The stars were smattered and scattered like freckles against the dusky sky.
The carriage bounced up and down and the king's jowls bounced too. He had been a jolly man once, but sagged a little now.
They were in a stupendous hurry, but going nowhere fast - blame bad roads and wooden wheels- and the princess had no idea why any of it was happening.
"Basically," the King said as the carriage crawled, "It's been foretold that you're going to die a gruesome death unless I do something about it."
That didn't clarify much.
"Who's foretold it? And what- what are you going to do about it?"
His cheeks flushed red. "See, according to the prophecy, I was meant to lock you away in the tallest tower a few years back, but I felt, you know, that it was a little harsh. I mean, you weren't set to die until you came of age, and that's not 'til next month, so I thought you were safe enough."
She agreed.
"So," he continued, "we're just going to start now and hope for the best."
"But Father, if it's just to be me up there, and that dragon that you're trying to hire, won't I starve?"
The King nodded and his jowls bounced.
"True my dear, very true. I'll assign you a chef. And a cleaner I suppose - a princess shouldn't be on her knees- and better get a gardener too, wouldn't want any dangerously sharp roses around, and oh wouldn't a butler do the trick for all this? You just simply can't get a good one on such short notice though. Oh well. The three of them will have to do."
The princess smiled sweetly.
"That'd be lovely dad. And how's the dragon search getting on anyway?"
The King lowered his voice. "Darling, it's awful to admit, but even I can barely get a hold of one these days. They're an endangered species, we've got to import them from China - transporting them is simply a nightmare, dead sailors and burnt out ships - they keep killing the locals, and the animal rights groups are demanding that they only work in safe conditions."
"Safe conditions?"
"Yeah so I know you'll be disappointed love, but your tower isn't going to be awful tall after all. Hazardous really. The original design could have toppled at the slightest puff."
"So what- how?"
"The one we're getting you instead was a wizard's once so it's nice and secure. He killed himself a few years back and they sold it to us half price because of the blood stains. Impossible to get out of the carpet seemingly. Now don't you go round babbling, we're still calling it an impenetrable tower of course, or the prophecy crowd will go mental."
She wondered who she was meant to 'babble' to, if she were to be locked in solitude for the next decade or so.
The carriage drew to a halt. The King pecked her cheek, his coarse stubble reeking of alcohol.
"Right so, I'm off. Best of luck."
She stepped out of the carriage, speechless, and watched it pull away. She hadn't even a bag packed.
Neither the dragon nor the cook, cleaner and gardener ever made an appearance, but she had expected that. Her father was not very good at keeping promises.
Her first few days were difficult. The bloodstains that decorated the highest room unnerved her, so she stayed clear of there.
The kitchen was bare, cupboards empty except for foul-smelling concoctions left to stew at the bottom of pots. They were undoubtedly very precious potions. She threw them all out.
She had never cooked for herself before, nevermind with no ingredients to speak of. Eventually she figured out that under all the thistles and weeds in the garden, there were vegetables planted, perhaps as a house-warming gift from the previous owners. She ate cold potatoes and raw carrots for the first fortnight, and went to bed dreaming of meat.
She left the tower often. There was no one to stop her. It was like she had been forgotten; a name uttered into the wind, lost.
There was a forest not far from there where she would sit, her back against a tree, and she would sing. She always had a curious affinity for attracting animals, and they followed her voice.
Squirrels would come right up to her, and she'd coax them onto her lap, and then snap their necks in one quick motion. That took practice, admittedly. It was a slow way to hunt, but she didn't know how make a bow and arrow, or even how to shoot one if she did, and so she sang the animals to their deaths.
Once she got better at the cooking side of things and her hunger abated, she became restless. She did mindless tasks to tire herself out; cleaned the kitchen, scrubbed the floor, wept. She spent two whole days washing the bloodstains out of the walls and carpet. The water would run red and she would have to bring a new one up the staircase from the well, panting.
The stains receded eventually: her boredom not so much.
It began as everything begins- slowly, so slowly you do not notice.
She began reading the old spell-books that dotted the highest room. Most were leather-bound and musty, and reeked faintly of piss.
Some of the books were not written in a language she recognised, and she abandoned those in the beginning, but soon found out she could understand them.
They were not made of words but of sounds, of colours and emotions. The scrawls should have meant nothing to her, yet when she read them she felt fleeting joy or monumental sadness, feelings that drifted away like mist as soon as she closed the book.
She understood vaguely that what she was she doing was not allowed, but she did not see the harm in it. If the books encouraged the reader to summon flame in their hands, and she found herself practicing, so be it. There was no shame in trying to relieve boredom.
The months turned to years. She no longer needed to sing for the squirrels. They came to her now when she asked, unwilling and trying to stop themselves, yet they still came.
She could summon flame now; green or blue, red and purple, or even black. The fires shimmered and glimmered in her eyes when she did not need them, a burning kaleidoscope of colours.
She could make invisible flame too, flame that could not be seen or felt yet burned the victim from within. Many squirrels died this way until she got it just right. She was never left hungry for meat anymore.
She was incredibly lonely still, and hating herself for it, until one day she tried setting her shadow on fire. It flailed and screamed with a sudden mind of its own, and then fell silent. A while later, it began moving again: it picked itself up off the floor and came to sit beside her.
Her shadow could not speak very well, but she understood it, and it understood her. It had emotions, duller than hers, and it was unable to express them, yet they were there, dimmed.
Her shadow was loyal. At night it wrapped itself around her, the blue and purple and black smoke caressing her softly. It dreamed too, and she could hear glimpses of its dreams if she listened closely and lay her head over where its heart should be. It dreamed of war and blood and darkness, and its dreams were the lullabies she fell asleep to, until she too dreamed of death.
When her shadow held her, it seemed to take away all of her emotions, absorb them as its own. She did not want her loneliness or her anger: let it have them.
and if she ever thought that it was feeding on them, she cast the thought aside again. It was only helping her, relieving her, nothing more.
Time seemed fluid to her now. Months could pass yet be stagnant like pond water, and then one afternoon could be like torrential rain, disrupting all.
The books called to her when she was not with them, a thousand voices inside her head, older than time yet impossibly young.
Her shadow grew wild and had an insatiable thirst for blood. It would pass through the forest and kill everything that it touched, and it burned with rage that it had stolen from her. She was empty and barren now. She felt nothing.
She understood now why the wizard had killed himself. No man could endure this.
But she was no man.
A long time later, an old broken King came to her in a carriage she thought she knew from a distant dream.
"Oh darling, you can come home now-" the man said, unperturbed by her hair, which was burnt away, or her eyes, which glittered like a thousand diamonds, or even her shadow, which had its arms around her and chewed softly on her shoulder.
She looked at the man, and apathy took her. Her shadow eagerly left her side and began to devour him, the smoke turning sharp as blades, slashing.
She found she didn't care.
She woke later, as if from a dream, and saw that the carriage was overturned, the horses with their innards wrapped around their throats.
Her father was nearly unrecognisable, his face chewed away, and blood splattered the inside walls of the carriage in a way that seemed familiar.
Her shadow was gone. She did not know how long had passed.
She began to walk.
Everywhere she passed, she meet the corpses of dead men and women, ones she thought she knew once. Some were burned alive, some had throats cut. Sometimes their faces were mangled beyond recognition.
She thought she knew who they were. They were everyone who had let her go to the tower, they were the people who had not protested, the ones who had not cared.
Now she did not care. She just kept on walking.
She found her shadow, in the corner of her old bedroom in the palace. It was gnawing on a bone and murmured to itself happily.
They were the last things alive in the kingdom, if you could even call the shadow living.
She could not blame it. It was only a reflection of herself, only a darker image. She went to the corner and it gurgled softly as it wrapped around her, and began to feed. She understood now that that was what it was doing, yet she had nothing left to give. She was dry on the inside.
She held in her hand a long blade that she had taken from the hand of some dead man. The shadow was blind, and knew nothing. It trusted her. It was loyal.
She drove the blade deep into her own chest until it protruded from her back and impaled the shadow too, so that they both lay dying in one another's arms.
The walls were again covered in blood, and her shadow made a raw, pitiful sound as it died, a guttural cry. It flickered as it died, and then lay still, a real shadow once more. She followed soon after, her own blood on her lips, the last living thing in the kingdom, dead.