Chapter 5

Rapunzel sways along with the steady stride of her horse.

The skylight has begun to dim into a blend of orange and pink hues, casting a warmth onto the sparkling snow that blankets the forest. She absently admires the view of the distant mountains beyond the trail ahead of her, and the tranquility of the faint sounds of nature within the otherwise silent woods.

A flapping noise and a soft tweet intrudes her blank thoughts, just as an aquamarine blur sweeps into Rapunzel's view.

She blinks in surprise at the plump bird now hovering just over her horse's head, its electric blue feathers almost out of place among the pale and colourless forest.

The creature's black eyes directly meet hers, cocking its head curiously.

Rapunzel pulls lightly on the reigns, her horse slowing to a stop at her command. After a moment's thought, she realizes she's never seen a bird quite this bright before. In fact, it looks as if there's a faint blue glow around it, so radiant that it's clearly visible in broad daylight.

Rapunzel gapes in fascination at the pure beauty of what she's seeing. Then the bird darts away just as quickly as it had appeared.

She follows it with her gaze as it perches atop a naked tree branch overhead, still eyeing her. It flutters across to a different tree. Even from this distance, Rapunzel notices its glow. Somehow, she can't take her eyes off it, like an invisible force is just pulling her toward its beauty.

Rapunzel watches it hop further and further along the trees until curiosity overcomes her and she urges her horse to follow it.

Her steed accelerates to a gallop, veering off the trail until Rapunzel loses sight of the fluttering creature within the tangle of dead branches.

She pulls on the reigns, scanning the sky with a puzzled brow. That's weird. It's as if it just… vanished.

"Rapunzel?"

She's so focused on searching the trees that she almost doesn't hear Cassandra's distant voice, or the sound of galloping hooves approaching her from behind.

Cassandra appears next to Rapunzel a few moments later, perched in Maximus' saddle. "Hey. Where were you? I thought you were right behind me." Puffs of frosty air escape her lips, her voice breathless and pinched with concern. She's wearing a fur-lined jacket and leather gloves, cheeks flushed pink.

Rapunzel had borrowed Willow's horse for the hike today, his hair dark and brown unlike the snow-white colour of Maximus.

"I was," Rapunzel finally looks over at Cassandra, snapping herself out of a daze. "Sorry."

They'd been making their way along the trail together until… whatever that was had completely distracted Rapunzel. She hadn't even realized she'd ventured so far off the path.

Max's saddle rattles as he taps his front hooves in the snow, huffing. Cass sways along with his movement beneath her, though she's only watching Rapunzel with concern. "Just… Don't scare me like that, okay?"

A shred of guilt twinges within Rapunzel. She hadn't even been thinking about that. But her mind is so flustered right now that she doesn't mention it. "I just saw the strangest thing…" She peers overhead once more.

"What?"

Rapunzel wonders if maybe she'd been imagining it. "This bird flew right in front of me and looked right at me. Then it started flying across the branches. Like… it wanted me to follow it or something."

The look Cassandra gives her is a mixture of both amusement and pure confusion. "You saw… a bird. Flying in the trees." Her voice is deadpan.

Rapunzel realizes she should've expected that reaction. "I know how it sounds, but something about it was weird. It was… glowing. I've never seen anything like it before. It was right here, and then it just disappeared." She urges her horse to walk at a steady pace, following the direction the bird had disappeared to.

Max's hooves crunch against snow as he trails behind her. Cassandra shrugs, "Well, who knows? Maybe you just discovered a new species of bioluminescent bird native to the Fairview mountains." Her voice is dripping with sarcasm. Unlike Rapunzel, her bored gaze wanders everywhere but overhead.

"What if it was hurt? And it needed my help?" continues the princess, entirely serious. "Maybe I could've healed it." Not that it had looked injured in any way, but she can't imagine why else it would want her to follow it.

"Rapunzel, I know you wanna help every living thing that breathes, but I told your aunt I'd bring you back home before the sun sets, and you know how worried she can get," reminds Cass, eyeing the darkening sky. "I'm sure the bird is fine."

"Look!" Rapunzel tugs on her horse's reigns, pointing to a spot in the distance. Just up ahead, the same electric blue blur she has seen earlier darts between the brush. "There it is! Did you see that?"

Cassandra follows her gaze, much less excitedly. "See what?"

The bird emerges a few uneventful moments later, landing atop a cluster of large boulders protruding between two snowy pine trees.

Rapunzel continues to point at it like an excited child. "Right there!"

"Where?" Cassandra exclaims, finding nothing but some peculiar looking rocks.

It isn't until the bird flies into a crevice between the boulders that Rapunzel realizes it to have been perched directly above a cave entrance. However, instead of arguing its existence, Rapunzel climbs down from her horse's saddle with determination.

"Rapunzel, wait!" Cassandra calls out as the princess treks through the snow.

But Cassandra's efforts do nothing to stop Rapunzel from ducking down and squeezing between the very boulders the bird had disappeared into moments earlier, and all Cass does is watch her get swept up into the darkness of it until she's completely disappeared from view.

Groaning loudly, Cassandra dismounts her horse.

Sometimes, Rapunzel really reminds her of an easily distracted puppy.

Finding no other choice, Cass follows her in crossing the patch of snow and ducking her head into the cave opening.

The entrance is so shallow that she has to bend completely forward to fit under it. Darkness begins to drown her as she crawls her way through, her voice echoing off the walls, "Rapunzel, don't you think – I don't know – that maybe you shouldn't be carelessly walking into unknown caves by yourself?"

Cassandra doesn't hear a response in return, not that she'd much expected one anyway. Rapunzel is clearly too preoccupied to listen to her right now.

Finally, she emerges out the other side. As she stands upright again with a sigh, Rapunzel is standing a bit further inside the small cave, with her back turned to Cassandra.

"That's weird," the princess is peering up at the cavernous ceiling, her voice echoing. "Where do it go? I just saw it fly in here."

Snow blankets the ground and the few pine trees positioned within the cave. Across it is a jagged stone wall like a cliff face, towering up into a curved ceiling. The slim cracks above provide little sunlight within the darkness, but the openings are definitely not large enough to cover the entire ground in snow. How could it have snowed inside a cave? Somehow, it's as if they're still in the forest, only sheltered entirely by stone.

What makes up the rest of the cave is a completely different kind of rock that Cassandra doesn't recognize. "Uhhh, I think the bigger question is… where are we?" she asks, also observing their surroundings. After a moment, she realizes she's been here before, only the area had been revealed to the sky then. "I've passed this cliff face before while riding, but… these black rocks were never here before."

They poke out of the ground like enormous jet-black icicles. Unlike the neighbouring jagged and gray cliff face, these rocks are as smooth and shiny as marble, with a faint violet shimmer on its surface. They must've been so buried within bushes and snow that Cassandra hadn't realized these black rocks were what made up the cave entrance.

"You sure you're not thinking of a different cliff face?" Rapunzel asks.

"I know these trails like the back of my hand. I would've remembered if these were here," says Cass, approaching one of them with curiosity.

"So, what? Do you think the rocks just… appeared out of thin air?" Despite the ridiculousness of the question, there's no joking tone in Rapunzel's voice.

Cassandra sighs, unsure what to think of it but another part of her not much caring. "It wouldn't be the craziest thing we've seen."

It's either that or the rocks had grown straight out of the ground, in which neither option is physically possible. Then again, neither is healing people back to life.

Cassandra is still hovering by the entrance, with her hands on her hips and a little bit of a growing headache - unlike Rapunzel, who is currently wandering further inside with her back still turned.

"We should just get out of here," decides Cass. "This place is giving me the creeps." She turns to leave.

"Wait," Rapunzel slows to a stop in front of the wall, staring curiously at it.

Cassandra stops to peer over her shoulder. "What?"

Carved into the stone is the image of a crescent moon. Three raindrops form a vertical line, leading down toward a castle, with pointy spikes bursting from the edges of it. Something about it feels oddly familiar to Rapunzel. Next to it are markings that she thinks may be symbols at first, before she realizes they are actually forming words.

"I recognize that castle." Rapunzel slowly touches her fingertips to the wall, feeling the rough and cold surface glazing across her skin. "There's something written here."

Curiosity gets the better of Cassandra. She appears behind Rapunzel, peeking over her shoulder. "What does it say?"

Rapunzel squints slightly, attempting to decipher the uneven markings. She manages to read it out slowly, "Wither and decay... End this destiny. Break these earthly chains… And set this spirit free."

Silence envelopes the cave as they both just stare at it for a while, wearing blank, puzzled expressions on their faces.

"Huh," says Rapunzel. "I wonder what it means."

Cassandra opens her mouth to speak.

Then a low rumbling causes them both to snap their heads downward.

The ground begins to quake beneath their feet. Pebbles and clouds of dirt rain from above. The noise of deep groaning grows into a roar. A cold darkness washes over the entire cave, drowning out the pine trees in desolate blackness. Their lush and prickly branches shrink and shrivel into nothing but scraggly dead twigs. Cracks split and stretch within the ceiling, revealing the darkened evening sky.

"What's happening?!" Rapunzel shouts.

The air around them becomes thin. What feels like a suffocating disease crawls and expands within Cassandra's chest, emitting a wheezing cough from her throat.

Everything begins to crumble. Raining pebbles turn to boulders, exploding into large shards of rock as they hit the ground from all directions.

Rapunzel shields her head with her arms. Cassandra pushes her toward the exit, stumbling, yelling frantically at her to run.

Then they both dive out of the same opening they'd entered from, emerging from utter darkness into what feels like blinding light.

They land roughly in the snow on their stomachs. Just as they do, a shower of large boulders collapse in a wall behind them, completely closing off the cave entrance.

A woman with snow-white hair, glistening armour and a black sword on her back accepts the object handed to her – a small glass bottle, round with a narrow neck. "You sure this will work?" She asks, eyeing the glimmering violet liquid inside.

"If my son's calculations are to be trusted. Which – I assure you, they are," the man before her responds in a deep voice, dressed in a crimson cloak and suit of dark armour. His graying hair is slicked back from his wrinkled forehead, creased over deep brown eyes. On the top of his hand is a tattoo of a black circle, with three lines piercing through it, the mark identical to her own.

When the woman pulls the cork from the bottle, a brief lavender mist soars from its opening. Slowly, she pours the contents into the black marble birdbath standing before her.

They both loom over it in anticipation.

They watch the peculiar substance gradually bleed into the crystal-clear water inside the birdbath, like clouds of spreading smoke. What was once clean darkens into a deep plum-coloured whirlpool, like a starry night sky.

"Show me the sundrop," she demands, staring expectantly down into the now purple water.

After a few moments, it's surface blooms into a blend of colours. It's blur soon clears into a moving image that dances on the ripples – the image of a girl, with long brown hair and rosy freckled cheeks, propped on her stomach in a patch of snow.

"You all right?" A voice, not belonging to the girl, emerges from the water in a distorted echo. As if not quite there. As if tearing through another dimension.

In the reflection, a gloved hand reaches down toward her.

She takes it, allowing herself to get pulled to her feet by somebody else. "Yeah," she dusts the snow off the front of her skirt, "What was that?"

"Must've been an earthquake or something." Another woman with short black hair and a sword on her hip peers warily around the forest, snow-covered mountains visible in the distance. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

The sundrop exhales with relief. She follows the other girl to their horses, grazing nearby. "Right behind you."

Then the reflection fades until there is nothing left but an ordinary puddle of clear water, just as it had been before.

"She's read the incantation," realizes the man, after the silence begins to settle. "The tie has been made. Now all we have to do is wait."

The white-haired woman continues to stare down at the water before her. "Or… we skip the waiting part and find her before she finds us." She turns, shoving the empty glass bottle toward his chest.

He takes it from her.

"Tomorrow, we head North to the Fairview mountains," she announces decidedly. Considering all the snow they'd just observed, it's the only logical place the sundrop could be. "Find the girl. Bring her back. And make sure she stays on course. Let the others know." With that, she turns confidently on her heel.

He stares after her backside, walking further away from him. "What about the other one?"

She stops. A darkness glazes across her eyes as she stares ahead. "Keep her out of the way," she demands emotionlessly, before continuing on her way.

A/N: I know what you're thinking. This sounds a lot like what happened in the show. But I'll be changing a lot of the laws surrounding the moonstone and decay incantation, making this story much different than what you may expect.