Thank you for the reviews! Tell me your thoughts on this chapter, please.
-Rei
Dedicated to all who read and review but most especially: The Writer you Fools, Alena-chan, Cherry Jade and my dear castle in the air
Glass
Chapter Five: Mischief
She felt the edges of sleep crawl off of her like waves parting and her first thought was that she did not remember falling asleep.
"You look dead when you sleep."
She jumped, getting further tangled in the sheets and stared at the young man standing nonchalantly across from her, leaning on the elegant mahogany wardrobe-chest.
"You...you are...who are you?" Her words stumbled, or she stumbled over her words—she wasn't certain which—and she added with new fire when he did not answer her, "Well, whoever you are, you're very rude!"
"The truth is not always pretty," the young man said, not intending the double meaning that carried through.
"I already know I do not suit my nickname," Raven said coldly, trying to hide the sting that last comment had inflicted, much as she hated to admit it.
"I never said that, lady," he sighed like someone who was tired of trying to explain that red was red because it was red and for no other simpler or more intricate reason than that.
"What is it with the creatures here?" She balled her fists in the sheets, irritated. "Either I am a child to you who cannot know anything useful and must settle for half-heard conversations on the verge of a dreamless sleep or I am a lady who is no more enabled to understand but distanced with terribly pretend politeness!" Her words ended in a rushed and very vexed escalation.
But all the man said, the disinterested look on his face never leaving, was, "Creatures?"
She groaned and threw one pillow at him before pulling the covers over her head. At least there were no chores for her to do here. Then again maybe it'd be better if there were. She feared she might go mad with only this increasingly obnoxious new guest to keep her 'entertained'. Speedy—Roy, she amended shortly—seemed to have disappeared entirely.
Not surprising, her mind chuckled and she drew the blankets over her tighter.
The day was too harsh with these magical curiosities.
"Oh stop," the man said and now she recognized it as the voice of the man Roy had called 'X' the other night. It helped that she had her eyes covered as it simulated her first encounter with his existence, triggering her memory. "At least get up and have breakfast. Mr. Fast and not so furious will probably throw a great fit if I don't get you out of bed soon," X intoned unhappily, as one resigned to his duty.
"No," she replied, her voice muffled by the cloth. X scowled and pulled the covers off of her roughly.
"Just come and eat; it's right over here," he gestured to the small table set for her and she sniffed, almost involuntarily. Herbal tea.
She wondered how they knew and then stopped wondering as she padded wordlessly over to the little stand, white table-cloth making it a pristine picture against the reddish brown wood and dark blue cloths of the room.
"Do you...want anything?" she asked uncertainly and X shook his head.
"I have no need of such things. You could call it the perks of an otherwise damnable plight," he said and here offered a crooked smile.
"Why does he hold you here?" she asked, assuming.
"He doesn't. The castle though..." he trailed off, eyes falling to the small butter knife at the side of her plate of white toast.
"It is a magic castle then?" she probed further.
"Of course," X said a little testily and she laughed.
"Where's Roy?" she inquired now and sipped at her tea, eyeing her new acquaintance with more than a little amusement as he shifted restlessly in place.
"Out," X said and she glared.
"You are not nearly so helpful nor...cheerful as your fleet of foot friend," she commented.
"You do not seem the type to care much about cheer," X retorted pointedly and Raven seemed to think on his statement.
"Fair enough," she admitted finally, tired of arguing with the ceaselessly unbothered character before her.
"I think it only fair to warn you. There are places you should not go here," X began.
"He promised me safety," she interrupted. X scowled.
"Promises are not ever without loopholes, lady. You'd do well to remember that. Now if you're going to interrupt me every time I try to actually be helpful, I think I'll just leave and ignore all of Roy's resulting tantrums," he said, impatient and irritated.
"Fine," she said shortly and he snorted at her less than amiable response, but continued.
"These places are as follows: the roses you found first, stay away from them. They got you caught here and that is not the least of their dangers. Second, the keeper's corridor off to the northeast area of the castle, that too you should avoid. That is where he goes when..." X trailed off. "When he is less pleasant," he decided upon and left it at that. Raven stared at him. Was she really just supposed to nod and behave like a five year-old?
Well now, her mind chided, you did no such thing when you were five...or any other age.
She smiled.
So maybe she'd never been the most obedient child...she couldn't help herself really, sometimes.
"Alright," she said though and X didn't miss the wavering tone, but disregarded it. If she was to disobey, she was to disobey and secretly, X thought maybe some rebellious tones in the household would offset the stagnant state of things.
Almost, he wanted her to go.
Then maybe...
A clang stopped his train of thought and he snapped back to find Raven picking up the small knife she'd accidentally knocked off the table.
"Sorry," she half-smiled. X exhaled loudly.
"I don't care."
"No, I don't suspect you do," Raven said peaceably and X found, her agreeable nature got under his skin more than her contrarian one—if possible.
"I'm leaving now," he announced without grandeur or importance, just as a notation.
She waved.
He scowled and exited the room.
"That was a bit easier than I'd expected," Raven said to the now empty room and the curtains around her bed lifted a little with an inexplicable breeze as if in reply. "He can't stand a cheery disposition. That much is obvious," she explained to no one in particular and pushed her chair away from her breakfast table, standing and stretching.
Dubiously she gave herself a once over—or as much of a once over as one could manage without a mirror—and approached the wooden dresser. She did not remember putting her only other change of clothes away but upon not finding them anywhere in the room, she imagined they might have been put away for her. It would not have been surprising, in any case.
What was surprising was the extravagant array of clothing she did find in the dressing chest's main compartments.
Gowns heavily embroidered with pearls and jewels, some brocade, others silk that looked almost like gossamer, rich velvet all edged in filigreed golds and silvers, and in the bottom drawers shoes that seemed to match.
But none were things Raven wished to wear and she frowned at this.
"Well it's all good and fine if it's a Duchess or a Princess or an Empress that you're planning on decking out here, but it's just me," she told the dresser in a very, very no-nonsense voice and shut the doors emphatically.
She waited. Now, if her theory played out, the whole of the castle was enchanted, so maybe even its furnishings...
The wardrobe began to shake, almost like it was going to dissimilate...a seizure-like motion, but stopped shortly and holding her breath, Raven opened it again.
"That's better," she grinned and picked out her clothes for the day.
It was a couple hours later when she emerged from her room. Upon leaving she cast the nametag—still reading 'Beauty'—an annoyed look as though to say: change, you.
But that was one wish this magic castle seemed disinclined to grant, so she sighed and walked down the very long, very grand corridor. It was the first time she had actually walked the hall in the hours of daylight and now the sun filtered prettily through the ceiling-high, arched windows, all crossed with ebony panes. The carpet beneath her knee-high boots was a soft blue velvet and cushioned her footfalls, making her presence almost perfectly silent, but for her breathing.
Knee-high boots...Raven's face broke into the kind of grin one makes to one's self when one is particularly amused with an inside joke, and she chuckled a little. In addition to the unorthodox footwear—well, unorthodox for a girl anyway—she had on black breeches and a long billowing shirt the color of indigo. She wore no sash or belt but felt it was hardly necessary to have all the proper outfitting of a man; she wasn't one after all. She just thought their clothes were a great deal more sensible.
This sentiment was not new. Raven had probably felt this way since the moment she could easily identify the evident differences between cumbersome skirts and motion-friendly pants or the like—since age six or so. Her sisters had been able to dissuade her from it all her life though, insistent as they were—Raven was insistent as well of course, but there were two of them and one of her, so in the end they always won out and Raven always ended up with a death glare plastered firmly on her face, skirts pooling at her ankles.
But now she didn't have them here to tell her no or why not—Raven's eyes softened at the remembrance of what she no longer had and she steeled her heart against what she saw as weakness—and so she wore the clothes the magic dresser provided her, according, it seemed, to her very whim.
The only remotely feminine thing she wore now was a single piece of jewelry and now Raven had lost any real sense of where she was and it seemed to her this corridor might go on forever if she didn't ask it for a specific place but she became distracted when the sun hit the glass-like rose on her right ring finger and so she continued walking to nowhere in particular as her thoughts lapsed for the hundred-millionth time on something she did not understand.
Absently, she twisted the ring, but did not take it off.
She hadn't removed it even once since it had mysteriously appeared there, somehow knowing that to do so would probably be cause for some very bad things to happen and she wasn't in the mood for any more of that quite yet. So the ring stayed, glimmering in the light as it refracted and caught in the crystalline facets, seeming far warmer than its brother and sister roses she had encountered in the wood.
"I think I'm growing attached to you," she remarked to the rose and it winked back at her, but that was just the light probably, moving as she walked.
Just the light.
Raven stopped walking and glanced at the ever-continuing hallway.
"This is ridiculous. I don't even know where I could go, much less where I want to go!"
"I believe you enjoy reading," a familiar voice intoned and she jumped an impressive height, startled.
"Ye Gods and little fishes!" she exclaimed, heart dropping into her stomach and returning all in the space of a few seconds. She suspected him of holding back a smirk and exhaled sharply. "Don't do that!" she all but scolded the approaching Robin.
"I apologize," he said, tone never changing.
"Yes, well..." she petered off.
"Books, I asked if you liked them," he reminded her, moving an arm that made his cape—the same one from yesterday, the same rose red—flicker out a bit. She nodded. "I have a library if you wish to see it?" he inquired and she looked behind her. What for, she wasn't certain, but it helped to get a break from Robin and his incessantly intense scrutiny. She wondered wryly if he practiced making people uncomfortable with his gaze.
"Yes, please," she said finally and he opened a door to their left that Raven had not even noticed before his arrival.
Raven thought she knew what "a lot of books" was.
Upon entering his "library" she decided she probably hadn't before, but now most definitely did.
Stacks, piles, shelves...it wasn't the most organized of rooms, not in the least the elegant paragon of alphabetized perfection she had expected, but there could be no doubting one thing: this was what "a lot of books" was.
"I don't believe it," she breathed. Robin arched a brow.
"In light of everything, it is my archives that hold you most astounded?" he asked.
"I am enchanted," she flashed him a grin that he couldn't help but return.
"So it would seem," he replied and made a motion to show she had freedom in this room of literary wonders.
"Do you have any favorites?" he inquired as she ran her fingers across the spines of many books, some worn, some seemingly very new, some somewhere in between.
"Fantasy," she answered and he nodded.
"I thought so," he said and she groaned.
"Don't think so much," she advised lightly, but in all seriousness, and he lost sight of her as she ducked down a veritable alleyway of piles of higher stacked books.
"You would rather I idled away then, Beauty?" he called out, occasionally hearing her rustle pages as she paused to thumb through one tome or another. He heard her snort.
"Tcha, maybe..."
Robin smiled. She was certainly different.
"What have you found there?" he inquired after the sound of her shuffling her feet leisurely through the mountains of books stopped.
"I am not sure," she replied, and, intrigued, the blue eyed man sought her out. She was perched on a smaller stack of bindings, a book open on her lap and she held in her forefinger and thumb a loose paper.
"What is it?" he asked again.
"I told you I'm not sure. It looks...like a spell..." she trailed off, feeling silly. "Or maybe a riddle," she amended, understanding this much better. "Can you tell? It is...it is not Mischief is it?"
To her surprise, he laughed.
"No, Beauty," he said. "Let me tell you there is a very distinct difference between Magic and Mischief. Mischief...it's like an animal, a beast if you will," he explained more casually than Raven had ever heard him. He settled down on another pile, perching across the way from her.
"How do you mean?" she asked, feeling uncomfortably unknowledgeable.
"Mischief will run rampant on its own, comes of...curses," and here his voice regained its usual tone of constant despondency. "Magic can be controlled, used to even do things like heal. It may have mischievous streaks, but Magic is for most essential purposes, a useful thing, and...though it has a life of its own too, it is far more human than the Mischief that has no discriminatory sense."
It was all a bit much for her to take in.
But she tried.
"Here, listen," she said at last, weary almost from trying to wrap her mind around all he'd just explained and she dusted the page off delicately so as not to tear it before reading the words in her clear, eloquent tones, voice reverberating oddly in the gargantuan library's core.
"From the ground it came alive
Into the manor's way
A deceptive spell
An earthbound Hell
A rose in blood-red bloom
---
Soon over the stones it slowly left
In every crack and crevice
A soulless sadness
And a mirthless madness
Acrimony with tiny black thorns
---
And so the mischief, shadowlike
Coursed through the forgotten wood
Making eternal winter
For the eternal sinner
The eternal reminder of a wrong
---
But even eternity settled imperfectly here
It was undeniably a double-edged curse
And so if a maker could make it
Reason said maybe a breaker could break it
As an end to man's endless fall."
A wind whipped through, sending books scattering and pages flipping like mad, and Raven had to cover her eyes, so strong as it got. Strange chiming noises blared from the ground and the sky and the sides of the rooms and she swore the walls were screaming as creatures in great pain. Robin shouted something as the wind began to darken.
To blacken...like ebony.
"What?" she yelled, anxiously trying to find him, blind with the wind. He called again, still indistinguishable from the roaring calamity engulfing them both. Books were literally zinging from place to place with no sense of order and Raven ducked to avoid such flying missiles but one struck her near her temple.
She stumbled.
It hadn't been a very large book, but it still hurt and she groaned, rubbing her head slightly before tuning her senses to concentrate on Robin.
He had said she needed only to think of him to bring him to her...or vice versa...perhaps it would work now.
But the wind seemed to be keeping them from each other and now it was as a black, dense fog with knives slashing through it in hot white stings, mercilessly grating at everything and with a falling feeling, Raven could faintly hear some of the books' pages being torn.
"How do we make it stop?" she cried out, loud as she could.
By some miracle...or Magic, she heard him respond, though only barely:
"If it's a spell, there should be in that book, a ward or a counter-spell or something to keep it down for a while! Look for it!" he shouted, and she could feel his strain as she realized the only reason she could hear him was also because she could see him.
And he appeared to...to be pulling the black wind and mist apart...with his hands.
"My God," she gasped.
"Find it!" he demanded, voice constrained with tension. She hurried.
Where was it? It seemed to her the wind had knocked it all out of her grasp and in the sight-inhibiting storm all around it took her almost too long to find it but a small gold-brown corner peeked out from a newly messed pile and she snatched it up triumphantly.
"What should it look like?" she yelled, frantically thumbing through the pages with a care not to rip them.
"I don't know!" he shouted back and she rolled her eyes.
Great, she intoned mentally but kept looking.
Her eyes caught.
There was a tear where the riddle might have gone...and on the adjoining page were some words she'd never seen before.
"Robin!"
"What?" he forced out. She thought she could see him trembling as she felt the ground shake beneath her. The winds were getting angrier, stronger, louder….it felt like swords were whipping at all of her and she knew it must be worse for him.
"I think this might be it, but I...I do not know the words!" she cried, exasperated and frightened now in light of the pain etching itself into her captor's face. His flesh had paled to near deathly white—more ashen than she remembered her own skin being—and his eyes so blue and sky-like were glassy like someone on verge of death or oblivion.
I am frightened? Part of her marveled. Never before...
But for some reason the idea of this man, this stranger, slipping away to the Underworld did not sit right with her...made her heart lurch...
Made her cold.
But in the alarm of the whole situation, she quickly chalked it up to a humanitarian streak.
"Say them anyway!" He sounded like he was choking. His hands all furled up in the raging gale around them visibly shaking and taut with effort.
He is trying to protect me, she realized with both a rush of gratitude and perplexity.
"I..." she faltered.
"Raven!" he shouted, as his hands slipped and the wind seemed to barrel completely down on both of them.
It felt like she was being suffocated, like a vice had gripped her and was shattering her spine and crushing her lungs and compressing her mind. Something slashed her right arm and that same cutting sensation ripped across part of her collarbone area and a shoulder, the back of her neck...
Raven was vaguely aware of two things other than that: 1) Robin had called her Raven without her ever telling him her real name; and 2) when the razor-like force scratched across her nape, she felt the weight of her long hair...her hair that some people said was like her mother's...disappear.
And then she couldn't think about it anymore because it felt like something had just punched her in the stomach, causing her to collapse to her knees.
But it was for the better. The book she'd dropped again, the one with the theoretical anti-curse or whatever the Hell it was for the chaos around them that threatened death with every savage howl it unleashed upon the two separated birds...it was there.
The vice feeling tightened and Raven thought her chest might burst with the compression, thought she might pass out...
"Azarath, metrion, zinthos." She felt the words tumble out of her mouth more than she heard herself say them, but it wasn't as foreign as she'd thought.
In fact, they came out oddly...comfortably. The winds seemed to recede...a bit.
"Azarath, metrion, zinthos," she repeated, more firmly, fingers clutching the edges of the book to keep her consciousness straight long enough to keep focusing on the words.
The darkness seemed to dim a bit...she could make out the slumped form of a caped figure a way's away from her...
Robin.
A screeching howl brought her back and, mustering all that was left of her strength, Raven summoned her most powerful emotion so far here: anger...rage.
Rage of her own to match the rage of the unnatural storm around her and her Robin.
Her Robin?
Raven's mind blurred.
She managed to stand, storm still all about her, book in hands.
"You do not belong here!" she cried out, doing her best to sound as if she knew what she spoke of. "You are not welcome!" she yelled, and she felt a strange fiery sensation behind her eyes...almost it burned, but it was not unpleasant and it distracted her from the gashes being inflicted on her now by invisible blades of air, rending her clothes, making red marks on her skin.
Faintly, she recognized the sensation at last: it was like many pieces of...no, shards of glass digging into her...tiny, tiny fragments of crystal-clear glass...thorns...
"Ah!" she cried out as one 'thorn' scraped the center of her forehead. She lifted a hand gingerly to touch it and brought it back to find, as expected, a small patch of blood on her fingers.
The winds seemed to scream back at her and Raven inhaled shakily.
Maybe if she said the words again...
"Azarath..." The winds beat as wildly as war drums gone awry.
"...metrion..." The black tendrils of the insane war of supernatural cause grabbed hold of her wrists making her drop the book, and one wrapped around her throat.
But she remembered the last word almost as if she'd known it before she even read them there. She didn't need the fallen tome. And Raven, not knowing why, but knowing she had to, shouted with extra power, with extra everything that was alien and bubbling in her anger now: "ZINTHOS!"
The winds and darkness all merged and she felt herself hit the ground, noting vaguely how nice and cool the motionlessness of the marble tiling felt, how calm it was...how quiet.
But nothing after that.
Review please. I'm not sure if people are losing interest or not, haha, but some of you seem to still like it and for that I am very glad. Thank you so much.
-Rei