On the Top of the World
Fiona's eyes shot open. Something had rudely ripped her away from sleep, but she couldn't place what; perhaps the baby had just kicked particularly hard, which was nothing new.
As her eyes adjusted, she slowly realized she was not looking at the cracked earth above her and her husband's bed, thick roots creeping down the walls; rather, lush dark green furls came into focus, suspended above her on four ornately carved bedposts. She felt around the mattress she lay on, but her hands only fell onto cold silken sheets, Shrek's warm shoulder no longer beside her. A firm, cylindrical pillow pressed into the back of her neck.
She bolted upright, looking down at herself in frantic disbelief - lean legs and narrow waist under a velvet dress, and delicate, trembling hands held up to her face. She felt around her body in panic, but it was all horrifying real beneath her hands.
Her human ears then picked up a sound, faint but unmistakable: a baby's cries.
Her baby? Was it hers? It had to be; she wasn't pregnant anymore, after all. The distressing sound was growing louder, occupying more of her consciousness.
Fiona stumbled from the bed, through the gossamer curtain into the center of the room. Before she could take another step, she froze as she caught her reflection in the vanity mirror.
The human woman staring back at her was unrecognizable - empty grey-blue eyes sunken into their sockets, dark bags surrounding them; hollow, gaunt cheekbones; matted, unkempt hair a faded dull mess.
The continued crying finally broke her horrified trance, growing louder still. She rushed back over atop the mattress to the window sill, but could see nothing through the oppressive black smoke.
Fiona ran to the room's door and pulled desperately at the handle, but it was locked. She threw her weak, bony shoulder into the door. She did it again, but to no avail. She reeled, gasping for air as tears began to blur her vision. Her head whipped back around the room, and she noticed a coil of rope sitting at the foot of her bed, somehow unnoticed before. She tied an end around the thick leg of her bed, and threw the rest out the window.
She held the rope tightly as she lowered herself out of the window, down into the darkness toward the cries. One hand after another, further down the rope–
"MOMMY!"
Three terrified little voices shrieked out in unison above Fiona. She raised her head, her neck straining as she clung to the rope with all of her frail might.
The faces of her three children were huddled at the tower's window - three little ogres no older than six, their eyes full of terror and tears. "Help us Mommy!" "Please!" "We're scared, Mommy!" "Help!" they sobbed, their voices a random, deafening cacophony. Fiona could only stare back up at them from where she dangled, horror-stricken.
She looked back down over her shoulder, toward the smoky abyss, the infant's ceaseless cries searing through her skull like a white-hot spear. Every cell in her screamed at her to continue down. She looked back up at the triplets, their desperate pleas ripping the fabric of her mind in two.
Tears streaming down her pale face, she finally pulled her arm up the rope, back up toward her tower room, where her children were trapped.
Just as she grabbed her first hold, her vision suddenly filled with the swirl of gold dust.
"No!" She clenched the rope harder as she transformed.
The triplets' cries and the infant's wails kept her battered mind from forming thoughts. She opened her eyes, the delicate hands that held onto the rope for dear life now large and green.
Over all the unbearable noise, the strain and snap of fibers cut through as the rope snapped.
Thick black smoke whipped her face as she fell down, down, endlessly down toward the bubbling lava that somehow encircled the tower. She screamed, but the sound was lost in the smoke, her throat raw from soot and strain.
The heat of the lava lapped at her skin, finally consuming her as she–
"Fiona… Fiona… Fi!"
She gasped awake, actually awake, the end of a vocalization still burning in her throat. Her husband's face came into focus above her, his warm hands rubbing her shoulders to wake her. Fiona's hands frantically felt all around as her panicked eyes darted around the room - the earthen ceiling, the empty crib below the window, the still-lit candle on her nightstand. Everything was there.
She shot upright in bed, breath ragged and heart pounding in her ears. The dim reflection of her and Shrek in the vanity mirror caught her eye. She was herself, as she always was, not a husk of a long-forgotten ghost. Of course she was. She felt a kick from within, and her hand met her middle. Another few followed.
"Ye all right?" Shrek placed a gentle hand on her back.
Fiona nodded quickly, shoving her bangs back off her clammy face.
A nightmare was nothing new for her, nor her husband. But it had been so long since she'd had one, months - long before the kids had even mentioned Leaving, so long ago that she couldn't even place it.
Not that she thought they'd stopped, of course; she wasn't so naive to think that anymore, no matter how long a gap in between. Not even candlelight was always enough to keep them at bay.
She looked up at her husband, and the lump lodged in her throat broke free as she fell against him, sobbing. His arms immediately wrapped around her, holding her fast to him.
"Aht–!" A loose rock under Fergus's foot gave way, but a firm hand from the ledge above him gripped his wrist and kept him in place. Fergus took hold of his brother's wrist back, as he climbed up with Farkle's assistance.
"Thanks," Fergus grunted, all four limbs now securely atop the plateau.
"Mhm," Farkle replied as the two scooted away from the cliff's edge. Felicia slowly turned her head toward her brothers from where she was squatted, her awe evident. The boys, however, were too consumed with what was before them - what had inspired her awe in the first place - to return her glance.
The dark, charred castle that lay across the lava moat loomed before the three, even from its distance. The heat of the bubbling lava hit their faces with a rude gust, despite being quite far beneath them. The brimstone saturating the air stung their noses, irritating the back of their throats. The rope-and-plank bridge that extended out across the endless lake of lava swayed with a mocking ease.
Fergus had, of course, realized how painfully close to the Keep he'd unwittingly meandered on his solo sojourn; when the three looked out upon the same vast, barren valley that surrounded the forebodingly clouded mountain, his stomach began to sink as the map indeed told them to continue on in that direction.
He wasn't about to tell them that, of course, knowing they would never let him live it down. He would just keep his little shame to himself.
"Dunno what I expected," Felicia mused, finally present enough to raise back up to her feet, "but… wow."
"Seriously," Fergus seconded, also standing. "Like yeah, there was the lava, and Aunt Dragon keeping guard, but I never really thought about what that meant, ya know." The other two hummed in agreement.
"Why did I have a mental image of like, a single tower in some secluded valley, Aunt Dragon just chillin' at the bottom of it," Farkle offered, his tone still far-off as he took it all in.
"Wrong princess, dude, that's Rapunzel," Felicia replied, the joke seeming to bring the three back to the present. She began to make her way down the steep incline toward the beginning of the bridge.
"Oh yeah, huh," Farkle conceded, he and Fergus close behind her. "Wasn't she like, a huge bi–"
"Betrayed Mom and Grandma, yeah," Fergus interrupted. He inhaled, as if to continue speaking, but stopped himself.
Felicia whipped her head back at him as she stopped under the large pillar beside the bridge. "We're not betraying her. 'Kay?" she retorted. "If anything, she–" But she stopped herself - not only noticing her brothers' shifting expressions, but also because… well, she didn't really mean it herself.
"I thought we were over that," Farkle muttered, coming to a stop as well.
Felicia exhaled in surrender. "We are." She looked from Farkle to Fergus, any ire having left her eyes. "Right?"
Fergus looked between the two, his knapsack straps in his fists. "Right." He turned his head, letting his glance go down the bridge mere feet from where they stood - his vision started to tunnel a bit, the dubious slats all blurring together into a single precarious path to cross the molten moat that separated the three from their destination.
"Right," Farkle echoed sarcastically, an eye roll signaling his lack of confidence in either sibling's assertion. He strode past them, bumping Fergus's shoulder as Farkle began across the bridge, Felicia close behind.
"I thought the bridge got burnt up," Farkle mused half to himself as he clomped forward.
"Obviously not, idiot," Felicia scoffed. "That was Uncle Donkey's tail–"
"Hey–" Fergus blurted, trying and failing to grab his sister's arm before she too stepped onto the unvetted structure. "Shouldn't we like, test it first?" he asked, concerned at their flagrant lack of concern.
"Why?" Felicia replied flatly, calmly standing a number of planks deep along the bridge. "It held Dad and Uncle Donkey–"
"AND Mom too, crossing it back!" Farkle added over her shoulder, a few yards further along.
"Almost twenty years ago," Fergus emphasized, "AND she was a tiny human lady when she did it! Who knows how all this smoke exposure has compromised the integrity of the–"
"Fine," Felicia relented, unable to keep a tinge of condescension from her tone. "Why don't you come stand on the first plank and we'll see if it can hold all of us at once. Hold onto the post with one hand, my hand with the other," she clarified, grabbing Farkle's hand, "and if anything happens, you'll be our anchor. Okay?"
Fergus remained unconvinced, eyeing their feet with unease.
Farkle lifted he and Felicia's joined hands, shaking them impatiently. "Come on, it's hot as balls over this lava," he urged.
Fergus raised a hesitant eyebrow at him, then looked at Felicia in front of him. He finally released a pent-up sigh, and approached the edge of the bridge. "Fine." He wrapped his arm around one of the posts, and held out his other, which Felicia quickly took. He inched off the rocky ground until both feet were on the bridge, his heels flush against the edge of the first plank as his feet stretched over the next couple.
The three stood on the bridge a moment, as still as possible despite the unavoidable light swaying. The rope fibers weren't straining, and the planks weren't splintering.
"See?" Felicia offered. "We're good."
Fergus nodded, his arm slowly relinquishing its hold of the post. He took another step forward–
"SEE!" Farkle shouted with a gleeful grin, squatting up and down energetically to make the bridge ripple and bounce. "WE'RE GOOD!" He continued making his way forward across the molten moat.
"AHH! FARK STOP–" Fergus squawked, attempting to immobilize himself where he stood, but he was no match for Felicia's iron grip pulling him forward.
"We're good! We're good!" she shouted as encouragingly as she could muster, forcing him across the bridge with them.
Fergus's resistance didn't diminish until they'd reached about halfway, at which point he seemed to resign himself to the fate his impulsive siblings had laid out.
No sooner had Fergus come to terms with potential doom, he tripped forward off the end of the bridge, belly flopping onto a gloriously solid surface.
"You… you…" he panted up at Farkle, "…Jerk." Farkle offered him a hand up, but Fergus ignored it, pushing himself up despite his jelly-like arms and legs. Farkle shrugged, and turned his attention back to the Keep.
"I'm this close to saying what I said to you back outside Duloc," Felicia commented calmly as she helped steady him. "But I'm working on myself, so I won't." She messed his hair. "Just know: it's very tempting." Fergus grimaced sarcastically at her.
Felicia looked back up at the castle that the three now stood directly below, just a handful of meters from the main entrance. She scanned the skyline, looking for the tallest of the towers.
"Ah!" she said to herself, digging into her bag for her new spyglass. She aimed and extended it up to what she confirmed to be the highest window on what was the tallest tower. It was dark up there, of course, but that was clearly their target.
She sensed a rogue hand entering her field of vision, and swerved herself away from Fergus's grasp.
"This is MY Christmas gift," she sneered as she stepped away from Fergus, toward the Keep. She collapsed the spyglass and shoved it securely back into her bag, continuing down the stone bridge as she kept her self-righteous glance on Fergus. "Sorry your slingshot isn't the most useful at the moment–"
Her smug bragging was cut short as she toppled over a rogue Farkle, who was sat smack in the middle of the uneven walkway.
"Are you KIDDING–" she griped as she picked herself up off the ground. Fergus's satisfied smirk went unnoticed behind her.
"Oh my bad," Farkle mumbled plainly, his attention still on the boots he'd fully removed off of his feet. He folded the tops back and forth, pulled the tongue, and kneaded the still-stiff toes and heels.
"Still aren't broken in?" Fergus observed, quietly delighting in his brother's karmic discomfort.
"Might've helped if you actually wore them after Christmas before we Left," Felicia chided, noting his raw, chafed ankles.
"Might've helped if Mom actually made them the right size," Farkle snipped back, shoving them back onto his feet begrudgingly. He left the laces undone, desperate for any small relief. "Should've just worn my old ones," he muttered as he got to his feet, continuing forward past the other two.
The three continued forward, over the obtrusive crack in the stone bridge and the surrounding rubble. As they passed under the massive archway, Fergus approached one of its formidable pillars, swiping a finger through the thick layer of black soot that clung to it. He brought his blackened fingertip closer and paused, wondering how long the ash had taken to gather there. Was it from the lava? Was it there when their parents were here? Or was–
"Yoooooo!" Farkle's voice echoing from within the dilapidated castle snatched Fergus's attention back, and he jogged inside to catch up with the other two.
Farkle and Felicia stood atop the landing of a tremendous cement staircase that seemed to lead deep into the castle, heads tilted upward and mouths agape. Fergus traversed the toppled pillars, all too aware of the orange glow that shone through the cracks in the floor that their collapse had created. Fergus met them where they stood, unable to stop himself from staring in awe at the unending palace around them.
"Whoa," Felicia exhaled, striding to the landing's railing, specifically the human skeleton that was draped over it. Her brothers were close behind, similarly intrigued. She reached out to touch it, but the skeleton fell apart before her finger even made contact, its upper half falling over the bannister into the abyss below and its legs falling into a dusty heap at the ogres' feet.
"Oops," Felicia uttered under her breath, retracting her hand sheepishly.
Having noticed one pile of bones, others began to stand out from the shadowy darkness all around them. A lot of them. A pair of legs still standing in its metal boots and shin guards, a headless and limbless chest encased in a breastplate, and mounds of assorted bones and melee weapons and armor mixed together.
"Aunt Dragon doesn't play around," Farkle remarked, summoning amused exhales from the other two. He knelt down, his aim on a particularly spikey battle axe, but a hand pulled his shoulder back to his annoyance.
"I don't think we should be touching anymore stuff," Fergus cautioned, side eyeing his sister.
"Why not?" Farkle retorted. "Who's gonna know? That axe is sick–"
"And what are you gonna do with it?" Fergus lobbed back. "Take it home?"
Farkle inhaled to continue arguing, but he realized with frustration he didn't have anything adequate to counter it. "We're not going home anytime soon," he shrugged as unaffectedly as he could manage, adding an eye roll for good measure. "I'll get it on the way back."
As they wandered further through the Keep, they found themselves exiting the dark interior of the castle into an open courtyard, the dark swirling clouds above visible again.
"Hey, is that–" Fergus's eyeline raised from the ground to the sky - like locating the Duloc Museum, but without a map this time.
"Yeah," Felicia replied, her tone almost reverent. "It is."
The three looked at each other - any previous annoyances long forgotten, all still beside themselves that they were actually, finally, here. And it was more incredible than they could've imagined, than the stories they'd been told could have ever suggested.
Felicia offered her brothers a playful smirk and a raised eyebrow, which they mirrored. The three bent their heads forward until their foreheads touched, their toes forming a triangle below them. The last time they'd attempted to do it had fizzled out - before walking into Christmas Eve. This time would make up for it in spades.
They crossed one last small stone bridge over the ever-bubbling lava, into the narrow interior of the tower's spiraling stairs. The claustrophobic structure contained only the staircase, the steps themselves barely visible in the near pitch blackness.
The three began their single-file ascent up, up, up - it WAS the tallest tower, after all. They were unsure of how high they were, nor how much further they had to go. They didn't talk, concentrating only on the constant flex and strain of their legs and their elevated heart rates - whether from the exertion, or growing nerves, or both.
"HUPT–" Farkle broke the collective silence as he tripped, having caught an untied lace under his step. Bringing up the rear, he was fortunately far enough back to not take Fergus or subsequently Felicia down with him. His arms shot out to catch himself, one on the inside wall of the staircase, and one on the outer wall. The outer wall remained intact long enough for Farkle to regain his balance, but the bricks soon gave way under his hand's pressing, leaving a sizable hole in the stairwell wall. The splash of falling bricks hitting the lava below was just audible - as the staircase rotated upwards, where they stood right now was directly facing the fiery moat.
"Be careful!" Fergus blurted between heavy breaths as his head spun around, eyes wide at his brother's misstep.
Farkle's mouth pressed into a thin, irate line. "Yeah? No kidding!" he spat sarcastically, similarly breathless. He peered out of the makeshift window he'd created, but there was too much smoke to see how far off the Keep's ground level they were.
"Tie your shoes, maybe?" Felicia prodded, descending one step closer.
"It's fine, I know where to step now," he responded, his glance still out of the new hole in the wall. He stuck his head a bit further out and turned upward, noting the lip of a stone windowsill a handful of yards directly above the hole.
"We're almost there!" Farkle exclaimed. As he pulled his head back inside the safety of the stairwell, Felicia and Fergus had already taken off, closing the final stretch of the endless ascent towards their goal.
Farkle quickly caught back up to his siblings, completing another full rotation up the stairs. Two more holes in the outer wall were met, before both brothers abruptly bumped into their sister's back, stopped in her tracks atop the final landing.
An arched doorway lay before them, peaked at the top like most every other one they'd come across in this place. A formidable wooden door stood widely ajar, splintered wood and mangled metal strewn about the floor.
The three moved closer, silent save for their heaving breaths, peering inside but making no move to enter. Despite the open door, it felt as if some intangible barrier was in place, between where they stood and the interior of the chamber. The barrier that had been instilled in them over their whole lives… the barrier that they could never, ever tell their parents they had crossed.
Within each ogre there sparked the slight, unmistakable pang to turn back. They'd never actually been explicitly told to never come to the Dragon's Keep; it was just understood. The grandeur of the decaying castle having subsided, the weight of their actions was finally making itself known, bombarding their consciences and rooting them in place at the top of the staircase.
They could feel one another's tension beside them, the physical manifestation of their brains at war with their hearts.
Felicia shook her head out of her state. "Come on," she said, perhaps more for her own benefit than either brother beside her. Farkle and Fergus deliberately exhaled in agreement.
Felicia took a single step past the doorway's threshold, both feet planted just inside the circular room. She wanted to move further inside, she had to, but her feet didn't want to cooperate.
Farkle attempted to look inside the chamber around his sister, but couldn't resist his impatience. He began to pull her backpack off her shoulders, to annoy her enough to snap her out of her nerves. She flinched at the movement, shaking her bag out of his grasp - mission accomplished.
Felicia took another full step into the room, letting her bag drop off her shoulders behind her. She took another step, her eyes not moving from the curtained bed that lay across the room from her. Her eyes began to take in the ornate carvings on the bed poster–
"Fel–!" Farkle choked, tripping over his sister's bag dropped by the door, inadvertently shoving her even further forward as he found his footing.
Fergus, who had been quite content to stay outside the room at the back of the group, was suddenly presented with an unobstructed view through the door. Not that he was particularly eager to see inside, but his head reflexively turned toward the newly revealed site. He found his feet moving into the room, letting his bag fall to the floor beside Felicia's as he approached his siblings rising to their feet.
The three looked back between one another as they stood in the center of the circular room, as if checking in one last time to make sure everyone was still on board. Any nervous ambivalence that may have existed behind any of their eyes wasn't enough to qualify, so they silently agreed to stay, and began looking around the room more curiously.
The sizable hole in the ceiling courtesy of their father let in a bit more light than without it, dim as it was from the dark clouds above. The fallen chandelier, the stone rubble scattered about, a dilapidated vanity and stool, and every other visible surface lay under a thick layer of dust.
Felicia stepped closer to the bed, toward a small side table with a delicate flower vase on it, but no flowers - any it may have once contained had likely long since dried up into dust, just like everything else in here. She reached for the gossamer curtain beside her, and drew it slightly back with a single finger. The bedding was slightly rippled, untouched since its former resident last laid upon it, as was the ornate cylindrical pillow, the pristine white linen dulled with two decades of neglect.
Farkle had made his way to the large trunk by the foot of the bed. It looked nearly identical to the one their parents had under their own bed. He knelt down to open–
"Wait," Fergus urged, striding toward him.
"What!?" Farkle snapped at his brother's continued micromanagement. "Are we NOT gonna look around?" He looked up at Felicia, still investigating the bed. "Why don't you ever stop her from–"
"I just mean–" Fergus offered, the trepidation in his voice resurfacing, "What if they, like… come back at some point? And they see that things have been–"
"As if they'd come back," Felicia scoffed, letting the bed's curtain fall back into place. "If they haven't by now, I don't think they ever will."
Farkle pushed himself up from his knees, his center of balance altered slightly by the knapsack still on his back. "Why would anyone besides us even have a reason to–"
SLAM!
Their three heads snapped back to the chamber door.
Two green-grey skinned witches hovered on broomsticks in front of it, evil grins on their faces as they glowered at the trio.
They suddenly zoomed around the trio, corralling their captives into the center of the circular room. One witch took hold of the bed's gossamer curtain and ripped it off the canopy, leaving the window unobscured before landing back in front of the exit with her cohort.
"Sooo!" A faintly familiar, grating voice sounded from somewhere beyond the window. The ogres' heads whipped from the witches to the last voice they ever expected to hear again.
A third witch-piloted broom slowly lowered into view, the imp that the three now knew so much about perched atop her shoulder. He grinned far too widely, his huge turquoise eyes shining with glee as he looked at his captive audience.
"How was Christmas?"
Again I say: LET'S GOOOOOOO
Alexa play Mother by Danzig… again
Thank you for reading!
