Crowns of the Kingdom
Chapter 32: Do You Believe in Magic?
The portcullis slammed to the ground just after Mickey walked under it, gouging out chips of stone, but he hardly reacted. He had expected exactly that; it was so typical of Maleficent. So, too, was the courtyard of the grim castle—a barren quadrangle illuminated by the sickly greenish flames of torches mounted to the walls. He supposed he was meant to dash inside the halls, fight his way through hordes of goons or Dispirations or whatever Maleficent was using for cannon fodder by now, fling himself up a staircase to the tallest tower—or down one into a deep dungeon—to find Minnie, and then fall right into an inescapable trap. Well, nuts to that.
"Here I am, Maleficent!" Mickey called out, more bravely than—no, don't think like that!—exactly as bravely as he felt. "Bring it on!"
"Ah, Mickey," Maleficent's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere. "The mouse that roared, come to face the spider in her own web. And I see you've even dressed for the part."
"Don't be ridiculous," Mickey said, turning around and glancing up at the barred windows that overlooked the courtyard, as though he might be able to spot Maleficent glaring down from one of them. "This place doesn't belong to you."
"But it suits me so well, don't you think? So much like home. And so easy to bend to my will….like this!"
The ground heaved, throwing Mickey off his feet. He sat up just as more black, woody briars erupted through the paving-slabs of the courtyard, growing with frightening speed. One burst upward so close behind Mickey that the thorns snagged the back of his robe and pulled him into the air with it. He yelped and reached back to grab the branch and stabilize himself, but the thorns were too dense. So he was left, dangling precariously on the end of a creaking vine while all around him, its brothers and sisters lashed back and forth, twisting and interweaving. Within minutes, there was no sign of the courtyard at all, or of the sky. The briars had completely enclosed a space the size of a large cathedral—in fact, they defined it. There was nothing to see but spiky stems, some slender and whiplike, others gnarled into lumpy masses.
"Mickey! Oh, Mickey!"
His heart leaped, and he twisted in the runner's grip, trying to see where the voice had come from. "Minnie! Where are ya?"
"Up here! Above you!"
He looked up—carefully, so that he wouldn't ram the back of his head into anything stabby—and spotted his girlfriend, still trapped in the orb, which was nestled into a nook near where the "wall" of briars curved over to become the "ceiling." Three or four thornless stems were wrapped across the globe's front, holding it in place. Much to Mickey's relief, Minnie appeared completely unharmed, although for some reason she was back in her Fantasyland princess gown. Maleficent had said something about dressing for the part…maybe this was her idea of a joke.
"I'll be right there, Minnie! Don't you worry about a thing!" He stretched his tail up toward the vine, found a safe spot between the thorns to curl it around, and let it take his weight so that he could free his robe. Then he began looking around to see if there was a sturdier branch within swinging reach.
"I am surprised at you," said Maleficent's voice, and this time the wicked fairy was present, standing on a platform of intertwined brambles that projected from the wall so that she could look down on Mickey. "Did you really think it would be so easy, here in this corner of Inpotentia that I have claimed as my own? Have you learned nothing, little mouse?"
"I warned you not to pick on him!" Minnie growled from her prison.
"You stay out of this, whelp!" Maleficent growled back, sending a flick of lightning at the caged mouse. It didn't pierce the skin of the orb, but it danced over the surface, causing Minnie to shrink away.
"That's enough!" said Mickey. His tail was starting to ache. "Why do you have to be like this?"
"Come now, Mickey. Are we not all as we were made? Surely you don't think you play the hero because you have a choice in the matter."
"Oh, no you don't. I'm not about to fall for a cliché like the old we're-not-so-different-you-and-I lecture. Now, are we gonna do this or not?"
"You seem awfully eager for your own destruction, Mickey," said Maleficent. "Far be it from me to disappoint you!"
With a grand gesture, she called forth her trademark green fire to engulf the vine. Mickey dropped almost on pure reflex, and fortunately on the way down he passed close by a clump with thorns large enough to be handholds in their own right. He caught one and swung himself around to land more-or-less on top of the clump with his feet wedged nicely between the huge spikes.
He looked up. Maleficent was already raining more fire down upon him. He dodged with a leap toward the next vertical stalk and climbed it like a ladder toward the Wicked Fairy. "So that's how you want it, huh?" he said, and from his innermost magical spirit he brought forth his own fire: the pure, white-hot fire of stars and comets. Balancing on the briar stalk, he hurled a shining cluster of it from each hand, one-two, and watched with satisfaction as Maleficent gasped and ducked aside to avoid it.
"So, Sorcerer's Apprentice," she hissed. "I see you wish to escalate this battle to its logical extent. As you wish…but do try to remember one thing."
"Oh? What's that?"
"This still is not taking place in your imagination!" She raised her staff with both hands and drove the end of it into her platform of briars. Flames erupted around her and she began to change.
Mickey heard Minnie scream a warning, not that it was necessary. In truth, he had pretty much seen this coming, but that didn't make it any less alarming to watch the transformation. Maleficent swelled, as though converting the energy of the fire directly into extra mass. Already a creature of sharp angles, she became even more so, her face elongating into a fanged snout and her hands curving into talons. Her black and violet robes fused with her skin, clothing her in chitinous scales, and her neck grew to a serpentine length and sprouted a crocodilian saw-ridge. The whole process took less than a minute.
Maleficent-the-dragon stretched her wings and swished her tail, smashing some of the more brittle briar runners. She stood directly on the jagged floor of the arena enclosed by the plants, the thorns making no difference to her armored feet. She bent her head toward Mickey, and her jaws could have snatched him up and swallowed him whole. As he stared up at the multifariously deadly predator that his bitter foe had become, all Mickey wanted to do was run and hide, preferably in a comfy hole. But he stood his ground and forced his trembling to stay below the threshold of visibility…not that she couldn't probably hear his jackhammering heartbeat anyway.
"Heh," he said, his voice cracking a little. "I guess you feel like posing for some promotional material."
Maleficent snapped at him in annoyance, then pulled her head back and thrust it forward again, breathing a long plume of fire. But Mickey was already moving, scrambling back down the stalk toward the floor and looking for safe places to land. He ducked under an arched branch as Maleficent's teeth lunged at him again, then had to flee as she set the branch afire. Fortunately, the briars didn't seem to burn too well, and the green flames spread slowly. Mickey was pretty sure that Maleficent couldn't keep breathing fire indefinitely without stopping to recharge, but he had no idea how many shots she had left, or how long it would take her to recover.
As he scrambled for cover, he heard the telltale sign of another blast coming his way. This time, instead of dodging he spun about and countered with the white fire, and the two streams met in an explosion of fierce light and heat. Before it quite died away, Mickey was in motion again, picking his way across the hazardous floor. He knew he needed to formulate some kind of strategy, but the demands of surviving in the short term didn't leave him much room to plan for the long term.
With a shriek of rage, Maleficent slammed her tail against the ground just ahead of Mickey, creating a brief hail of thorny shrapnel. Mickey gasped and reversed course, only to pull up short again when she took a swipe at him with a taloned foot. Another blast of green fire followed, and Mickey found himself trapped between Maleficent's body on one side, and crackling flames on the other. The dragon chuckled darkly.
Mickey glanced up, toward Minnie. The globe containing her was rocking slightly in its basketlike bonds. If he could just get to her, he could free her, and the two of them could defeat or escape Maleficent together. Somehow.
Maleficent was gearing up for another direct attack. Mickey began preparing to counter it, but then got a better idea. He made a lightning dash for the end of her tail, seized one of the elongated scales at the tip with one hand and generated a blazing star-flame with the other, and made sure to let her see what he was doing. It worked—she whipped her tail upward, and he used the momentum to get a head start on a leap for the nearest wall. He caught a protruding runner a little over halfway up and began climbing higher, swinging and somersaulting, presenting his enemy with a moving target. He felt unusually light, as though gravity was slightly weaker than normal.
On the other hand, it might have been thermal updrafts. Maleficent was strafing the wall of thorns in her efforts to blast him, and although she was missing him so far, he could feel the wash of heat every time the flames approached. He was out of her direct reach by this point, leaving the fire as her only effective weapon. Mickey re-checked his position and discovered to his delight that he had only about twenty feet to go before reaching Minnie's prison.
But that instant of inattention cost him. As he prepared himself for the next leap, he suddenly found that his support was crumbling out from under him. Maleficent's fire had been slowly eating away at the brambles, and parts of them were collapsing into little heaps of charcoal and ashes, leaving the remainder to collapse into tangles of lacerating spines. Something below him snapped altogether, and Mickey plummeted…only to be slammed up against a mass of prickles and held there. The sudden shock of a hundred tiny stabbing pains made his eyes water, and it was a moment before he was able to absorb the fact that he was literally in Maleficent's clutches, being pressed into the thorns by her powerful claw.
He tried to call up the star-flame, but the imitation Sorcerer's Hat had gotten hung up on a large spine a few feet above him, and he found himself unable to summon up the power. The dragon began to open her jaws…
There was a sound like a huge lightbulb popping overhead, followed by a shrill cry, and then in a swirl of petticoats, Minnie landed on Maleficent's head. Ever since the battle had begun, she had been shoving and kicking inside the globe, trying to bump it into the big thorns behind it and shatter it, and she had finally succeeded.
Now, straddling the dragon's head just behind her horns, she reached around her face to grab the finlike appendages at the corners of her mouth, one in each hand, and began to bawl her out. "I said to leave him alone! I—have—had—enough from you! You can't even patronize people right! A whelp is a baby dog! A baby mouse—is—a—pinky!" With every emphasized word, she gave the fins a sharp yank, eliciting a gasp of pain from their owner.
"All right, Minnie!" Mickey crowed. Maleficent let go of him and began to shake her head and paw at it, trying to knock Minnie loose. Mickey quickly climbed up to reclaim his hat, felt the power surge within him once again, and started pelting Maleficent with little shooting stars.
"Go, Mickey!" Minnie cheered, her voice wobbly with the motion. "Kick her fanny! Punch her lights out! Give her—" At that point, Maleficent managed to fling her away, and she went sailing helplessly toward a bank of briars with a scream of horror. A moment before she hit them, something caught the back of her dress and pulled her up, and she landed astride what proved to be the tail of an actual, whizzing comet. It was warm to the touch, but not uncomfortably hot. Mickey was sitting in front of her, doing his best to steer the thing. She clung to him. "Now what?"
"Well…I hadn't really thought that far ahead. To be honest, I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this thing going."
"Maybe we should get off, then!"
"No, wait! I've a got a better idea!" He leaned back, and the comet angled upward. When they were only a few feet from the ceiling, he reversed course, aiming the unlikely vehicle straight for Maleficent. "Hey, Creepy!" he shouted, not that she wasn't already watching them. "Have some of the stuff that dreams are made of!" And just as gravity took over, he poured everything he had left into the comet.
"I just hope you know what you're doiiiiing!" Minnie squealed as the comet went turbocharged. Maleficent had just enough time to open her mouth for one last blast of fire, but not to release it, before the impact occurred.
Then everything turned to sound and pressure and light.
There was no telling how much time had passed before Mickey and Minnie were able to pull their senses back together, but when they did, they were floating, weightlessly adrift among splintered fragments of brambles and gossamer strands of blue-violent vapor. The explosion of the comet had shattered the entire arena! There was no sign of the castle, or the bridge, or any part of Disneyland-That-Never-Was.
Mickey paddled in the air until he reached Minnie's side. "Huh," he said with a nervous little chuckle. "I didn't see that coming."
"It's not over yet," said Minnie, pointing to a place a few dozen yards away where Maleficent could be seen, back in her original form and clinging wearily to a large knot of briars. She caught sight of them, and her eyes flashed with hatred.
"It is and she knows it," said Mickey. "She's just too stubborn to admit it." He raised his voice. "Come on, Maleficent! Let's all just go home and get back to business as usual."
But she didn't appear to be listening. Her attention was elsewhere. Mickey was just about to repeat himself when she began to cackle. The sound wasn't very loud at all, but there was nothing to muffle it; it just expanded outward unimpeded, so that it reached Mickey and Minnie seeming to come from much closer.
"It is coming," she said. "Your doom. Can you not sense it?"
"What are you talking about?" said Mickey. But a memory nagged, and with a feeling like he had swallowed a super-dense ice cube, he recalled the horror of his very first experience of Inpotentia, when for a fractional instant it had seemed that his very being was disintegrating into the void. And now it seemed to him that the splintered bits of thorns were drifting in more-or-less the same direction, as though caught in a gentle current.
"An Oubliette, of course," Maleficent said as though that explained everything. "And it will be here within minutes. If only you had not disrupted my domain, we would all be shielded. But now all this space is unclaimed and vulnerable. Thus must I take my leave of you, little mice. My only regret is that I will not get to see your end for myself. Enjoy your last remaining moments…if you can!" And with that, she vanished in her customary fashion.
"Mickey…what's an Oubliette?"
"I'm not exactly sure. But if my hunch is right…it's bad. Real bad."
"How bad? You can tell me."
The general drift of the debris sped up a little, and Mickey and Minnie began to move along with everything else. "Like…we'll never have existed, and everyone will forget about us. That bad."
"Oh," Minnie said, and although her voice was calm, Mickey recognized a note of growing panic in her eyes. "Can we escape?"
"I…I don't know. Maybe I can make a wind to push us—"
Just then, the Oubliette came into view.
Actually, it was more like it had suddenly arrived from behind the scenery. It seemed as if everything that was far enough away from their location to be considered background was a flat curtain, and someone had turned on a powerful vacuum hose behind the curtain, sucking it into a funnel shape and pulling everything on their side of the curtain toward it. Mickey was no astrophysicist, but he had read enough analogies involving rubber sheets and lead marbles to know that it was space itself—or what passed for space in Inpotentia—being deformed. And so he wasn't surprised—horrified, but not surprised—when his perspective shifted and he felt like he and Minnie were no longer being pulled along in a current but instead were falling toward the vortex.
"Oh, no," Minnie moaned. "Mickey, what are we going to do?"
"I don't know," he said. Their speed continued to increase, and a wave of mingled fear and guilt sloshed through his mind. "Minnie…I am so sorry about this. Maybe if I'd been smarter about fighting her—"
"Don't, please," said Minnie. "You did everything exactly right, exactly the way you should have. You're my hero, Mickey. You're everyone's hero, and a hero's story can't end like this!"
"I hope you're right," Mickey said as the two of them were swept into a tightening spiral orbit around the maw of the Oubliette. The pretend Sorcerer's Hat went whipping off of Mickey's head, and his Fairy Godmother-granted red robe dissolved back into his usual shorts. Minnie's satin gown, too, changed back into her simple polka-dot dress. "But just in case you're not, I just wanna say…I'd much rather fall into this thing with you than go back without you."
"Oh, Mickey, I feel the same way!" said Minnie, wrapping her arms around him. "But if I did have to go back without you…well, you're the first thing I remember, and I'd never forget you, no matter what!"
"Same here," said Mickey soberly. "In fact, if we really are about to disappear, I'll just keep thinkin' about you and nothing else right up until the end. That way, it'll be just like I remember you forever."
They were circling the rim of the funnel, dipping a little closer to oblivion with every lap. "Then I'll do the same," said Minnie, hugging Mickey as tightly as she could.
And the two mice, so close together that they were almost one being, dropped into the Oubliette.
The rope had dropped, and hundreds, maybe thousands of guests were arriving at the Plaza Hub. They stopped when they saw the characters gathered in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle and stood there uncertainly, whispering amongst themselves, apparently taking the tableau for the setup to a show. A few people audibly commented on Mickey's absence.
In a burst of thunder and green flames, Maleficent appeared once again on the parapet. "Poor children," she scoffed at the gathering. "Waiting for your precious hero's return. Well, you'll never see him or his 'sweetheart' again…and soon, you won't even remember that they ever existed. What then, I wonder, will become of all of you, and all of this?" She gestured negligently at the park in general. "You're all nothing without him!" Somewhere in the crowd of guests, a small child began to wail.
Glowing red with fury, Tinkerbell zipped up out of the gathering and flew at Maleficent's face repeatedly; her shrieks were like clanging cymbals. Maleficent swatted her away with a sneer of contempt, but she did not relent, and with their own battle-cries, the warriors and magicians among the characters charged. The Wicked Fairy found herself under onslaught by spells, arrows, and finally swords, among other things.
And then the guests got into the act, jeering and booing. When some of the bolder children resorted to throwing things, Maleficent decided she had had enough. "Resist all you want, fools—it won't make the least difference!" she spat. Then she twisted into a sliver of darkness in the air and disappeared.
"What did she mean, we won't remember Mickey and Minnie ever existed?" asked Goofy. "How could we forget them?"
"She must have done something dreadful to them!" Fauna whimpered.
"We did forget all about her meddling and everyone who was missing before," said Alice. "Perhaps she's found a way to make that sort of thing permanent!"
"Well, I won't forget!" piped Jiminy Cricket. "Mickey asked me to remember everything, just in case he or anyone else couldn't, and I intend to follow through!" With a few swift movements, he hopped to the center of the Hub and scaled the bronze statue of Walt Disney. Perched at the very tip of the founder's outstretched hand, he addressed the characters and astounded guests alike. "Hey there, hi there, ho there! We all want to see Mickey again, don't we? And Minnie?"
"Yeah!" shouted a few kids.
"Well, we can't forget about anyone or anything as long as we're thinking about them! So everyone—let's think about Mickey and Minnie and hold that thought! It might just be enough to bring them back from wherever Maleficent has sent them!"
"That's the stuff!" shouted Donald, elbowing his way to the front of the group of characters. "Remember Mickey! Remember why he's worth remembering!"
For a few minutes, no one said anything. The guests seemed uncertain—they weren't used to this level of audience participation. But then a little boy of about seven, wearing his very own mouse ears and a faux-vintage Mickey tee-shirt, raised his hand like he had been taught to do in school, and said "I remember how Mickey Mouse never gives up even when he thinks he can't win, and that's how come he does. Win. Um…that's all." He backed up a few steps and clung to his parents, suddenly shy.
But shy or not, he had broken the ice. Next, a frail old man in a wheelchair spoke of his boyhood in the Great Depression when even a quarter to spare was a rarity, but whenever he had one, he would head down to the cinema for a day, and gorge his funny bone on Mickey's old short subjects. "He always took my mind off my troubles."
Then a thirty-ish woman wearing a souvenir Sorcerer hat credited Mickey's appearance in Fantasia with introducing her to classical music when she was small, and said that no matter how old she got, the curious, adventuresome Sorcerer's Apprentice would always be her favorite member of the Disney Family.
Then a father and son, the one in late middle age, the other looking fresh out of college, reminisced about Mousercizing together on weekends while the son was growing up. "I was kind of a couch potato as a kid," he confessed, "but Mickey made aerobics fun."
The floodgates were open and the stories poured forth, from people of all age groups and ethnicities. One family who had traveled all the way from Iran and spoke only Farsi still managed to cheer "Yay, Mickey!" in unison, having learned it from old episodes of "The Mickey Mouse Club." A smiling young woman in well-traveled clothes including an eccentric aviator's scarf and goggles referred to Mickey as the "universal ambassador" because no matter where she went in the world, she found people who loved him. A couple in their late teens, wearing wild Goth clothing and makeup, pulled up their sleeves to reveal their complementary tattoos, his of Mickey, hers of Minnie, so that when they lined up their arms just right, the mice appeared to be kissing. A slightly older couple, the man handling a stroller containing their two-year-old daughter and the woman visibly pregnant with a second, related that Disney shorts and movies were the best cure for morning sickness they had ever discovered.
Eventually, some voices near the back of the crowd began to chant, repeating Mickey and Minnie's names over and over with gradually increasing speed and volume. It didn't take long for the whole throng to join in, and then the characters themselves. When hundreds of hearts and minds are all focused toward a single goal, a kind of energy is raised. No manufactured instrument can measure it, but it exists and can be felt, and on that day in the Happiest Place on Earth, it manifested as tiny motes of golden light, all but invisible in the daylight, rising up from the chanters and gathering over Sleeping Beauty Castle like pixie dust in reverse. There was a sense of building pressure, felt by everyone even if most of them didn't know what it was.
Finally, Jiminy belted out "Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?"
With one voice, the crowd replied "M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E!"
A momentous sensation, like a non-physical shockwave, swept over the Hub. Simultaneous with that, the tiny specks of light suddenly coalesced into a shimmering shape in the air, slowly descending toward the Castle drawbridge. The golden glow faded, revealing the shape to be in fact two shapes, so close together that they shared a single outline: Mickey and Minnie, arms wrapped around each other as though their embrace was the only way to avert the end of the world. When they touched down on the drawbridge, they seemed not even to notice…until the watching guests erupted in cheers.
At the sudden noise, the two mice jumped, looked around, took in the scene, and went right back to hugging.
There was no need for words. It was all over but the celebrating.
It was truly the Happiest Homecoming on Earth.
The End…? (Not Quite)
A/N: I didn't actually get to go to Disneyland the day they kicked off the 50th Anniversary Celebration, but I couldn't resist…I put myself in the crowd scene. Can you guess which one I am? It shouldn't be too hard. Most of the other individual people aren't based on anyone I know; they're just theoretical examples of Mickey fans across the nations and the generations. There is one, though, who is not my own creation:
The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.
Oh, and I put all of you, my readers, in the scene too. Where, you ask? Well…you guys are the ones who start the chant.
Are you ready for the epilogue? I've uploaded it too.
(For the record, I know comets are not really fiery, more the opposite, but just go with it, okay?)
—Karalora
