Chapter 6
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Two Nights Previous
Soft footfalls, the light click of claws on wood. The hiss of hot breath escaping his nostrils. Occasionally, a metallic, musical, cling! as scales gently rubbed one another. After more than nine years, these were the sounds the Beast was accustomed to making as he moved through the oshiro. His oshiro. Sinuous as a snake, all four clawed paws moving in harmony, he glided over the nightingale floor, making his way towards his suite of rooms. The floor gave its customary cry as he moved over it, making him twist his scaly lips upward in a semblance of a smile. After all this time, the familiarity of the nightingale floor's song was still a comforting one. One of the few comforts left to him.
True, his servants still waited on him, though the grotesque onii forms that the yuurei had given them at the same time she had transformed their master into his dragon shape had been disconcerting at first. The Beast wanted for nothing. Except...something was missing. Something he could not even name, but it gnawed at his heart and sent him into fits of helpless rage and despondency that could last for weeks at a time.
Sliding open the wooden doors to his suite with his long muzzle, the Beast glanced about the darkened room. The silence that greeted him drew another thin, icy veil across him, making him shiver slightly in spite of himself. With a snort that exhumed a short blast of flame from his nostrils, the Beast proceeded into the room and lit a few lamps with his breath. The room had once been simply decorated with the finest of furniture, made to be comfortable and functional for a reclusive scholar prince, but the years and the Beast's destructive fury had left their mark. Only the sturdiest furniture remained intact, and all was deeply pitted with dragon claw-marks. Even the walls had not survived well; they were viscously clawed in some places and burned coal-black in others. The elegant wall screens had been torn down long ago and lay strewn about the room in costly shreds. The only thing left untouched was Nightingale, his katana sword, still hanging in its customary place the wall. It shone as if newly polished and sharpened, though it had been many years since it had known either polishing cloth or swordsmith. The vines etched into its metal skin were still dark. Only the single rose remaining near the haft looked dull and faded, marking the passing of his final year to escape from the yuurei's cruel curse.
Rearing up awkwardly on his hind legs, the Beast traced that rose with a claw. Not long now.
Suddenly, his sensitive ears picked up a sound, echoing through the still-open doors. A sound that didn't seem to belong to the dark, enchanted world of his oshiro. His fire-colored eyes narrowed, and he slid to the suite entrance, sharp claws making almost no sound.
Tilting his head to catch the slightest noise, the Beast listened intently for a minute or two without moving. Yes! A stranger's voice drifted in the corridors. After nine years, he knew the voice of each and every servant. This voice did not belong. Not at all. It was male, timid, and spoke with the oddest accent the Beast had ever heard. Certainly not Nipponese, but not Dutch, either, which he had heard occasionally at court when he was small.
Curious in spite of himself, the Beast inserted his claws into grooves he had put into the walls and ceiling over the years and began to climb. Climbing upside down from beam to beam on the ceiling was both his way of avoiding the nightingale floor and ensuring that he was only seen when he wanted to be seen. In this way he silently crept into the main portion of the oshiro, following the stranger's voice.
At last, he rounded a dark corner and found himself looking into a small room with a cheerful fire at its center. Kneeling next to it on a floor cushion was the stranger. The Beast's stomach gave a painful twist as he surveyed the man. A man of the West! Someone he would have longed to meet had he been in human form. But something was clearly wrong. This man's clothing was dirty and torn, and the ashen flesh that the Beast could see from his odd angle was mottled with dark bruises. He seemed quite old, his hair was mostly white, and he was short and plump with a prominent nose. That in particular fascinated the Beast. He had never seen a nose such as that before in his life.
He continued to watch undetected as a few of his servants bustled in with tea for the old stranger. That made any pity the Beast felt for the injured intruder melt away like ice held over a cookfire. His servants were supposed to serve only him. Clearly they had forgotten their duty and their oaths of absolute loyalty.
The Beast continued to watch, rage and jealousy smoldering like flame in his heart as his servants gathered around the old man. Though clearly he did not understand Nipponese very well, the fellow did his best to interact with them in a hodgepodge of stilted Nipponese phrases and muttering to himself in both Dutch and another language the Beast could not identify. He did not seem much bothered by the servants' strange, implike appearances. Perhaps he thought he was hallucinating. He would have more to hallucinate when the Beast was through with him.
The Beast announced his presence with a low, threatening growl that rolled around the room like thunder. The servants froze, their bulging yellow eyes darting around the room nervously.
The old man spoke in Dutch, which only the Beast understood: "What's going on? What is it?"
From an onlooker's perspective, the Beast abruptly appeared in the room as if by magic. In reality, he had simply dropped from his hiding place amid the ceiling beams, flipping in the air with practiced ease. The old man's eyes bulged as he surveyed the snarling monster that seemed to have come from nowhere.
"What are you doing here?" the Beast growled in Dutch, baring his gleaming mouthful of teeth. He hadn't practiced speaking the language in many years, and was glad he remembered enough to be able to get his meaning across.
The man's eyes started out even more. "You speak my language?"
"I do. Now, answer my question. What are you doing here?"
Trembling, the old man tried to stand and fell back with a gasp of pain. "I was taken into the forest by a group of men who wished to kill me. These…creatures," he indicated the cowering servants, "were kind enough to rescue me from my captors and lead me here. They said they could help me."
"These creatures are onii demons, and my servants. Which they seem to have forgotten," the Beast snarled, with a poisonous glare at the onii. They backed away even more, but did not dare bolt for fear of further angering their master.
"Gomen nasai," the old man whispered in heavily accented Nipponese. The Beast tried once again to place the accent and could not, which fueled his temper even more.
"You are trespassing in my domain. You deserve to be punished," he snarled, a few flames dripping from between his teeth like molten saliva.
The man threw himself facefirst to the floor. The desperate gesture was familiar to the Beast, but he was in no mood to consider the similarities between this scenario and the one involving the oshiro's previous unwelcome intruder. However, something in him softened, just a bit, at the pitiful sight.
So instead of ordering the onii to kill him, something they would have been obliged to do even against their wills, or simply dispatching the man himself, he bent and snagged the man's shredded clothing in his teeth and hauled him roughly to his feet.
"Start walking."
The old man did so, hobbling painfully away from the fire and into the corridor. "Please, sir," he begged in Dutch, "I meant no harm. I only needed a place to stay until I recovered enough to return to Nagasaki."
"And so I shall give you a place to stay!" the Beast snarled irritably, annoyed more at his own weakness at letting the man live than at the man himself. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw some of the servants begin cleaning up the spilled tea and broken china caused by his sudden appearance. The rest watched him shove the old man roughly down the corridor towards the oshiro's unused dungeons with reproachful gleams in their large yellow eyes.
Author's note: We finally get to see how Maurice escaped and ended up at the oshiro! Yay for cliffhangers! Gomen nasai and much groveling to TrudiRose, from whose thought-provoking story "Second Chance" I borrowed the idea that Maurice's intrusion would remind the Beast of the Enchantress's (in my version yuurei's) original visit. I simply made it the reason the coldhearted dragon-prince didn't kill Maurice on sight, because my Beast would have done so without a second thought. And yes! He breathes fire, though not much and not far.
