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There are many wonderful things in the world. Like sparkling and valuable treasures, unusual and inconspicuous trinkets, or mysterious thingamajigs that sometimes are absolutely inaccessible.
In some incredible way she held everything at once.
He pursues and observes, with his characteristic mocking curiosity - like the child that watches the game of animals in the zoo. This forest was an open-air aviary for everyone curious. But as soon as the unfortunate prey took a step in, the gates to the world of living were closed to them. The aviary became a cage in which the victim will stay and entertain the master until the end of days.
Sometimes something special and beautiful comes in his tenacious web. For example, her.
He pursues and observes how she wanders in his domain, performing his tasks. Cute puppet at first glance, there’s something more inside than it seems. It’s hard to follow her footsteps - she is too fast, too restless, too cautious. The one with an adventurous spirit in a fragile porcelain shell.
The forest is unwelcoming. It reaches for her with the hands of hundreds tormented souls, draws into the quagmire, into sewage mud and rotten foliage. It throws snakes and spiders at her, spiny stems of flowers and poisonous mushrooms under her feet. It exposes open graves and yellow bones in front of her, carries acid fumes and swamp gases to the surface. It’s angry and seeks to break her, but gets hit and crawls away, unaccustomed to resistance.
He pursues and observes her to snatch the precious spirit for himself when the porcelain shell cracks. This never happened. Contracts slip away from his hands, and she comes for a reward, sometimes battered, but no less lively than she was. The forest breaks its fangs and claws on white porcelain, and even the Queen of Ice cannot reach the fire within.
In the end, his own patience cracks, he tries to break this doll himself. To break and destroy the treasure he cannot possess, out of greedy desire not to give it to anyone else. He throws flames and insults, laughs and watches as the small animal rushes about in its cage, trying to escape from the butcher.
But he is too angry and reckless to recall what he always had to remember. She is quick and savvy enough to hit him with his own attack, and smart enough to look for loopholes in his spells and contracts. All his experience, power and magic were useless against something so small.
He is too angry to think about anything else. He wants her to leave, but she doesn’t. She makes a fool of him, makes him give away the treasures stolen from her hands. He gives them away - the immortal flame of the soul, and the priceless relic of time, - too quickly than he should.
He is too angry to think about it before he does it. He will curse his haste afterwards.
***
Of course, she doesn’t leave. That would be too easy. She’ll never go the easy way.
She returns here, to the cemetery hidden in the forest thicket. The only living creature for miles around, she disturbs their already distressed world. She travels, searches and explores, as if these ruins might interest someone, as if their beauty and glory hadn’t died with everything around.
At first he thinks she just wants to mock him, to trample the remnants of his pride. This absurd thought is quickly lost. She will never do this. She doesn’t have the cruelty inherent in the local inhabitants. She’s just curious and wants to have fun. For some reason, this thought seems even more absurd.
Each of them is a strange interweaving of what cannot exist, but exists anyway. She stands out with nothing but a hat, but carries more mysteries than any of them. Somehow survives where nothing else can, somehow achieves something that no one else can. Who is she, this mythical creature in a mortal shell?
He tries to find an explanation for her actions, but quickly gets lost and throws away this venture. She comes into his domain to remind about the ruined contract that will be his burden until the end of time. A normal person would be horrified by his appearance alone, but not her. She climbs in his chair, in his house, in his life as inevitability and doesn’t leave until he reads aloud to her.
He carries his burden with humility and reads stories until she falls asleep and gives him a couple of hours of blissful peace. Because after napping she won’t leave until she tells him everything about her travels, shows her drawings and braids his mane.
The forest hasn’t changed for eons just like him, but something has happened since she began to come here. As if centuries-old ice began to melt and a green sprout made its way through dry trunk. Dead silence was dispelled by children's laughter the village hadn’t heard for years. In the clearings and in the wilds, games began - tag and hide and seek, long forgotten by the inhabitants of this place.
As if after ages of fierce winters, spring has suddenly come.
She comes again and again and brings a fresh breeze and sunlight with her, as if to return him everything Vanessa had taken. He is not trying to push her away any longer. He understands how useless it is to deal with unstoppable force. He accepted it and allowed the spring to come in his forest and his soul.
So the plants and hearts came to life, and with them came the curse of the living - the tangles of human feelings that deprive minds and lead astray more often than bring any good.
***
Something so restless just had to get involved in a huge adventure with the tyranny, mortal battle and salvation of the world. Something like this was supposed to be part of her story. And the catastrophe happened, he just had to wait.
Actually, watching the suffering of miserable mortals on the death court was even fun. Even more fun is to watch the battle unfolding in the midst of blazing chaos, when the timelines broke so much that the space itself began to distort.
But any story comes to an end. The heroine won her final stand. The peace, time and space have been restored. It would be worth having a farewell party, but something prevented him from rejoicing in victory with the rest.
She came just when he was deciding whether to visit her himself. Unceremoniously as usual she disturbs his peace and sits down on the alchemical table, almost dropping flasks and valuable ingredients from it. But smile on her face seems blurry, as if fake, and her eyes don’t meet his gaze. She never knew how to lie properly and hide emotions, and he literally feels the tension coming from her.
His premonition didn’t deceive him. A mask of joy slides off when she says she has come to say goodbye. Despite all the sorrows and joys, many adventures and friends found on this planet, she must leave. Forever this time.
He’s almost certain that her words shouldn’t have saddened him so much.
At the moment of a storm of completely human emotions, - which he’ll certainly regret later, - he interrupts her and asks to stay. He hadn’t experienced such feelings for several hundred years and completely forgot how to deal with them and restrain himself.
She refuses.
He insists.
She’s angry. She calls him an egoist (she’s damn right), then turns and runs away, barely holding back tears. Shadows rise above them, enclosing both in an impenetrable ring, blocking her exit.
He knows that everything has gone too far. She’s a star warmer and brighter than the sun, that revived his forest and his heart. Once he lived in an impenetrable cold night, now he swallowed life-giving heat and wasn’t ready to lose it. What an irony - he thought he was coping very well with his loneliness.
He asks her again.
She frowns and refuses a second time.
He should have known. Her stubbornness never breaks so easily, and the heated debate just inflames her decisiveness. Then his storm of emotions lit the deadly fire of anger.
He begs her, and she refuses a third time.
He was seeing red for a moment, but reason comes back a bit too late.
When his sight returns, he sees red everywhere on the stones.
***
It was so easy to break an unmovable object that he didn’t believe in it at first.
Then he threw all his strength at her and couldn’t even kick her out of the forest. Now he threw a few lunges and this was enough. She didn’t fight back, just never had the time, and her favorite umbrella stayed on the ship. Why would she bring weapon with her? She was going to visit her friend.
He’s trying to convince himself that all of it is an illusion or a cruel joke. Then he still decides to go down to her. It’s hopeless. His hands can’t feel a hot breath, the heartbeat is not echoing in his head. Comparing the size of his claws and her neck, it becomes clear why the result was so dirty… so effective.
When realization catches up with him, other emotions come, those he never wanted to remember. Gray sadness, heavy despair and cold hatred, so familiar, but much more destructive this time. Then the object of his hatred was Vanessa, not himself.
It’s way more difficult to push away these dull feelings. He drowned in them like in deepest swamp. He wouldn’t float up if the sudden desperate providence hadn’t hit his head. Recollecting himself, he sank down beside her to snatch the treasure he wanted to own for so long.
It burns like a small star, this sphere of living warmth. The fire, once kept in this shell, lies again in his grasp and this time it’s completely in his control. A ball of light shimmers, distorts, sometimes taking on a familiar shape. He gives her a smile, feeling how hope revives inside his empty being.
Not everything is lost yet.
In this cursed place death is never an end.
***
For some reason, her body gets cold quickly, either due to blood loss or a damp cold of the forest. He drops everything from the alchemical table. Then, carefully picking her up in his arms, he lays the corpse on this improvised altar.
The prince's favorite pastime now and then is the study of law. But after his death he found several other hobbies. Civil laws fascinated him, but there were others to study - the laws of nature, magic, life and death. Learning of alchemy in their kingdom was punishable by death, but now there’s nothing left of the kingdom, and death can no longer affect him.
But now he can affect death itself.
The first stage is body treatment. The rigor mortis turns her skin into cold porcelain. He gently closes her glassy eyes, wipes away the remnants of blood from a white face, treats the body with formalin, and pricks the veins with herbal balms to fill the blood.
After that comes a long autopsy. He had to take out internals, she’ll not need all this meat anymore, and he has other ways to fill a fine vessel. A blackthorn vine will strengthen the bones so no one could break them. The glands of toxic mushrooms will poison the blood so no one could touch her. Heather root will replace the heart and give her strength so no one could take her away from him.
He fills her lungs and stomach with flowers. It’s not necessary, but she would’ve liked it. Let them smell and strengthen the body. All that left is to sew up and tightly bandage the body.
He feels like a master ceramist, creating a new masterpiece from old ceramics.
The further process is a little complicated. Her head barely holds on the rags of flesh and skin, so he had to improvise. Remove the remains of cervical vertebrae; completely separate the head from the body. The branches of blackthorn and blackberry are flexible and strong enough to replace neck bones, and their spikes will protect her from other violent blows. Bind everything together, then bandage again.
The second stage is a ritual. No matter how beautiful the shell he created is, so far it’s just a lifeless doll. To turn it into a new receptacle for the soul, he needs to fill it not only with flowers, but with magic as well.
Place seven candles around the body in a specific order: two at the shoulders, two at the hips, two at the feet and only one, without a pair, at the head. Then mix blood, potions and poison in certain proportions. Draw the necessary symbols in a certain places with this mixture. Somewhere the bandages were soaked with blood, but this doesn’t bother him. The applied potion immediately begins to glow with a bright green radiance.
He's not used to casting spells, but some magic doesn't work just at the snap of his fingers. Therefore, he speaks, whispers and sings, giving up part of his power to fill the created vessel.
Now, a few cosmetic procedures to make it better. Just comb her hair and dress her up. Her clothes are torn and stained with blood so he creates others. Firm fabric, leaves and petals of plants affected by black magic, - he sews all of it in a simple, baggy dress with a hood, that enclothed the body by itself at his request.
All left is the third stage, the last and most important - to give the lost soul a new shell. He takes her out of a pocket dimension again. The light shimmers with different colors, trembles, changes its shape. The sphere rolls uncertainly on his hands and then makes a desperate jump forward. He barely manages to catch it in the palm of his hand.
“No need to worry, kiddo. You’ll be fine, I promise.” She tries to break out of the weave of his claws, rushes and trembles. “What? Let you go?! Don’t be stupid. If I let you go, you... do you understand what will happen? You will be gone... forever. You won’t return from there”.
In the shimmering light he sees a familiar figure. She begs him.
He refuses.
“Sorry, kid, but this is for your own good.” A dark purple glow fills his hands, and the white light of the soul begins to change. “Don’t worry, you won’t even remember all this.”
The sphere changes it's color to purple, then charcoal black. He gently lowers the soul onto the doll’s chest, and dark shine envelops the empty shell.
Some part of his mind whispers that he has changed, becoming like Vanessa. To kill a loved one only to make them be with you. He dismisses this thought, allowing joy to fill him. He’ll never be alike Vanessa, and all this is a mere coincidence, tragic and happy at the same time.
Now he has a friend who will never leave him. A small dark star that will lighten his forest and his soul every day and for all eternity.
On the altar, the Shadow Puppet opens her eyes.