Every time I watch her brush her skyforsaken quill across her lips while she thinks, all I can think about is burying my face, my fingers, my cock, really any part of me, between her thighs and feeling her silky pussy one more time. When she catches me staring at her, my expression causes her to blush from her cheeks to her chest. I follow the rosy hue as it travels along her skin with rapt hunger.
“Get out.”
Her demand jars me from my admittedly deplorable thoughts.
“What?”
She points her finger toward the door. “Out,” she repeats. “You are a completely useless distraction.”
A smile tips my lips as I step closer to her. “Pray tell what exactly about me you find distracting,” I croon.
“One more step, Prince, and I’ll cut off the part of you I’m particularly distracted by. Then, I won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
I pretend to give her empty threat some thought. “True, but then it couldn’t shatter you into oblivion anymore while you scream my name.”
She blows an aggravated breath through her nose before wiggling her finger at the door again. With a gloating grin, I give her a mock bow before seeing myself out of the library.
Deciding to make myself useful, I walk to the gardens. Since I didn’t deliver the usual bouquet of forget-me-nots to her this morning, I figure now is the perfect time to craft her daily bouquet and surprise her with it at dinner.
I can’t keep my mind from thinking about the cracks in the curse’s magic, which are clearly increasing every day. Part of me questions whether this is the only reason why I’ve been able to get as close with Azalea as I have been, but then I decide I don’t care. Whether it’s because the magic in the curse is weakening, or because we’ve both finally lost ourselves enough to find our way back to each other, I’m grateful for every smile, every heated glance, every moment of attention she is offering me now.
My mind begins to tally and compartmentalize all the ways in which the curse has changed. There are the obvious large changes like Azalea’s memory not being fully wiped clean and the singular time a group of animals crossed the border, but there are also smaller changes like the morning fog and the sound of birds chirping in the distance. Two things I never even knew I missed until they were taken from me and given back to me.
The sound of the morning is very different when you’re trapped and exiled from the outside world, and now I’m startingto wonder how much of the world the curse is letting back in. More importantly, what will this mean for me and Azalea? Are we going to begin aging? Will the unending magical supply of food for the castle stop replenishing itself? Will we be able to die again?
As I find another perfect bunch of forget-me-nots to add to the growing bouquet in my hand, I hear a yelp from behind me followed by a shrieking scream.
Spinning around, I find the source of the gurgled cry coming from the stream that runs through the castle grounds. While this stream isn’t particularly deep, the section of it that flows along the edge of the castle’s border has a strong current that can pull even the strongest person’s footing out from beneath them. Once that happens, whoever’s fallen victim to it is at the water’s mercy. The section of the stream just outside of the castle grounds becomes significantly shallower, making it easier to fight the current. It happened to me once when I was a little boy. I thought my time had come and the Great Abyss was coming to collect me. By the time the current weakened and I found my footing, I was well outside of the walls of the castle, but I was alive.
The problem now is that if anyone subject to the castle’s curse leaves the castle grounds before the curse has been lifted, they will wither away and turn to dust. That is, everyone besides Azalea. I wasn’t willing to bet her life, and I feared she would be too stubborn to stay within the brick walls of her confinement until I could break the curse. No. If she willingly leaves, then I’ve lost and Dianthus wins. No more countdown. Azalea will forget me the moment her feet pass the threshold, never to return. The castle will disappear from her view, and she won’t be able to find it, or me, ever again.
My feet are reacting before my mind can, pulling me toward the moving screams, until I see what looks like a small childsplashing around as the current pulls them along. My mind tries to make sense of this; I wasn’t aware any children were on the castle grounds to begin with. My fretting comes to an abrupt halt when I see them slam the back of their head into one of the large rocks caught in the middle of the brook. Their cries stop abruptly, and the water begins to become stained with red.
Fueled by a mixture of fear and adrenaline, I jump into the stream. Icy water shocks my body, and pain ricochets through my side as I feel a few of my stitches rip. Gathering my bearings, I kick my feet until my head breaks free through the water’s surface. The mixture of the sun’s warmth and the water’s chill is jarring. My clothes cling to me as they absorb the frigid water and begin weighing my body down. I have no choice but to shimmy out of my jacket as I use all of my strength to keep the current from pulling me under.
When I hit a particularly deep section of the stream, I lose the unending fight, and the water yanks me deeper into its clutches. My eyes and nose burn when the glacial liquid fills them, and when I reemerge from the depths of the shallowing stream, I’m sputtering as I try to wipe my eyes clean. The only benefit to the water being so cold is that it’s made the wound on my side feel somewhat numb as my body works against the treacherous torrent.
My eyes lock in on the motionless figure ahead of me. Taking a deep breath, I succumb to the flow of the current, letting it pull me closer to the girl’s body. Luck is on my side when she gets momentarily lodged against another one of the rocks in the stream. The water is pressing against her, slowly sliding her off the immobile object, but it’s giving me time to get closer. Once she is just barely an arm’s length away, I’m able to notice two things. She’s not a child after all, but a young hand maiden, and a small gash is visible on the back of her head, darkening the patch of pale blonde hair surrounding it.
Right before she slips fully from the rock and is pulled back into the current, my fingers curl around her arm and pull her toward me. The water’s strength is weakening, keeping me from getting overpowered by the rivulets coursing around us.
My feet slip in the slick mud beneath me, but I slowly bring us to an edge of land where I grip the grassy ground and slowly let the water pull me until we reach a spot where the current is weak enough that I’m able to haul her onto land without losing my footing. Once I get her out of the water, I’m pull myself up after her, my side screaming in protest with every movement.
Gently rolling the girl over on the grass, I barely have her lying flat on her back before she’s spitting up lungfuls of water and greedily gasping in the crisp air. Her entire body begins trembling, and she reaches for her, no doubt, throbbing head.
I gently pull her arm back to her side. “Relax. You fell in the stream, but you’re okay. We’re going to get you inside to the infirmary, okay?”
She nods slowly, but makes no attempt to speak, keeping one of her hands firmly clasping her throat. She’s looking at me as if she’s seen a ghost, and I’m not sure if it’s the shock of the incident or because I’m the one hovering over her, explaining what happened.
“I-I’m sorry,” she eventually wheezes, her voice sounding weak.
I shake my head, and wave my hand. “Don’t apologize. Focus on saving your strength.” I look at her trembling frame. “And warming up.” I silently curse myself for not tossing my jacket off before jumping into the frigid water. At least then I could have had something to try and warm her up with.
After waiting a few minutes, I slowly help the maiden into a sitting position, assessing carefully as her body sways back and forth. This time, when she leans over, it isn’t water she coughs up, and I decide right then that she won’t be walking anywhere.
After she collects herself and gives me another embarrassed apologetic look for losing her stomach right next to me, she tries to stand, but I stop her.
“I think it might be better if you didn’t walk,” I state firmly.
