Disclaimer: I own nothing
Author's Note: THIS IS RATHER IMPORTANT. This chapter will probably make significantly more sense if you recall the fate of dear Princess Nuala. Re-reading the paragraph that discusses where she is now and why she was put there before you read this chapter is advisable – it's the 6th "paragraph" in chapter two.
Chapter 9
Bacchante awoke the next morning from a pleasant, dreamless sleep. She opened her eyes slowly to the unfamiliar room, and paused a moment to remember the events of the previous evening – the horror in the dungeon pit and... all else the Prince had done. Wordlessly, the siren motioned to climb out of bed, but withdrew her hand abruptly as it landed on something sharp. Glancing over to the pillow beside hers, Bacchante found a single burgundy rose lying in place of her Prince. Of course he was gone, she chided herself as she took the flower's long stem in her hands. As the siren admired the fulsome, decadent bloom, she hardly noticed the tiny droplets of blood that stained her fingers where the thorns hat cut them.
Quickly, Bacchante dressed and, with her rose in hand, stepped into the hall. Though her gown was hardly appropriate for mid morning and she was certain her hair was dishevelled and unkempt, Bacchante didn't feel at all like returning to her rooms to make herself presentable. As the lady often did when she was alone and wanted to remain so, she found her way to the Solarium.
When she reached to stone archway that opened to the garden, the siren noticed for the first time that the entrance had a door. It was a heavy, wooden thing that lay open, almost unnoticeable against the hallway wall. The door must have remained unused for years, as the vines that covered the halls now wound around the door as well, holding it open. On a whim, Bacchante pried it from the grasp of the ivy, entered the Solarium and closed the massive door behind her, wood grinding fiercely against the floor and slamming shut with a heavy bang.
The tranquility of the chamber made the lady sigh. Lightly, Bacchante stepped over to the grand, tiered fountain in the center of the tropical garden, breathing in the sweet scent of running water on moss and stone. Absently, the lady twisted the deep burgundy rose in her fingers, twirling it by its stem. The siren, in the seclusion of Prince Nuada's Solarium, dared to sing. She doubted anyone would hear her there – still, her voice wasn't something she could use lightly, and in consequence she sang so softly she could hardly hear herself,
"Rose, rose, rose red, will I ever see thee wed? I will marry at thy will sire, at thy will..."
Bacchante stopped and laughed bitterly, letting the flower in her hand fall into the fountain. Ridiculous, she chided herself, sighing at her own odd loneliness. For over a thousand years she'd lived almost alone, singing men to their deaths but it was now, when she was living in one of the last great Netherworld cities with its Prince for a lover that she felt...
Gazing into the water, following the burgundy flower with her eyes, Bacchante noticed something that gave her pause. The last time she was in the Solarium, she'd seen the symbols etched in the fountain's stone facade, but she hadn't time to realize what they were. Now, peering through the ripples at the base of the water-feature the siren could see very clearly that the symbols cut into it were not random at all. The etchings were alchemy sigils, symbols used for the practice of arcane chemistry, and for writing. The language, the version of script that they were written in hadn't been used for centuries – funny, the siren thought, as these sigils couldn't possibly be more than ten years old, or the water would've worn them away...
Reading the message under the water, it didn't take Bacchante long to realize that the symbols were written together in riddles. Following the sigils' direction, the siren dipped her hand into the fountain's second tier and felt along the base for a small notch, an imperfection she read would be there in the stone. Without thinking she pulled back on it and heard a click, like flipping a switch that turned a gear. Her action caused something under the fountain to move, and like a massive mechanized clock one small gear turned a larger one and with the laboured sound of stone grinding against stone, the fountain split apart. Dividing itself into quarters, the fountain opened cracks wide enough for the water in it to rush through, draining into some unseen channel below.
For a brief moment, the grinding stopped, and without the rushing water Bacchante became aware of how deathly silent the Solarium was besides. The siren's rose, once floating in the water now lay in the fountain's empty basin, its scent gone and lavish bloom tousled and waterlogged– Without warning one of the fountain's separated quarters sank into the floor, disappearing to reveal in its place a chasm wide enough to climb down.
Bacchante almost laughed. Though a part of her wondered what lay under the Solarium floor, her rational side balked at the notion of slipping through the hole. Clearly, someone had gone to great lengths to make certain no one found what she had; although unlocking the alchemist's fountain was simple, someone younger than she and less versed in alchemy wouldn't have recognized the sigils as words, much less been able to understand them.
In a moment of rare boldness, Bacchante lowered her legs into the hole, braced her hands on its edges, and dropped down to the space beneath the fountain at the very heart of the Palace of Bethmora.
The drop from the Solarium floor to the bottom of the hidden room under it was short, and the antechamber Bacchante found herself in was very, very dark. The only light in the secret chamber came from the hole through which the siren had entered, streaming down to illuminate a small patch of floor below.
Once her eyes adjusted to the dim light, the siren saw that she had entered a barren space – completely without furnishings and, because the chamber had been pitch black before, no vegetation adorned the granite walls. In the center of the room, raise upon a stone pedestal was a coffin, and Bacchante thought then that she had entered a tomb.
Slowly, the lady stepped over to the catafalque – upon it was a sarcophagus cut into the shape of a woman sleeping. From what Bacchante could see, the coffin belonged to an Elf, young by the standards of her race. In the figure's stone hands were carved a bouquet of forget-me-nots, and adorning her head was a delicate, fragile crown. So she was royalty, Bacchante thought, resting her hands gently on the casket. Of course she would have been, to have a sepulchre in the Palace... Absently, the siren ran her hand over the stone of the coffin, pausing quickly when she realized that under her fingertips were the same sigils that had been cut into the fountain above. The lady wondered then if the coffin was locked just as the tomb itself had been – but who would lock a coffin? Bacchante gazed at the sarcophagus' stone face thoughtfully. The tomb wasn't old – it couldn't be, for the fountain that locked it was new, and the woman buried there was surely far too young to have been Queen. But if she was royalty, she would have to be Nuada's sister. Bacchante read once, when she lived in the North Sea, that the Elf King had win heirs, a boy and a girl. But surely the woman lying on the catafalque before the siren couldn't be Nuada's twin; the bond between Elvish twins was well known, and if she were dead, he would be too.
Unless...
"Who would lock a coffin, unless this isn't a coffin at all..." With the fear that she was perhaps desecrating Nuada's sister's grave, Bacchante read the sigils on the sarcophagus, and following their direction, opened it as easily as she had unlocked the alchemist's fountain.
Like the fountain, the covering on the casket separated and pulled away in sections, revealing the woman whose stone effigy it bore. She lay as if dead, but Elves turn to clay when they die... with a start, Bacchante saw the woman's chest rise and fall. As the siren looked more closely to be certain she hadn't imagined it, she noticed a long cut breaking the woman's skin above the line of her dress, from her shoulder to her breastbone. The wound looked fresh and familiar...
Suddenly, the woman's eyes flicked open. Bacchante gasped in surprise, staggering back from the catafalque. Weakly, the Elf in the coffin lifted her arms to the edges of the casket and tried to pull herself out, uttering a sad, exasperated sigh when her muscles wouldn't cooperate. Instantly, Bacchante stepped over to the lady and wrapped an arm around her back; the Elf was frail and fragile, made weak through her imprisonment.
"Who are you?"
"Princess Nuala," the Elf breathed, her voice a cracked and broken whisper from years of disuse.
"So you are Prince Nuada's sister," Bacchante whispered, more to herself than to the Princess.
"We're twins." The lady said this lightly, gazing at the siren as if looking through her. Bacchante tried to meet Nuala's eyes, but they seemed hollow and empty somehow, missing the same light that flickered so fiercely in her brother's.
"Why were you locked away here?"
Nuala tilted her golden head; her eyes open wide like a child's, "We are twins." The Princess said this simply and deliberately, as though three words were explanation enough. Nuala blinked and looked down at the gash cutting across her chest; seeing it, she uttered a soft sob, a sound that reminded Bacchante of the dungeon, "Oh, my brother hurt us again–" the Elf looked to the siren, "When he's hurt, I am the like because we are–"
"Twins." Bacchante finished for her. Nuala turned her eyes from the siren and gazed off at nothing.
"Twins. Yes. I have one, you know. His name is Prince Nuada." Bacchante's stomach sank with the suspicion that there was something very, very wrong with the Princess... Nuala looked back at the siren, giggling like a schoolgirl, "you should be mindful of him. Young men will do it if they come to it; by Cock they are to blame." As suddenly as the Elf was consumed in a fit of laughter she stopped, and very seriously said, "You are wearing my dress."
The siren drew a deep breath, "You're stark raving mad..." Nuala shook her head and replied decisively,
"No, no, that is my dress. But never mind, it looks beautiful." The Princess lifted the flowers that had been placed in her hands, regarding them curiously. They were black, shrivelled and dead, and had once been the inspiration for the forget-me-nots carved onto the cover of her casket. "I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died."
Bacchante picked the dead flowers from Nuala's hands,
"Please, tell me who locked you here – does your brother know?"
"Of course... I wanted to feel the sun again, it had been so long, but there was no sun, not after the war. My beloved brother... He was so angry that day when they found me in the moor, I am glad you did not see it. I couldn't breathe... He had taken so many lives; he'd made the world so dark; he kills everything he tries to protect. I saw him choking, even as he stood away from the water, his life flickering alike with mine... He was so afraid, not of dying, not at all, but that his life should end when I saw fit to end... mine."
"You tried to drown yourself and he did this to you?" Bacchante forced herself to ask, her voice a mirror of the cracked whisper Nuala's was. It was a question that horrified her even as she asked it, for she already knew the answer.
"Will you let me see the sky?"
With a solemn nod, the siren helped the Princess from her coffin. The moment the Elf's feet touched the floor her legs gave out beneath her, and it was only with Bacchante's aid that Nuala was able to escape her tomb.
"Do you remember a way out of the city?" the siren asked once they had reached the Solarium.
"Oh yes," Nuala answered, gazing up in reverie at the glass and wrought-iron dome of the underground garden, "I lived here once."
The pair left the Solarium, but instead of walking back to the Palace proper Nuala led them down another corridor in Bethmora's intricate labyrinth, to a seemingly endless flight of spiral stone steps.
In time, the Princess' strength began to return, and after several minutes she pulled away to walk on her own. She stepped slowly and delicately, bracing her hand against the wall of the stairwell. Nuala placed the first step, but when she shifted her balance to take another she collapsed, falling onto the stairs. When the Royal hit the ground, she cried a soft sob, not of pain but a different anguish. Bacchante turned and saw the Princess looking at her hand, cut in the fall, blood trickling down her forearm.
"I'm sorry," Nuala whispered to the siren, her voice a sigh. Bacchante narrowed her eyes, reached down and took Nuala's bloodstained wrist in her hand, pulled the Princess to her feet and ascended the stairs out of the city.
Author's Note (that would have been a spoiler if I wrote it at the beginning): Please don't message me about Nuala being out of character... I realize that she would probably never say some of the things she said, or act this way exactly. She's insane. This was done deliberately, as a major plot-point.
Some quotes are from Shakespeare's Hamlet (with two slight modifications if you noticed); if you're familiar with it, I based my version of insane Nuala on Ophelia.