Here is the next chapter!
With one minute to spare, the Guest guessed correctly! Sparklygurl's answer—although it was a few minutes late—was slightly more detailed. This chapter was added as promised, but it isn't one of my bests. I will get the other chapter posted on Friday or Saturday—depending on when I get it finished.
Don't forget to vote on my poll! I've gotten votes, but I know there can be more. After all, this story has 377 followers. It would be pretty amazing if I could get at least 100 users to vote. Right now, 27 users have voted.
In past chapters, I had a couple people hold a certain object earlier than they were supposed to. One was never meant to, but now you will see why I did.
Enjoy.
Deep in the harrowing woods as dusk began to settle, the group approached the cottage like a precision security team.
"Whatever you do," Mal began quietly, but with a warning tone, "don't touch the scepter. If you do, you will fall under the same spell as Audrey."
"What about you?" Celia wondered from behind a nearby tree.
"I'll be fine," Mal promised as she smiled reassuringly. "When I first retrieved the scepter for my mother, I fell asleep for nearly an hour and experienced the pain and trauma she originally went through. Trust me when I say the scepter can't do anything to me now. It's just a broken stick that my mother used to help her walk. Once the magic is gone, it will be useless."
Careful to not make a sound, the engaged couple reached the flower-covered gate first, having each other's back in case anything should go wrong. Deciding that the coast was clear, they signaled the others. With a whoosh of adrenaline, the seven Isle children and the Auradon King charged through the front door, ready to take on the delusional villain.
However, Audrey was nowhere in sight.
The cottage, both upstairs and the ground floor, was void of the princess. Besides the eight of them, the house was empty, but that didn't stop Mal from looking around the place. After all, this was where her sister was raised as a child; where her mother watched Aurora grow up into a fine young lady.
Almost like she was drawn to it, Mal found herself standing in a smaller than average sized bedroom. There was a small crib forgotten in the corner while the bed took up a majority of the space, only leaving enough room to walk around it. Mal remembered the story of how her mother visited and tried to scare Aurora as a baby, but Aurora had only smiled at the woman, which caused the fairy to call her 'Beasty'.
Despite it being an ordinary bedroom, something felt off about it. Mal could sense powerful magic had been used in this very room, but that couldn't be right. Her mother never told of using magic in the cottage—with the exception of creating a small rainstorm to annoy the pixies—so why could Mal sense her mother's influence in there?
I revoke the curse. Let it be no more . . .
Standing on the side of the bed, Mal stilled as her mother's voice rang through her head. Gazing upon the furniture, she could barely make out the faint outline of a person—of a teenager girl—who looked remarkably like Sleeping Beauty.
I revoke the curse! Let it be no more!
Mal's eyes widened as a green grow appeared around the girl. If her friends walked in on her now, they would only see her staring at a vacant bed. They wouldn't believe that she was seeing, experiencing an event that her mother never told her before.
Let it be no more! demanded her mother's voice. Yet the green grow seeped back into the slumbering girl's skin, with the words 'no power on Earth can change it' echoing through the room. Finding it hard to breathe, Mal burst out of the room and ran out the front door of the cottage, leaving behind her confused friends.
Once out in the night air, Mal paced back and forth as she digested the new information. Her friends came running after her, unsure of what made her so jittery when she had been alone for barely a second—though it felt like hours to her.
"Mal," Ben chided as he carefully grabbed her shoulders to force her walking to end. "What's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"My mother," Mal began, shaking her head almost in denial as her fiancé let go of her. "She had Diaval search for Prince Philip so he could break the curse. Right now, I saw this illusion from years ago. She tried to remove the curse from Aurora months before she actually became victim of the curse. My mother tried to save her before it was too late!"
In that moment, there was a flash of lightning. Ben, Evie, Jay, Carlos, and Dude had all been turned to stone, Audrey's telltale fog swirling and billowing at their feet.
"No!" Mal cried, her voice trembling with despair at believing she was alone. "Why—?"
"Why are we not stone?"
Twirling around at the voice, Mal was momentarily relieved to see Uma and Harry staring at her, waiting for an explanation. Then realization hit her about the situation. "Because at some point during the day, we touched the ember," she determined confidently. "The brief contact we had with it was enough for it to protect us from at least one spell."
Uma was about to question how that was possible when she noticed a shiny object at her feet. Cautiously grabbing the object by its chain, she and the other two were surprised to see that it was her gold-shell necklace with the blue ember still inside.
As Uma tossed the ember to Mal for safe keeping, Harry wondered the obvious question, "If that is here, then where is Celia?"
"Help me!" cried a voice in the distance
"There's your answer," Mal retorted bitterly as she ran full-force toward the direction it came from with Uma and Harry somehow trailing behind her.
As soon as Mal arrived at the back side of Auradon Prep, a hair-raising lightning bolt ripped through the sky. She raised her eyes to see Audrey's silhouette atop the school's parapet. The evil princess laughed sinisterly as she pulled Celia to her chest, using the Voodoo girl as a human shield.
Mal's eyes flashed vibrant green as she clenched her jaw in aggravation. There was no way she could get up there in a timely manner. If only she had wings . . .
Wait a second! She didn't need wings!
Mal wasn't only the daughter of Maleficent. She was the daughter of Hades! Her father used to tell her stories of how he got around in the Underworld and on Olympus. He would—
Disappear in a cloud of smoke, just like she did when Uma and Harry finally caught up to her. A moment later, the couple saw her reappear on the building.
On top of the parapet, Celia had broken free from Audrey and was now cowering in the corner. Audrey didn't bother with her since her focus was now on the Queen of the Isle, surprised by how she magically appeared.
"Pathetic," Mal spat with a venomous glare. "All of the powers absorbed by the scepter, and the only thing you did was make people fall asleep, turned people to stone, choke me with iron, and turned my fiancé into a beast."
"You couldn't do any better!" Audrey insulted. "You were raised by two villains-!"
"No," Mal denied as she carefully took a step forward. "You are wrong. I was raised by two wonderful parents, who gave me nothing but love and compassion while you were raised by your grandparents, who taught you greed and selfishness. Like I told you before, you were raised to be a princess. I was raised to be a queen. And as a queen . . ."
Mal trailed off as she held out her hand expectantly. As though it had a mind of its own, the scepter flew out of Audrey's hand and into Mal's. In that hand was also the ember, which was began to sap away the magic of the scepter. Audrey watched with surprise and fascination as the powerful scepter morphed into a useless twig.
Breaking the stick over her knee, Mal tossed it over the edge of the building, retorting, "I don't need the scepter to prove how strong I am. With my father's ember, I can take its power away from you."
The blue laser of the ember locked on to Audrey, draining the sorceress of her remaining power. Audrey felt herself weakening under the ember's crippling glow. She crumpled unconscious to the ground, the queen's crown no longer on her head.
"Mal!" Celia shouted as she joyfully hugged the elder teenager tightly.
Mal put her arm around Celia protectively. "It's okay, Celia, I got you."
Looking over Celia's shoulder, Mal noticed Audrey's lifeless body. Rushing to her side, Mal held out the ember in hopes its magic would wake her. "Audrey? Audrey?"
Nothing happened. Then Mal remembered her father's warning. She was only half Hades. The ember couldn't do everything that Mal wanted it to do.
There was nothing she could do.
A short time later, everyone gathered in Audrey's dorm room as anguish and despair hovered in the atmosphere. To prevent herself from being burned by the furniture, Mal draped a blanket over the chair as she sat by Audrey's beside with Evie on the other side. Audrey laid motionless due to the drawback of the ember.
Evie rested her head depressingly against the back of her chair. "She's slowly slipping away," she commented sadly. "It's only a matter of time before she's gone for good."
"There's only one person who may be able to save her," Mal revealed with a soft sigh. "And that's my father."
"Will Hades want to though?" Ben wondered as he stubbornly crossed his arms over his chest. "Audrey nearly killed you with iron. He won't want to help her."
"He will for me," Mal reassured before she sighed once again. "It's just getting him to leave the Isle that will be the problem. After all, he promised my mother he would stay on the Isle for her, and I doubt he would want to leave her alone when she's so ill."
"I should go with your guards to get him," Uma suggested with a careless shrug. "I am his niece. Maybe my aunt and I can convince him to go. I can stay behind to watch Maleficent if that would ease his troubles."
"I can go to!" Celia volunteered, though she quickly dialed down her excitement. "Sorry . . . I love it here in Auradon, but I just miss my dad more."
"Well, you ladies can't go home alone," Harry insisted as he placed his hands on Uma's shoulder to show his loyalty. "Gil and I will go back with you. I'll miss my twins, but I can always see them when we get to come back."
Mal cleared her throat to rid herself of the lump in her throat. "About that . . ."
"My parents want to close the barrier for good," Ben informed before his beloved could do so. "Mal and I don't want that to happen. We've been trying to think of a solution, but with everything's that happened. We haven't had the time."
Although they had been delivered bad news, Uma shook her head in amusement. "I have the solution," she insisted with a mischievous smile. "And it was given to me by someone whose known about the solution for less than twenty years. You are the Queen of the Isle. You shouldn't have to forsake your kingdom because you are engaged to a king of another, so why not unify them?"