Chapter Nine: Actions and their Consequences

The sun shone stronger than it had ever done before and it still had yet to ascend to its highest position in the sky. It shone on a lake by a waterfall, evaporating the mist as it rose and making the water glint like silver. It shone on the rocks, baking them harder still. It shone on the the tousled head of a man in the prime of his youth as he sat, his knees hugged tight to his chest and his hair drying slowly, by the body of a maiden, her matted hair becoming golden and curled once more around her painfully white face.

Chip sat exhausted, his throat hoarse from the frantic efforts of breathing for two. His hands felt dry and useless. His eyes never left Raisse's closed eyelids, in case he missed the slightest flicker of movement from within them, but he was no fool. He knew of life and death, of mankind's inevitable mortality. He knew that his efforts had been wasted. He knew she was dead.

Raisse.

His Raisse.

Gone…forever.

As he watched, his vision began to blur. He had never cried, not since his childhood. Not even when the dreams turned into nightmares, or when he doubted his sanity for the first time. He hated tears. They represented finality, an end. Once there was nothing else to do, once every breath and bead of sweat had been used to no avail, once everything was over, one cried. It was a release for many, an expression of sadness, a longing to take away the pain. The start of the long process of picking up the pieces and accepting that there was nothing else that could have been done in the circumstances. You had tried your hardest.

It wasn't good enough. Chip hated crying and he refused to cry now. He forced the stinging tears away for they were of no use to him. Tears meant accepting and giving up, and Chip never gave up. It was not over yet.

Later in the day, Chip would swear that he was not in control, not fully. He would swear he was being guided by something within. He had been oblivious to what was about to happen, to what he was about to do, but it had felt so right, so natural.

Whatever guided Chip filled the emptiness that grief had started to form inside him. It sprung from every palpable emotion—anger, sadness, love, hate—and it grew from the void. Like a spectator in his own body, Chip knelt over Raisse so he was astride her. Suddenly, he felt giddy and sick. He felt his mind begin to thud so hard that his eyes shed the few tears he'd kept back. He gasped and swallowed as something took him over. Something beautiful and radiant and bloodcurdling and powerful that was nothing and everything all at once. It possessed every blood cell, every nerve, every vessel of his body, and it made him cry out as its intensity grew…and grew…and grew until he could hold it within him no more. His hands shot out from where they'd been clenched into red fists at the side of his body and instantly attached themselves to Raisse's skin like magnets. They started to throb and glow and Chip fought to stop himself from howling from the exquisite pain. Instead, he bit his tongue until it bled as his hands shook, unable to let go of the skin that seemed to be getting hotter beneath them. It was unbearable yet sublime, like the sweetest ecstasy mixed with the deadliest agony. It flowed from Chip to Raisse, just as Chip was on the threshold of unconsciousness himself.

He watched, adrift and detached from his senses, as she glowed with a white blinding light that enveloped everything around them. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, it started to shrink and then vanished somewhere above Raisse's chest.

Just as Chip regained some sort of normal vision and hearing, he was thrown off of Raisse, hitting the side of his head on the ground, as she rolled over and vomited a stream of water onto the grass. It poured from her delicate throat and lungs, giving her the appearance of a living gargoyle on a fountain, for at least half a minute, giving Chip time to groggily sit back up and try to comprehend the scene in front of his eyes.

She was…alive?

This was confirmed as the vomiting ceased and Raisse coughed and spluttered, gulping for air, and then lay on her side, doubled over and breathing raggedly, tears of bewilderment and effort sliding down her cheeks. Pure joy filled Chip like sunshine. Somehow, he crawled to her side.

"Raisse?" he said in a choked whisper. "Raisse?"

Her eyes flickered open. It seemed to Chip they'd been closed so long he'd forgotten how beautiful they were.

"Raisse? Oh my god, Raisse!" he managed as he reached out a shaking hand to touch her face.

Suddenly, she screamed. It was a scream of pure terror and anguish, and it cut through Chip's skin like a knife. Before he knew what was happening, she was up and running in a way he'd never thought possible, her torn dress streaming behind her in tatters. Instinctively, he scrambled to his fee, running a couple of metres before collapsing face-first into the grass. He could move no more. Every muscle he had was numb with something like exhaustion but deeper and more consuming. He had no choice but to let it wash over him, and then everything went black.

……………………………………………………………………………………

The force that had pushed the princess into the water had had no intention of killing her. She meant nothing to it, nothing more than a pawn, a device to get what it wanted and help it reach the state of affairs it had longed for for almost a quarter of a century.

It knew how overwhelming it could be, how terrifying, especially in its ocular form. The girl's face had been wonderful to see. It never tired of that particular expression. It had never experienced pleasure in its most basic sense, only delight in its own cruelty, but that look got it somewhere near it.

The boy had been harder than it thought, but this did not alarm it. It relished the occasional challenge. It happened on so few occasions these days. The mortals were becoming too easy to control. Promises of meaningless things—treasure, love, revenge—ensnared them in its traps so quickly it was disappointing. At least the boy had fought briefly before it overruled him. The boy was special, like no other alive—it was sure of that already, and the restoration of the girl merely proved it. Purely enchanting to observe, if a little sloppy. The boy needed to work on his control but that was easily mastered through practice, and the boy would soon have plenty of time and opportunities for that to occur.

Yes, it grinned to itself, there is certainly potential there.

It slunk through the shadows into the nearest clump of trees where its latest minion was waiting, and grimaced. Lefou lay on the grass, snoring in the sunlight.

"Lefou!" it hissed, not loudly for it never dealt with noise, but softly and inside the man's head. He jerked upright, like a puppet on a string, wincing as a cramp shot through his leg. He was not slim enough nor young enough to be moving so quickly.

"Yes, master?"

"It is time for you to prove your worth to me and take the first step towards the vengeance that you crave. Go to the castle and do as I told you, and do not let me catch you so un-alert again, or there will be consequences for both of us."

Lefou's ears pricked up at the word 'vengeance'.

Finally! he thought.

"Yes, master. Your will is my will," he said, and he trotted through the trees on his stumpy legs.

……………………………………………………………………………………

Chip awoke to the sounds of shouts coming from nearby. He felt as if he'd been sleeping forever, but a bleary glance skywards told him it was early afternoon. It had been but an hour, two at the most, since he'd sunk under. A strange heaviness still hung in all his limbs as if he'd subjected his body to extreme exercise, yet it was not sore, more like a dull ache from deep within his bones, making them feel like lead.

With great effort, he moved his left arm up to his face, retrieving some blades of grass that had somehow found their way into his mouth while he had lain there. He had fallen asleep on his front—an unnatural position for him—but he was now sprawled on his side with his legs crooked in front of him. Straight ahead, beyond the grass that swayed with insects so close he could count every leg and wing, he could make out some rocks splattered with water. They filled him with an uneasy dread, its origin one he could not place. He was yet to remember why he lay in a field on a sunny afternoon, but he would soon be forced to.

The shouts were louder, closer, now. He could hear footsteps running towards him. He tried to get up, but was saved the trouble by a rough pair of hands that appeared from nowhere and hauled him to his feet. He was glad of them for he was quite certain he lacked the strength to stand at that moment. His head was swimming. Had he been drinking?

His eyes travelled up the arms that gripped his shirt tight to a pair of broad shoulders, a thick neck and then the tanned face of a man in his late forties with gently greying hair and a wiry moustache. It was Francois DuMaine, head of security at the castle. He had been employed some time after the enchantment, which Chip had always felt was a shame as he would have made an excellent brick wall.

"Francois?" he rasped, his throat dry as sandpaper. The larger man said nothing to confirm his identity, but nodded to the three men that accompanied him.

"It's him alright. Just where the princess said he'd be."

The princess?

Suddenly, the day's events started to trickle back into Chip's mind. The horses. The waterfall. Raisse falling, and him being powerless to stop her. The moment of utter despair as she lay motionless in his arms. The shock as she'd woken. The indescribable feeling of…of…he didn't know what.

What happened? What did I do?

"Can you walk?" The question was barked at him. Francois had noticed how unsteady he was.

Chip shook his head in the negative, his mind and body wracked with sluggish confusion. At this signal, Francois moved to his left and another man appeared at his right, They took an arm each round their shoulders and half-walked, half-dragged him in the direction of the castle. As they moved, Chip struggled with the curious mix of memories and emotions in his head.

Raisse had been dead, he had been sure of it, yet now she lived. How was that possible? He tried to remember the sequence of events between her death and apparent resurrection, but they were already growing hazy. The feelings though, they lingered—the pleasure and pain, the tingling, the heat—he could still feel traces of them like imprints crawling on the underside of his skin.

What happened? What did I do?

These questions and more plagued him until he saw the castle walls loom in front of him like a hidden fortress in the desert.

What had he done?