Archive of Our Own

”There will be hell to pay for leaving me behind!”

Fueled by the rush of boiling heat through her veins at her rescuer’s turned back, the Princess lunges forward. Her chain pulls taut, just for a moment, rattling metal filling the small basement with a cacophony of unbearable noise. The sound bangs against every wall of the basement, against every edge and surface of both of their bodies, rendering the air too filled with metal to even think about breathing — until it snaps.

Chains fall loose from her wrist, descending slowly onto the cabin floor as though suspended in the pool of its own echoing clamor. Its impact, though slow, rattles the very ground with its force. Wooden boards break loose from one another, and the Princess begins her advance. Her ‘rescuer’ is already fleeing up the stairs, back still turned from the Princess, eyes locked on the lofty goal of the cabin’s upper floor. She follows, her every footstep shaking the earth — no, pushing against the already loosened boards of the floor beneath her feet, dislodging them ever further from their places. Every impact of her shoe against the wood pushes the basement further into inordinance with itself — but she does not stop.

Her first footstep against a stair creaks the very bones of the cabin around her. Every step higher, closer to the increasingly faraway basement door, breaks its stair away from the construction of the building. Every stair behind her floats atop the still-echoing noise of the shattering chains. Every stair in front of her creaks and groans in fear, in knowing anticipation of being ripped from their places and forced into a stagnant float. But she does not stop.

The door slams shut just before she reaches it. The sound screams against the already-overwhelmed walls of the stairwell, driving their wooden beams further from one another, slowly drifting apart. But the tectonic shifting of the basement below does not deter the Princess. The unmistakable shing of something metal on the other side of the door brings the fearful creaking to its hinges. Her fist lands against the wood.

”I know you’re still there. Why don’t you make this easier on yourself and let me out?”

She does not focus energy into the banging fist on the end of her arm. She doesn’t need to. It acts almost of its own volition. The door begins to crack beneath the force.

”It’s not like this little door will hold for very long anyways! And you might want to get back on my good side.”

Loud groaning wood drowns out whatever response the trembling little hero might have managed to squeak out underneath the weight of all the roaring noise from the shattering basement below. Even still, the Princess’s slamming fist rises above it all. A thick split drives down the center of the door.

”Come out, come out, little hero! Come out, and I’ll consider going easy on you…”

The door breaks inward, splinters floating slowly outward in all directions. There, huddled against the cabin door, sits a frightened and trembling hero with a blade clutched uselessly between his claws. The Princess’s footsteps toward him drive the cabin floorboards to dissonance with one another.

”There you are! I gave you a chance, you know… but now, I’ll take my time with you!”

Her foot lands on the floorboard directly in front of him. Its impact drives his body to dissonance with itself. His eyes — bloodshot, now — snap wide open as static invades the edges of his every extremity. As the Princess’s other foot lands beside the first, his breath catches on a new obstruction in his throat. She can’t help the wicked smile that threatens to wrap around her own skull and swallow it whole.

”Or maybe I can’t take my time with you! You don’t look well! a little green around the gills…”

In a moment of morbid curiosity, the Princess reaches forward a single finger, pressing the tip of her untrimmed nail against his chest. Against it rumbles a single, jolted heartbeat before it is met with complete stillness. Her smile stretches wider.

”Can’t even handle being around me? Cute.”

At once, the smile becomes a scowl.

”And more than a little useless.”

Her hand snaps forward, latching tightly to the traitor’s upper arm. With the slightest tug it dislocates from its place, just the same as the disjointed beams of the basement’s wooden floor. She tosses his lifeless body aside the door with a scoff.

She taps, just once, against the cabin door with naught but a single outstretched finger. It snaps from its hinges almost eagerly, ready to be removed from its place at only the slightest command, and shatters into wooden splinters. But beyond the bounds of the cabin is no expansive world, no falling kingdom, no readily shattering reality. Only a simple mirror, completely still amongst the chaos of the cabin’s remains.

That doesn’t belong here. That’s not supposed to be there. It’s watching.

Before she can even process the thought, she’s reached out to touch the foreign object — its surface clearing almost as soon as her flesh makes contact. But reflected in the mirror, she does not see herself. Strings, perhaps, and the bones of a marionette. But not herself.

For the briefest of moments, an image of her own face, cast in porcelain and cracked across its surface, flashes across the mirror image — and in an instant it’s gone, and so is the mirror itself.

The Princess finds herself back in the basement.

The ‘basement’, as it were, is little more than a suggested outline of the small structure it used to be. Where once there stood four walls and a floor, there are naught but the pieces of the room. Where there should have been earth surrounding the basement, there is only an empty and boundless expanse of darkness, of nothing. It’s cold.

Reaching up to touch her face comes only as something of an instinct, something automatic that pushes her to make sure she hadn’t really seen her reflection correctly. That it had only been a trick of the light. But, no — her fingertips, cloaked in satin fabric, press against the harsh and unfeeling material of her porcelain cheek, catching against the thick crack running down its side.

It changed me? It’s able to change me?

She shakes off the thought. Only a mirror. Nothing more. Wooden boards float slowly further from the place where the Princess floats motionless, and it takes only a moment of white wood ghosting across her periphery to remind her to drag her gaze across the ‘basement’.

In every direction stretches an endless expanse of dull and untextured void, broken up only by the occasional wooden board or loosened stone or simple memory of the structure that once existed in its place. ‘Stairs’, loose floating beams of wood in a pattern that only suggests a stairwell, lead up until they disappear entirely from sight. Something blinks at the corner of her unfocused vision. The slightest flash of metal, of something reflective. Taunting. Still watching.

It’s back already?

Her gaze returns to the aimless beams and planks of wood, now existing almost in the shape of a hallway. Stones line the empty space where a floor should be.

Were those like that before? I don’t think they were.

Eyes — hundreds of them, each nearly-imperceptible pair blinking exactly in time with her own. Those weren’t there before, either, were they? Her gaze, the one firmly attached to her own optic nerve, flits to every corner of the boundless space in precise order. Nowhere does she see the mirror from before — not yet. It’s here somewhere, its own gaze boring deep into her back no matter which direction she faces or how quickly she turns away. It burns against the bitter cold.

No. I won’t let it do this. I can’t.

Fingertips find the solid edges of a porcelain mask, digging gloved fingernails beneath its seams and pulling with an adrenaline rush bordering on inhuman. The force tugs at her skin, stretches her own body forward for as long as she continues to fight the presence ever-closing-in around herself — and her fingers slip from the edges of the mask, still completely attached. No — a part of her body, now.

It wasn’t a part of me before. I know it wasn’t.

Memories flicker behind her eyes one after the other. A basement, a blade clutched tightly in trembling hands, a promise to be freed, a heavy iron chain, a new face after immeasurable time alone. Had she been this way before? Had she ever known?

Burning slams against her back. It’s behind her. Quickly she whirls herself around, the static air providing no resistance to the motion. For a split second, her reflection shows in the mirror’s surface — again, that same sculpted porcelain face with a crack running diagonally across it. Its edges blur and warp and flicker and then the mirror is gone again, its gaze flitting away to an unreachably far corner of the void beyond the bounds of the ‘cabin’.

Something snaps at the top of the stairs. Instantly, her gaze is on the intruding presence, the body of a traitor descending into the empty space he created.

He did this. He made me into this. He lied to me.

She moves her existence into a place too far into the darkness to see, her unblinking eyes trained on the body of the traitor. His every feather stands on end against the static lifelessness of the air. His body still can’t stand to exist in this.

Her voice, higher in pitch and far angrier than she remembered it ever sounding before, screams across the cavernous emptiness between them.

”I didn’t think you’d come back! We’re going to have a lot of fun, you and I.”

Why would he come back? After everything he’d done, what reason would he have to return? Revenge? Some kind of sense of justice? After what he had done to her, he really thought that he deserved some kind of retribution? He really thought that she ought to be the one punished? Of course he did. He had no regard for anyone else — no. He had no regard for her. A specific vendetta. An overly-fueled sense of revenge.

His every footstep to another stair makes the static in the air crackle louder. The Princess hardly notices her own fingernails itching to cut into her palms through the gloves. Satin fabric nearly tears beneath the repeated action.

The traitor’s final footstep down the infinitely long stairway slams against every free-floating surface, louder than all the others combined. Wooden planks suspended in nothing bend and vibrate with the force of the sound, warping angrily in response to its intrusion. Every pair of eyes in the endless void trains itself on him as he steps up to the vague shape of a forking path. The Princess watches from hundreds of miles away.

”I wouldn’t give it too much thought, if I were you. Because either way, I’m going to find you.”

A blatant lie — she’d never once lost sight of him, and she didn’t plan to lose sight of him now or ever again. Clearly, though, he had no qualms about lying or bending the truth. She pushes off against nothing with her legs, launching herself toward the traitor — a familiar sheet of glass shrieks across her quickly-moving vision. First whizzing past on the right, then on the left, its gaze continuing to burn into her back no matter where it stands.

It’s watching. It knows exactly what you’re going to do.

She stops, grasping her forward momentum in one fist and crushing it in an instant to be brought face-to-face once again with the ever-observing mirror. Its image blinks between different reflections too quickly for her ever to process any one of them. With barely so much as an intentional thought, her arm reaches toward it again. The closer she gets to touching its surface, the further it stretches away from the tips of her fingers. Cold shoots up the nerves, then heat, then a tingling numbness that quickly envelops her whole hand. She makes contact with the mirror’s surface, but no feeling transfers to her skin — and then it’s gone again. Feeling slithers back into her arm.

It’s taunting me. It knows something I don’t. A lot of things I don’t.

Finally she places her own being in front of the trespasser, her very presence making his body completely seize up.

There’s something different about him now. He knows something new. He’s keeping a secret.

She shakes off the thought. Her first footstep brings his body to its knees, goosebumps rising across his skin as his nerves struggle to keep up with an onslaught of torturous sensation. Cold, heat, cold again. Numbness and feeling and numbness back and forth thirty times in a fraction of a second. The Princess steps closer, and a loud and rhythmic thumping bangs against her eardrums. Another step, and it stops altogether — for just a moment.

A single, forced beat. And then another, and another, and another. His body learned how to keep itself alive. His lungs gasp in a painstakingly intentional breath of static. It only makes his eyes grow wider. The Princess leans down to sneer at him.

”I told you I was going to find you.”

The swishing, gurgling noise of vital organs forced into unhappy functioning grazes across her eardrums. For a moment, the ghost of the sensation of a knotting brow touches her nerves, and then it’s gone again — replaced once more by unfeeling porcelain. Her gaze flicks up almost accidentally to where the mirror’s presence still threatens her senses. There it sits, at the boundary of a boundless expanse of nothing, taunting the edges of her very perception. Changing everything, slowly. Just slowly enough to go unnoticed.

But not to her. She knows. She knows exactly what it’s doing, and she won’t let it go unseen. The picture of her porcelain face flashes across the backs of her eyelids.

”Why aren’t you dead like before? What are you hiding from me?”

His beak parts just enough to let sounds slip free, incoherent as they are. Words tumble forward over one another in an avalanche of thought loosened from its place within his head.

”Why haven’t you killed me? You won’t let me die…”

A non-answer. Deflecting. Trying to push the blame back onto her. Feathers standing on end glint like metal in the unfocused parts of her gaze. Her hands grasp for his shoulders, cold slithering up her arms like a saline flush at even the slightest contact.

”Why won’t you answer? What are you trying to hide?”

He freezes at the bitter cold of her touch, every muscle across his entire body going tense and rigid at once. Any muscle already tensed grew tenser tenfold, tendons straining to hold the sheer compressed force of his shape together—

—until she pulls away, sitting back against the empty vacuum behind her, reeling from the image of every single one of his feathers, a tiny replica of the mirror for a split second.

”Fine. Don’t talk. It’s probably better that way, anyway. You’d only lie.”

Every strained breath that reaches the Princess’s ears lifts a strange sense of catharsis into her chest and wraps itself around her heart. But like her own plot to break his body before, any one sensation given too much space threatens to swallow every other. She tears the threads of false catharsis away from her static heart.

”But I can be so much worse for you than I am now."

She never makes contact with a floor, but every forward footstep thunders through her body with the force of falling at terminal velocity. As she moves, so too does he, his body fleeing from her furious approach. His legs make it to the end of the stairs, little though he is able to make himself move. He clambers up like an insect chased by its natural predator, but his frantic escape is not enough to deter the Princess. Her gloved fingers seize his shoulders, pulling at his now once again rigid and immobile body to force him to meet her gaze. Her eyes stare wide enough to sting at their edges, water begging to reach them but unable to force its way past.

"You should have rescued me when you had the chance,"

she spits the words, jaw tense beneath her mask. From every direction, the mirror observes the exchange.

"You brought this on yourself."

A terrible force slithers from her arms down across the palms of her hands and through the body of the bird, shoving him from the ledge of the stair holding him. In slow motion, his body, his center of gravity slips over the edge, sending him tumbling down into the endless void below.

He falls endlessly until his body almost leaves her sight, and the mirror's waiting maw swallows him whole.