an hour, or perhaps it had been years. She clung to the hope that Aladdin was not far behind, that he would surely intervene in time. There simply had to be an escape, she had to look for it, and whatever sickening ritual the ghoul had in store for her, this was not the worst she had lived through—
But it was, because when he commanded her to eat the fruit of the dead, she was alone in her fight to escape. When he forced half of it down her throat after she threw it back in his face, no one was there to stay his hand.
When she felt her body begin to fade, the breath in her lungs dissipating, vision unveiling to behold the full cacophony of grotesque spirits that surrounded them as spectators of the unholy ritual, she realized that death was no longer the end of torment, but the beginning.
The remaining half of the fruit was clutched in his bony palm. He ordered her to take it, to seal her fate as a permanent slave in hell. She stared back with the indifferent silence of the recently dead, drowned so quickly beneath shock and horror and grief that she felt nothing.
At that moment, the fruit and the hand that held it burst into flame. The brilliance of the fire was blinding, as if she were seeing the sun for the first time after living in a dungeon for years. The explosions that followed set the audience of the dead around her to wailing and scattered chaos.
She finally recognized the color of the flame as it consumed the ghoul's entire form and burned him to nothing. Cold, smokeless blue.
x.x.x
She did not remember the journey out of the netherworld. When her senses fully returned, she was sitting in a dark stone room without windows, lit by torches of the same eerie blue. She could breathe again, and her skin was no longer pale and flickering in a half-dead existence. She thirsted intensely for water.
A gloved hand offered her a drink. She looked up at him, the man who had brought her out of hell, still unable to speak. She feared the sound of her own voice.
"Ayam Aghoul is gone, permanently," said the sorcerer, a man who had always been her enemy. She wished, not for the first time, that she was dreaming, and that she would wake up before she had to reply.
"But you ate the fruit of the dead, and you are no longer fully alive," he continued matter-of-factly. She held the empty glass in both hands. "Half of you belongs to the underworld."
Her voice was cracked and thin, though the thirst was gone. "What…what does that…"
"It means that you must leave the living world for half of each year and remain in the land of the dead." He paused, gesturing to the stone enclave around them. "This room is one of several in my Citadel that sit on the border of the two worlds."
The questions she would inevitably ask refused to stay in order, proliferating beyond her imagination.
"My kingdom…I can't be…there has to be some…where is Aladdin?"
"Patience," was the cool reply. "Not even a jinni can pull a soul out of hell. Only I can. So we struck a deal."
"Where is he?"
"Waiting outside, demanding to see you. He won't believe me when I tell him you can't go above and he can't enter here. For you, it is physically impossible. For him, it would mean death. Only necromancers of my caliber can pass freely between."
She shut her eyes, waiting one last time to wake up. Slowly the futility of that hope settled in her veins; she could not tell if her heart still beat.
"Tell me what he agreed to."
A/N: For 2013 I've decided to post more often even if I'm not totally happy with the quality; I think that sometimes the lack of interaction with readers only deepens the inertia that I often find myself in.
I've had this story on the backburner for a long time since I wasn't sure exactly where it was going. I still don't have a very clear idea, but I'm open to suggestions.