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Roccann’s dead heart swelled as he drew nearer to home. Fantastica’s geography was so mutable that he could not have guessed how much farther he had to go simply from the countries through which he’d traveled. His only clue that he was coming closer was the change in the weather: oppressive golden sunsets and blue noonday skies like daggers in his eyes gradually faded behind him, and the view up ahead became one of low, rolling hills covered in gray grass, overtopped by a sky hung heavy with rainclouds. No breeze made the withered stalks whisper. The air was as still and heavy as a cold hand pressing down on him, and his spirits soared to meet it.
Soon, he knew, he would be among creatures who never flinched away from his smile, never peered cautiously into his drinking cup at state dinners, hoping to find only red wine. At last, Roccann spied the black ramparts of Spook City rising like low-hanging smoke above the dead hills. The news of his return preceded him. By the time he’d passed under the city gate’s keystone, with its carving of a grinning skull in dark basalt, and made his way down those beloved crooked streets to his lady’s palace, the great doors of black iron had been flung open to greet him and the grave-ghouls standing guard outside directed him up the stairs to the Dark Princess’s chamber.
The sight of her terrible beauty made Roccann’s dead heart almost give a single beat. He had spent many months on the journey to and from the Ivory Tower, and had missed her pale-porcelain face, her blood-red lips curved in amusement, her eyebrows like black caterpillars arched high as she drank him in in his dusty travel cloak.
Princess Gaya, the ruler of Spook City and the Land of Ghosts, offered Roccann her hand to kiss, for in addition to being a renowned physician, he was also her chancellor and one of her long-standing suitors. He brushed her cool knuckles with his dry lips. The ring she wore always on her middle finger blinked open to inspect him. The eye set in the ring in the place of a gemstone was green.
“Is she going to die?” Gaya asked without preamble.
“Your Malignant Grace, it is difficult to say,” Roccann replied, swallowing back the thick, treacly taste of his injured pride at the admission. “She wastes away without change. Any other Fantastican would have died or recovered at least five different ways by now. But not she.”
“Hmm.” Gaya pondered this information. “All the finest medical minds gathered together, and none of you able to either heal her or put her out of her misery. How disappointing.”
Roccann ground his teeth, so his sharp fangs pierced his upper lip. The taste of his own blood dripping on his tongue fortified him. He reminded himself that he would not have loved his lady half so fiercely – half so, he feared, desperately – if she ever showed him any mercy.
“She has appointed a champion and sent him on a Great Quest,” he supplied, for despite how Gaya’s iciness fed his ardor, he had been away from home a long time and was not at his best for these games just now.
Gaya turned away from him, crossed the room, and paused by the round ebony table on which their chess game was laid out. “Yes, I know,” she said.
Roccann blinked. His eyes felt full of sand. He would need to feed soon. He would have done it before entering the city, but Gaya disliked it when he came to her ruddy and filled-out like a cactus after the rain. She preferred his flesh attenuated and hard, his mouth sharp and hungry. I choose to take a vampire into my bed, not a sated, lazy leech, she’d told him once, and Roccann wished to serve her in all ways. Yet she’d only allowed him to kiss her hand after his long absence.
“Your Most Awful Grace?” he inquired, opting to focus on her cryptic remark rather than her keeping her distance from him still.
Gaya glanced at him, toying idly with her rook. The chess set was carved from black and purple horn harvested from unicorns in ages past, and all the pieces resembled nothing so much as shiny, compact beetles. The two of them had started the game before Roccann was summoned away to attend on the ailing Childlike Empress, and it pleased him to see that Gaya had played several moves while waiting for his return. By her cheating, he knew that she’d missed him too.
She placed the insectoid rook on a different field from the one where she’d found it. “I can feel it, Roccann, creeping closer. It’s much nearer than before you left. The Change.”
Roccann had felt nothing of the sort. He had not known what to think when Gaya had explained to him her theory about Fantastica: that once every age or so it underwent a complete transformation, everyone and everything in it rearranged or perhaps refashioned. When on the cusp from one age to the next, one bodily form and role in the story to another, Fantasticans could exert some degree of influence over what they became, how they changed, but only if they knew what was transpiring and paid close attention. We all play the roles for which we were wished into existence, she’d said once, musing on her throne with Roccann sitting at her feet. If I make the requisite preparations and listen out for the change on the air, I could harness the wind and ride it all the way to the heart of Fantastica.
Roccann liked his place in the story just fine, wished for nothing more magnificent than to stay by his lady’s side, but Gaya had always been ambitious. She was called the Dark Princess, but she had long suspected – or told herself – that she might be the equal of the Childlike Empress in power, the two of them each other’s dark mirrors. If only she, Gaya, could get a firm grip on the invisible filaments of power which ran through and under and around everything in Fantastica…
Roccann crossed the expanse of her chamber and wrapped his cold hands around Gaya’s narrow waist. A great liberty on his part, but he saw a black spark deep in her eyes at his presumption, and the eye in her ring blinked slowly, like a cat in the sun, and turned a pleased shade of red.
Gaya kissed him at last, clung closer to him when his fangs nicked her lip.
“There is a pleasing emptiness inside you, Roccann,” she whispered close to his mouth. “It’s like kissing a hollow inside a gem or a poisonous flower. You are ever unchanging, even at such times as these.”
Roccan’s dead, desiccated heart swelled and swelled at her nearness, her voice like molten iron in his ear. Why must she spoil it by talking about this so-called Change? Had Roccann not played every game she wished, every one of their overcast days and long nights together, and had that not earned him this one moment of respite before they took up the play again?
Before Gaya could lead him to her bedstead piled high with animal pelts and black brocade, a hollow-cheeked ghost dressed in a servant’s livery appeared at the chamber door.
“Your pardon, Your Infernal Grace, my lord Roccann,” the ghost moaned. “A visitor has come. A werewolf, and not one of ours. He… well… he did not precisely ask for an audience, but the majordomo thought you should be told.”
Gaya gave Roccann a knowing smile. “Well, well. An amusing mystery from lands unknown. A novelty to bring a breath of change to our days.”
Roccann swallowed his displeasure and offered her his arm. She took it, her ring winking as red as fresh, arterial blood on the hand which gripped the inside of Roccann’s thin arm, and led the way down the stairs to the throne room.
In passing a window so covered with sooty, oily grime that it became almost a mirror, Gaya glanced at her reflection, her hair elaborately coiled and coiffed, her arm curved oddly in the empty air, for Roccann, of course, cast no reflection.
“Do you know, Roccann,” Gaya said idly, “I’ve always thought I would look rather fetching with red hair.”