Dusk of the Realm

25

Will had not been able to sleep all night. Or else, he assumed that night had passed already, though he could easily have been wrong. The dungeons of the castle were dark and bleak; prisoners were not given the luxury of windows to absorb the sunlight. Typically, anyone unfortunate enough to be sentenced to imprisonment in the castle itself never got to see the light of day again.

That was how he heard the telltale signs of an approach. He clambered to his feet immediately, expecting to see Tarin appear on the other side of the bars. He was ready to apologize to the general, if that was what it took. Deep down, if Will set aside his jealousy of Tarin, he really did still respect him more than nearly any other Fae. He knew that he had been out of line when he taunted the general about the princess, and he knew that unless he made a real show of knowing so, he would never get out of this cell.

When his eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond the bars, he unintentionally moved back a step.

They stared at each other for a long moment, neither saying a word. Though he could see fine with his Fae vision, it did not stop the scene from looking eerie, and the blatant emptiness in his visitor's face did not act to reassure him in the slightest.

"Why have you come, Princess?"

He swallowed as he watched her mouth curl up. So many of the enemies he had faced down in his life had smiled at him like that; as if they were not afraid of anything, as if they actually yearned for the pain of others.

It was an expression wildly out of place on Serena, whose smile he had adored since the first time she had lit up his room with it. Not to mention, she was standing before him in a long, loose white nightgown - not blood-soaked battle gear. It was improper for him to see her in such a garment, but he did not look away from the shards of blue glass that her eyes had become.

"I just couldn't have you spreading lies, Will," she responded, in a tone as sweet as honey. A taste like metal, sharp and with a tang, spread throughout his mouth at the sound. He was not sure if his body was reacting to the sweetness of her false voice or if he had bitten his cheek hard enough to produce blood - what he did know was that something was off here, so off as to be disastrous. But he did not know what he could do about it.

Will swallowed, trying to flush the taste away, and took a hesitant step towards the center of the cell, still keeping his distance from her. "Princess... I don't understand. Why are you pretending that you didn't come with me? Tarin would never get angry with you for long--"

"Those are the sorts of lies I'm talking about, Will," Serena cut him off, her eyes dark, but her voice just as light as before. "You're going to get me in trouble."

Will narrowed his eyes. His sense of unease was so great that he started imagining the bars of the cell moving towards him, all the walls of the cell compressing around him until he was encased in stone.

"Princess, I would never want to get you into trouble," he said, as calmly as he could muster, "but you and I both know I'm not lying. Please tell me why you're saying these things. Are you in danger? Did something happen in the forest?"

She did not answer. Will watched in an entranced horror as Serena moved a few steps back from the bars and began to twirl and fall into the slow steps of a dance, her arms lifted and clearly around an imaginary partner. She hummed to herself, a soft, ghostly melody that he had never heard before. Her eyes were closed, and her gown brushed against the floor without a sound, swaying occasionally to reveal her bare feet.

He was beginning to think that she had somehow sleepwalked all the way down here when he registered something zooming through the air towards him. He flinched and covered his head with his arms, unable to create a magic shield from inside of these cells - a quality he had always admired in their construction until now.