The Dark Queen (The Dark Queens Book 5) (11 page)

There were few in all of Kingdom—either the above or the below—who boasted features such as hers. Skin as dark as deepest night, eyes as golden as the dawn, and hair that hung in soft, billowy waves down her back.

She was a product of true love. It was why she was as beautiful as she was, but her heart had turned dark, had been fouled by the spite, ugliness, and vanity of this realm.

Clenching long fingers against her robe, she turned her face to the side, studying the long, swan-like profile of herself.

Recently though she’d discovered something terrifying about herself. Something that had happened quite by accident. Mirror had been studying her silently as she’d dressed for her yearly royal ball.

The one time a year when she tried to actually be kind to her denizens and show them that their queen wasn’t such a cruel, heartless witch as they thought her. And quite without thinking, she’d simply asked mirror, “how do I look?”

That was when it had happened.

Mirror had shown her not a stunning, vivacious beauty who looked as nubile and exquisite now as she had decades earlier, but instead there’d been another picture given her.

That of an old, withered hag with long drawn out features and aged flesh covered in sores and spots. There had been very little hair on her bald head, and what there’d been was thin and wild. She’d looked like a monster, like an evil crone from one of those blasted fairy tales the damned fairies liked to skew.

She’d shrieked at the vision, demanding Mirror tell her why he’d shown her that image, and that was when her world had been rocked.

“That woman,” Mirror had said softly, “is no accident, my queen.”

“Then who is it!” She’d screamed and railed, wanting to use her magick to shatter him into a thousand slivers so as to make that goddess awful image vanish, but knowing that if she did she’d lose her only friend forever.

Mirror had looked baffled like he couldn’t fathom that she hadn’t figured it out on her own. And even now, three months later, she still trembled when she recalled the hushed whisper of his gravelly voice as she’d said, “Why, it’s you. You asked me how you looked, and this is who I see when I look into your heart now, Fable. You are no longer sprite, young, and lovely. You have been twisted by madness and black magick, this hag, my queen... this hag is you.”

Shutting him up had been the only thing she’d known to do. She’d sealed his lips with magick and slowly backed away, shaking her head in denial. But as the days, weeks, and now months passed and every day she asked Mirror the same thing, the vision had gotten no prettier. In fact, mirror Fable had deteriorated worse.

Swallowing hard, she searched the pretty eyes looking back at her. To the rest of the world, this might be what she looked like, but Fable had seen the real sight, and it had been burned into her brain.

“Mirror,” she whispered slowly, “how do I look today?”

Even when Uriah wasn’t actively in his mirror, the magick held true. And just as before, the woman staring back at her was a befouled, disease riddled thing. Now, not only was the flesh aged, but also decaying in spots. The skin around her nose was turning gray. But that wasn’t the worst; the worst was around her mouth, where the flesh had rotted so badly she could see through her cheek to the teeth inside.

Trembling, and inhaling rapidly, she shook her head but could no longer deny the truth.

Like a cancer, the black magick was twisting her, changing her.

Fable hadn’t known the effects of such terrible magick until it was far too late. Galeta the bitch hadn’t ever bothered to share it. That little fae had hightailed it away from Fable after the incident.

At first, she’d thought that perhaps it was just the reflection that was twisted, but a deep-seated root of worry had gnawed at her belly for days, she’d not wanted to speak to Mirror of it because she didn’t think a mirror would care nearly as much as she did. Also, it had felt far too private to admit that she was scared. Which she was. She was petrified.

So one night, two weeks ago she’d consulted with the dark elf of the forest. A being far more twisted and deranged than Fable was. Where Fable only looked vile in her reflection, the dark elf appeared as that.

The elf had required payment first—the heart of an unborn babe.

Wicked, Fable might be, but even she had balked at the notion of stealing the heart of an unborn child. So she’d slaughtered a pregnant swine and had butchered the unborn piglet still in its womb. Pig hearts and human hearts looked remarkably similar.

And with a sprinkling of magick she’d stripped the essence of swine off of it, replacing it with that of a human child. Fable’s magick was powerful; she’d known the elf wouldn’t note the difference, and she’d been right.

The gray-skinned being hidden deep within a cloak of shadow, cackled as she brought the bloodied heart to her lips and suckled on it, moaning in sheer, perverted ecstasy.

“One answer and one answer only will I’ll give to thee,” the elf had said in a voice that sounded of rusted chains.

Fable tried to make out the elf’s face; rumors abounded surrounding it. A being of such perverted looks that it appeared as though one of the walking dead, with an eyeball in its palm used for second sight and divination.

Truthfully, Fable wasn’t sure, and she rather thought that not getting to see the dark elf might yet be a blessing in disguise. Swallowing the ball of disgust and fear, she’d clipped a nod.

“I only need one.”

“Then a
sss
k, dark one,” the elf’s voice sounded like the fluttering cadence of a snake’s tongue flicking in and out of its mouth.

Grabbing hold of her stomach, Fable glanced around at the hauntingly quiet enchanted forest. With its thick-trunked, and towering trees covered in green moss, and rolls of fog curling up from the ground, fireflies dancing like drunken fairies in flight...it had all looked like a dream. A strange, surreal dream that she’d desperately wished to wake from but couldn’t seem to.

Gathering what little strength she had left to her, she’d asked.

“Black magick has twisted my reflection into something hideous.”

A low, curling kind of laughter began to echo through the trees. The sound came from the elf.

Stuttering, as her pulse skyrocketed in her chest, she pressed on, “it...it has turned me hideous. What...what will happen to—”

Fable couldn’t keep speaking as the low sound soon turned high-pitched and terrible, like the wail of demon cries.

The elf, who’d been shorter than Fable—or so she’d thought—unfurled like a beanstalk shooting up into the sky.

Backing up, because the elf now towered over her, Fable stared in wide-eyed horror as the cloak was tossed to the side revealing the emaciated, deformed frame of the dark elf to her view.

The creature stood nearly as high as the tree behind her and had a wasted, withered frame full of bone and knots covered only in a thick layer of gray flesh. Her chest cavity was concaved and heaving like a bellows as she cackled with laughter.

Blond, matted hair covered in brambles, weeds, and spider webs whipped back and forth like skeletal branches in a stiff breeze. She was completely naked, but it was almost hard to tell.

Her breasts which were pointed and tipped with black nubs that she could only assume to be nipples dangled nearly down to her belly button, but the skin was so mottled and ruined that it appeared more like elephant skin than that of a humanoid.

Long, razor tipped blackened nails curled menacingly toward the ground like twisted twigs, and eyes as red as magma gleamed back at her malevolently.

“Will ye look like this, then? Is that what ye mean to ask, oh dark queen?” She said the words cruelly and dripping with scorn.

Stepping closer, she cocked her head to the side and grinned, revealing rows of stubbed and blackened teeth.

“Did ye think, ye little witch, that ye could dabble in black magick and not be affected by it? That it wouldn’t demand it’s due? That it wouldn’t sink its claws into you and make you vile to one and all, forevermore?”

Her words were a breathy, lilt of madness that seemed to choke the life out of Fable. She gasped, clutching at her neck, desperate to take in a breath that didn’t hurt, didn’t ache.

But the madness in the elf’s eyes only continued to burn brighter. Lighting up the night and casting long, malevolent shadows everywhere it touched.

“Once, I was a beauty too—”

“No,” Fable shook her head. “No, this can’t be.”

The elf tossed her head back, and the wind howled, bowling through the leaves in the trees and scattering them in every direction. The stench of rot tickled Fable’s nose as the dark elf continued to move in closer and closer.

Her heart twisted with a sick violence because she’d never tasted darkness so powerfully perverted before.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes!” The elf practically screamed.

And then, like magic, the wind ceased. The world grew calm, and where once stood a twisted, deformed, and monstrous perversion now stood a being of such stunning and ethereal beauty that it brought tears to Fable’s eyes.

The dark elf’s skin was still gray, but now it glowed like moonstone. The blond hair that had once been twisted up with twigs and weeds hung long and lush down to the backs of her knees.

Her eyes, which had earlier glowed like hellfire, were now a stunning, clear blue that even in the darkness sparkled like a gem. On her crown rested a gold dipped laurel wreath, and poking out of her hair on either side of her head were two large elf-shaped ears.

Her smile was radiant, and when she spoke, it sounded as clear as bells.

“Once, I looked like you. Beautiful. And all things lovely.”

The cadence of her voice caused goose bumps to rise on Fable’s forearms, and she had a difficult time comprehending that this lovely creature and the hideous monster could truly be one and the same.

“But my heart was twisted and blinded by love, a terrible kind of love. The love of power. I let it consume me, I should have fought harder, but I always thought just a little bit mor
eee
.”

Her voice trembled, deepened, and filled with the dark resonance once again. The pretty façade began to waver, and Fable thought she might be sick.

“What you see in the reflection, Fable of Seren will become who you are in truth if you do not fight the blackness.”

And like a switch had been flipped, the night raged once again. The beauty of before had vanished, and in her place stood the twisted evil. The dark elf leered at Fable and in her eyes, she read the truth. That if she didn’t stop soon, if she didn’t stop what she was doing, this too would be her future.

Grabbing hold of her chest, the frantic beating of her heart thumped wildly against her fist.

“It can’t be. This can’t be.”

“Oh, but it can and it will, darkness! It will!”

The sky erupted with bolts of lightning that tore through the heavens, the ground shook, stones—caught up in the gale force winds—ripped into Fable’s cheeks bloodying her.

And then...it was all gone.

The dark elf.

The storm.

All of it.

Fable had stood in that forest alone, and knowing deep in her soul that this could never be her fate. That she’d fight it, tooth and nail. That she’d do whatever she had to do to make it end, to reverse the damage she’d already done.

Studying her reflection, she promised herself that this night would be the last night she used such evil magick.

“Just once more,” she said, and then frowned.

Wondering if that strange demonic echo she’d just heard could have really come from her. Clamping down on her lips, she ignored the incessant beating in her skull that she should not use anymore black magick.

“If they think me a witch, then a witch I shall be.”

And muttering the incantation beneath her breath, she turned her beautiful self into the image of the woman in the mirror.

Holding out her hands, she studied the grotesque flesh of her hands for only a moment.

But the moment she felt the quiver of powerful magick roll through the air, she turned her mind to what she must do next. Mirror had finally enacted the curse she’d whispered over the castle some years ago.

A sleeping curse. A deep, and unwaking sleeping curse. One only she could break. If Snow White cared so much for the people of this land, then she would know she could not kill Fable, because without her to recant the curse, the people would never rise again.

Uriah’s face filled the mirror a second later. He took only a moment to study her, before nodding. “It is done, my queen.”

She grinned, which, with this face looked more like a hideous pull of lips and gums.

“Good. Now I have only one task left to complete.”

“You will see, Snow,” he said without even asking. Mirror knew her well by now.

She nodded. “Yes. I will go to Snow White, and I will end this once and for all.”

Turning back to her table, Fable picked up the uneaten red apple she’d placed out for her dinner earlier. Walking slowly, since this new withered frame demanded it, she moved toward the cauldron of liquid curse she always kept handy.

Holding the apple firmly by the stem she slowly dipped it in.

“Now any bite shall be your last,” she murmured.

The apple gleamed prettily back at her, looking more perfect than any apple had a right to look. Smirking, she hugged the deadly weapon to her chest with one hand, while with the other she lifted the hood over her bald head.

“I will see you soon, my mirror,” she looked at him, having the queerest sensation of a sudden.

Like she wouldn’t see him soon at all. Like after tonight, everything was going to change, and not necessarily for the better.

Frowning deeply, she blinked and shook her head. Because just as oppressively powerful as the mood had come over her, it now scattered.

“My queen?” he asked, clearly noting her temporary distress.

Holding up her hand, she shook her head. “It is nothing, Mirror. Be well.”

He clipped his head.

Fable turned and whispered, “Time to find the little brat.”