Death's Daughter: A Disney's Descendants Story

Gargoyle Bridge

    After traveling through the thorn forest, the five some were more than happy to find a real path leading up to the dark castle on the hill above them.
    Plain old dirt and rock had never looked so good.
    Until it began to rain, and the dirt became mud, and the rock became slippery.
    Carlos's invention was beeping at regular intervals, its sensor light flashing more brightly and more quickly with every step that drew the closer to the fortress. "The Dragon's Eye is definitely up there," Carlos said excitedly feeling a scientist's enthusiasm at a working experiment. "If this thing is right, I'm picking up on some kind of massive surge in electrical energy. If there is a hole in the dome, its leaking magic here somehow, different from the Isle of the Lost."
     "Maybe the hold is right above this place," said Evie.
     "Yeah, I can feel it too." Mal nodded, still moving forward along the path. "Do you guys?" She stopped and looked at them, shielding her eyes from the rain with one hand.
    Carlos looked at her in surprise. "Feel what? This?"He held up his box, and it beeped in her face. Mal jumped back, startled. Jay laughed and Hesper smirked.
     "Whoops," Carlos said. "See what I mean? The energy is surging."
     Mal looked embarrassed. "I don't know for sure. Maybe I'm imaging it, but it almost feels like there's some kind of magnet pulling me up the path."
     "That is so creepy," Evie said, stopping to wipe sweat off her forehead with the edge of her cape. "Like it's your destiny, literally, calling."
      Hesper raised an eyebrow. "Destiny?"
      "Well," said Carlos, "no, not really. If it were literally calling, it would be, you know, calling her."
Jay laughed.
     Evie glared at him. "Okay, fine. Literally pulling like a magnet, only not really, because it's, you know, destiny. Are you happy now?"
     "Literally?" Carlos asked.
     Jay laughed again, which made Carlos feel good, though he couldn't exactly explain why, not even to himself.
     "Don't you guys feel it?" Mal sounded nervous. Nobody said anything, and she sighed, turning back to the muddy path.
     They'd only made it up past the next curving switchback in the path when Mal stumbled and fell, sending a slide of rock down the trail behind her.
     "Who-ahh," Mal yelped, her arms flailing. The dark stones were so slick with rain that she couldn't right herself, only slipping on the rocks again.
     Evie caught Mal before she tumbled headfirst down the stony path. Hesper tried to help Evie and Mal from falling, but lost her balance causing the trio of girls to fall backwards into Jay, who almost toppled Carlos behind him.
     "I got you," said Evie helping Mal regain her balance.
     "Yeah, and I got you three," Jay said.
     "Which is great for everyone but me," Carlos said, barely keeping one arms around his device as the other held Jay off of him. "The human doorstep."
     "I am definitely in the wrong shoes for this," Evie said, wincing at the sight of her own feet.
     "The rain has turned this whole trail into a mud river," Hesper observed. "There's no way we can get up without someone getting seriously hurt, or worse."
      "Maybe we should all hold hands," Jay suggested. "We'll work better if we're all together."
      "Did you really just say that?" Mal shook her head, sounding disgusted. "Why don't we just sing songs to cheer each other up and then weave flowers out of the mud and move to Auradon, while we're at it?"
      "Come on, Mal." Carlos tried not to smile. He knew that Mal, of all of them, had the hardest time with anything more beneficent than Maleficent.
     "Do you have a better idea?" Jay looked embarrassed.
     "If you wanted to hold my hand, you know, you could have just asked," teased Evie, as she offered it to Jay, waggling her fingers.
     "Well, now," Jay winked. "You don't say?"
      Evie laughed. "Don't worry, Jay, you're cute—but thieves aren't my style."
     "I wasn't worried," said Jay smoothly, grasping her hand in his firm grip. "I just don't feel like taking a mud bath." He over looked at Hesper, who was standing beside him, her arms crossed over her chest for warmth, and her light blue hair dripping wet. "I'm guessing you want to hold my hand to?"
      Hesper rolled her eyes and scoffed, "In your dreams." He held out his hand to her. She hesitated for a moment, but grabbed on, feeling Jay's sturdy grip tighten around her hand. Hesper looked down, watching as the mud became more river like, she shuddered at the thought of the river growing and taking her below the surface. This is the only way, she thought to herself.
      "From a physics perspective, it does make sense. If you want to walk about Newtons second and third laws," Carlos added, trying to sound reassuring. "You know, momentum and force, and all that."
     "Sure, what he said." Hesper nodded, shakily holding out her hand to Mal.
     Carlos watched them. He wondered if Jay flirting with Hesper and Evie was why Mal seemed mad. No. Mal and Jay bickered like siblings. And Jay, Evie, and Hesper were trying to cover up the fact that they were scared. He couldn't help but notice that Hesper had a similar facial expression to when they were on the scarp boat. It confused him as to why though. They were two extremely different situations.
      Jay had told him earlier that he thought Evie was cute, all right, but he thought of her like he did Mal, which meant he didn't think of her at all. As for Hesper, well she had slapped him on the back of the head when he had teased Evie. He did tell him that he thought Hesper was intriguing and mysterious. But, so did everyone else.
      Carlos thought that if the girls were had been their sisters, Mal would have been their annoying, grumpy sister, Evie would have been the manipulative, pretty one, while Hesper would be the distant, yet clever-witted one. And if Jay had been his brother, he'd be the kind who was either laughing at you or punching you when he wasn't busy stealing your stuff.
      The longer he thought about it, the more Carlos decided it wasn't so bad to be an only child after all.
      "Come on, Mal. Just take it. Even Newton agrees," Jay said, while still grasping Evie and Hesper's hands tightly. Hesper wiggled her fingers at Mal.
     Mal gave up with a sigh, grabbing it after only a slight hesitation. Mal then held her hand out to Carlos, who grabbed it as if it were a lifesaver, seeing as he knew his physics better than any of them.
     Somewhat awkwardly, and little by little, the five of them pulled and pushed and helped each other slosh their way up the muddy path, sweaty palms and muddy ankles and cold feet and all.
      Before long the pathway curved once again, and now the thick rain cloud surrounding it seemed to part on either side of the five adventurers, revealing a sudden and dramatic vista—what happened to be long and slender stone bridge, half-shrouded in mist, that jutted out above a chasm in the rock directly in front of them.
     "It's beautiful," Evie said, shivering. "In a really terrifying way."
     "It's just a bridge," Carlos said, holding up his box. "But we definitely have to cross it. Look—," The light was flashing so brightly and so quickly that he covered the sensor with one hand.
     "Duh," Jay said.
     Hesper rolled her eyes slightly. "Thanks, Captain Obvious."
     "It's not just a bridge," Mal said, in a low voice, staring at the gray shape in front of her. "It's her bridge. Maleficent's bridge. And it's pulling me. I have to cross it. It wants me to get to the other side."
      "It's not the bridge I'm worried about," Carlos said, looking into the distance. "Look!"
     Beyond the bridge and mist, a black castle rose from a pillar of stone. The bridge was the only way to reach the castle, as sheer cliffs surrounded the black fortress on all sides.
     But the castle itself was so forbidding, it didn't exactly look like a place that wanted to be reached.
    "That's it," Mal breathed. "That has to be the forbidden Fortress." The darkest place on their dark isle—Maleficent's old lair, and ancestral home.
    "Sweet," Jay said. "That's one sick shack."
     Evie studied it from behind him, still shivering. "And I thought our castle was drafty."
    "I can't believe that we actually found it," Carlos stared from his box to the castle. "And I can't believe it was so close to the island all along."
    "This place is definitely runner up with the Underworld on a level of dark and gloomly," Hesper muttered. She remembered hearing stories about the Underworld from her father when she was younger. He had described it so vividly, Hesper had had no trouble picturing it.
     Mal's eyes were dark, and her expression was impossible to read. She looked almost stunned, Carlos thought. "I guess that explains the rain. The Forbidden Fortress hides itself in a shroud of fog and mist. It's like a moat, I guess."
     Carlos examined the air around him. "Of course it is. A defensive mechanism, built into the atmosphere itself."
     "I'm sure my mom designed it to keep everyone she didn't want out."
     She didn't say the rest, so Jay said it for her. "Which means, you know, everyone."
     Hesper found it hard to look away from the black tower on the hill. No wonder the citizens of the Isle of the Lost were told to keep away. Here was concrete proof of villainy, of the power of darkness and infamy.
     Maleficent's Darkness.
     It wasn't just any evil. What loomed in front of them was the most powerful and most storied darkness in the kingdom.
     Hesper suddenly felt it—the magnetic pull Mal had tried to describe. She could feel it humming in the air, in the very stones beneath her feet. Hesper wondered if this was just a taste of what having true powers felt like. Maleficent's magic was different then her father's was. In fact no magic could compare to the power of a God. That was why, besides Maleficent, Hades was the next most feared on the island. Though he didn't think a whole lot of it. He hated arrogance even more then Hercules or his brother, Zeus.
     "You feel it to, huh?" Carlos asked from behind her. She whipped her head around. She had been so deep in thought; all the voices around her seemed to have vanished.
      "Yeah," Hesper replied in a low whisper.
     "Look," Jay said, yanking back an armful of overgrown vines that covered the stony steps leading up to the main ramp of the bridge. He tossed them to the side.
     "What are those horrible, ugly creatures?" Evie made a face. "No, thanks. I'll stay on this side of those things."
     Because now that the vines were gone, they could see that the entire bridge appeared to be guarded by ancient stony gargoyles. The winged gryphon's glared down at them from where they perched, flanking the bridge on either side.
     "Lovely," Jay said.
     Carlos stared. It wasn't only Mal who could see hjer mother's hand in every stone around them. The carved creatures sneered in exactly the same way Maleficent did, their teeth pointed, their mouths cruel.
     Mal looked at them frozen.
    Then Carlos realized it was because she was paralyzed with fear. "Mal?"
    She didn't answer.
    She can't do this alone, Carlos thought. None of us can.
    It's not different from pulling each other through the mud. It's just physics, if you think about it. It's science.
     But then Carlos tried not to think about it, because his heart was pounding so loudly, he thought the others would hear it. He began to recite the periodic table of the elements in his head to calm himself down. Atomic numbers and electrons were always somewhat comforting in times of stress, he found.
     And the more numbers he recited, the easier it was to put one foot in front of the other.
    Which is exactly what he did.
    Carlos stepped up to the first stone paver that led to the sloping bridge. Just as he did, the stone gargoyles began to flap their wings in front of them.
    "Whoa!" Jay said.
    "No," Evie said. "Just, no."
    "How is this possible?" asked Jay. "There's no magic on this island."
    "The hole in the dome," Hesper said looking at the gloomy sky.
    "It must have sparked the castle to life or something, like a chemical reaction," Carlos added. It made sense—not only had Diablo been unfroze, but the whole fortress as well.
Carlos moved his way up the next step, and then the next, until he was standing level with the main ramp of the bridge itself. Mal, Hesper, Evie, and Jay now followed behind him.
     The creatures growled as they came to life around them, the bridge rumbling beneath their feet. The gryphon's horrible eyes glowed green, illuminating the fog around them, until they were practically shining a spotlight on the five intruders. The gargoyles uncurled their hunched backs, now almost doubling themselves in height. They were really ugly things, with snaggly teeth and forked tongues.
     "This must be residue, left over from the magical years," Carlos said. "Whatever did this was probably part of the same power that sparked Diablo to life."
     "The same power?" Mal looked spellbound. "You mean my mother's?"
     "Or the same electromagnetic wave. I'm not sure how to tell the difference anymore."
     Jay swallowed as a gargoyle leaned down, looking as if it could spring at Carlos at any moment. "Right now, I'm pretty sure the difference doesn't matter."
     "Who goes there?" boomed the gargoyle to the right of Carlos.
    "You cannot pass," said the one on his left.
    "Yeah? Says Who?" Carlos took a step back, as did the rest of the group following behind him.  They looked at each other nervously, unsure of what to do next. They hadn't known about the gargoyles, hadn't expected a fight. This was going to be more difficult than they expected, maybe even impossible.
    "You ugly things need to move!" said Mal, shouting from behind him. She glared at the gargoyles. "Or I'm going to make you!"
     The gargoyles growled and grimaced, flapping their stone wings as a threat.
    "Any ideas?" Carlos looked over his shoulder nervously. "We don't have weapons or magic. What would we fight with? Besides, how do we fight something made of stone?"
     "There has to be away," Mal said. "We have to pass!" she shouted again. "Let us through!"
     "Yeah, I'm not sure that's working," Hesper sighed.
     The gargoyle glared at the children with glowing eyes, their fangs bared, their stony wings beating the wind. "You cannot pass," they said again in unison—and just as the creatures spoke, the thick gray clouds surrounding the long stone ramp dissipated, revealing a gap in the bridge, a forty-foot gulf with nothing below but air.
     The bridge was broken, virtually impassable.