Start from the beginning | Previous Chapter |
I was staring into a mirror, watching my reflection.
She wasn't really my reflection though. I was still wearing my tunic, but she was dressed in her tight black slip, her skin milky white. She folded her arms and stared at me, her eyes glowing orange.
"Well, isn't this fun?" she said, picking at her manicured nails. "Victor dead. Hendrik probably dead too. And now we're at the mercy of our enemies. I can only imagine the tortures that await us." She tsked. "Are you ready to start listening to me now, Jillian?"
The mirror tremored and rippled as if the surface was liquid, distorting the image of my doppelganger.
"What are you?" I asked her.
"I already told you who am. I'm the person that you ought to be. And now, I'm the only one left that can save you."
As the reflection swirled, I reached out to touch the glass. My hand passed through it as if there was nothing was there. "Is this real?"
"It's real enough. We're both a step below conscious, though this is the only way I can talk to you. Seems we don't have much time left though. If you want my help come to my tower."
"Your tower?"
"Yes, my tower. I shall wait for you there, my child."
The world was fading around me, the mirror dissolving into wisps of smoke.
"And Jillian," the doppelganger voice echoed through the darkness, "whatever happens, no matter how hopeless this all seems, just remember one thing."
"What?"
"You are not alone."
Something was dripping.
The world was fuzzy. A thousand aches and pain screamed from different parts of my body, bruises and aches and burns and other sensations I had never felt before but immediately never wanted to feel again.
“Wake up, sweetheart.”
I tested my throat and found it chalky dry. There was pain lancing behind my left eye, my throat was swollen and unable to swallow fully. I tried to reach out with a hand to massage my throat, but found I couldn't move my arms from their position stretched above my head. I turned my head and heard a rattle of chains followed by a swift jerk backward.
I was lying on some type of wooden table, my wrists and ankles bolted in place by thick iron manacles tethered to short chains. All my belongings were gone, including Malcolm's cellphone. I tried to sit up as far as I could, but there was barely any slack in the chains and I was stopped short. The most I could lift my shoulder blades off the hardwood before the iron tugged back against my wrists.
“There we are. Oh, you poor thing.”
My eyelids fluttered, and the world came back into focus.
The tan, angelic face of Nadia Highburn beamed back at me, her perfect curls dangling down just above my eyes. Her wide almond eyes narrowed as she loomed over me, hatred radiating out of her like a cloud of poison.
“Well Angel, you've had a rough day, haven't you?” Her white smile stretched into a sneer which was just a bit too wide for the face she was wearing, and the scars lining the edges of her face emerged. “And unfortunately, it's about to get a lot worse.”
If I had any saliva to spare, I would have spat in her face. Instead, I just stared back at her silence, watching her.
She spun on her heels and walked towards the door, her curvy hips swaying. She was dressed in a soft pink-silk bed-gown which glittered as she walked, jarringly out of the place in the dank cellar that smelled of mold and rot. She closed the door, then turned back around to face me. “Now then. There have been whispers.” She stared at me, her eyes narrowing. “Whispers that the peasant bitch that stole my crown is an Ageless.”
Nadia had something in her hand, but from my vantage point, I couldn't see what it was. Her dark curls bounced as she moved towards, her eyes cold and furious behind her plastic face. Instinctively I tried to push myself away, straining against the chains.
“Living forever must be nice,” she continued, her voice lowering to a purr. “You know, I've always wanted to live forever. I think I might just take that from you. You did steal something from me, after all. Fair is fair, right?”
She disappeared behind me, but her voice droned on. “My brother advised that I should just kill you and clean our hands of this whole mess. Something nice and simple. Maybe throw you off a balcony as we did with the last queen, let the people draw their own conclusions."
"I was ready to do it too...had the guards all picked out that would drag you out of your bed by your hair in the middle of the night and hall you all the way up ninety-three floors to your grave." She began to drum her nails against the table, making a grating clacking sound. "But then the whispers about the Ageless Queen started, and that's when I realized what I big mistake killing something as rare as you would be. There are a few things worth more than revenge -- the secret to immortality is one of them.”
Suddenly I felt something yank my hair downward. My skull smashed down against the wooden table and tears blurred my vision. Nadia stared down at me from above, this time upside down in my vision. “They say Father Caollin once harvested an Ageless. Chained him down in his lab of miracles and picked him apart, piece by piece, until he extracted a serum that could extend life, and then he fed it to those he wanted to reward." She giggled, a sickly sweet sound that made the hairs on my neck stand on end. "Well, I'm not a girl that weighs too heavily on rumors. I believe that truth is found from the source.”
Nadia dangled something that glittered above my face. It was some kind of small glass vial, filled with something clear. “Nothing to say, Jillian? Here, this should loosen those lips of yours.”
One of her small hands clamped down on my jaw, digging her nails into my flesh, trying to pry my mouth open. I threw my head sideways straining against my chain, as Nadia laughter tinkled across the hall.
“Stupid girl. Shall I get Cayno back in here? Maybe have him burn a finger or two off? Or are you going to cooperate?”
“I'm going enjoy ripping that fake face off you,” I said hoarsely, finding words at last. “Then I'm going to kill you. And then Cayno. And then your brother. And then everyone else in your stupid family.”
She nodded. “Sure you are honey. But before that happens, I'm going dissect you, piece by piece, limb by limb, until I understand exactly what it is that makes impervious to time. I'll keep you alive while I do it, too. I'll pickle each of your organs, then put them up on that wall like trophies so you can see. Every day will be a waking hell, and you'll beg me for death, but I won't give it to you.” Her face turned darkened. “I won't give you anything. Not after everything you've stolen from me.”
“I didn't take anything from you. Malstrom chose me as his queen because he was tired of your fake ass. You were never anything to him except for a cheap, easy lay.”
She gave me a sweet smile. “Better an affair with a king than one with the court jester.”
The blood drained from my face, and Nadia bounced on her heels, practically dancing with glee. “Oops. You and Hendrik thought you were being so sly, weren't you? Please. Anyone with half a brain knew you were sleeping with the fool.” She leaned in close to whisper. “You must be worried sick about that dunce. Would you like to know what's happened to him?”
“If you touch him – ”
“Oh, don't worry, I'm not allowed to do anything to him. As we speak, he's being tried in court for aiding in Prince Janis' plot to assassinate the queen, before he was brought to justice by the noble Cayno. They say that Malstrom's been inconsolable since your death. Poor Hendrik doesn't stand a chance against our holy king's wrath, I'm afraid.”
“You honestly think that will work?”
“I do, sweetheart. I mean...Hendrik was technically spying on you, wasn't he now?” She paused theatrically and made a fake gasp. “Oh, that's right, you didn't know that either, did you?” Nadia began to circle me, enjoying every second. “Stupid, stupid commoner wench. Did you really think Hendrik was running around tending to your every need because he wanted to be your loyal little advisor? You did? Then this may come as a bit of shock, I'm afraid." Nadia's fragrant perfume wafted down over me, sweet enough to make me gag. "Here's the truth of it. He never cared about you -- he's a spy for Princess Alynsa.”
“Liar.”
“Oh, I'm afraid it's very true. Hendrik insulted the royal family, so Alynsa had him jailed for life. She hated the man, was going to have him put to death...but realized that having a charmer like sweet Hendrik at her disposal might have other uses. So Alynsa and Hendrik made a deal. Hendrik could live, and in exchange for his life, he would serve on the council and spy on the king for her. They pulled it off quite beautifully too. And as soon as you turned up at the palace, she gave an order for him to on the mysterious commoner wench as well.” Her smile twisted, cutting deep into me like a knife. "She even ordered him to seduce you."
“Do you think I believe any of this trash?”
Nadia giggled. “I don't care what you believe, Jillian. Malstrom will have no problem believing that Alynsa's agent orchestrated the assassination of his bride. Gods know he hates the stupid Urias girl enough as it is.”
Without warning, Nadia dumped the contents of her vial on my face. I tried to spit it out but already, I could it on my tongue, the substances searing away at its softens. A feeling of constriction blossomed from my throat, like vines growing and veining down into my body, the muscles tightened up in paralysis.
My eyes and I gasped, and the pain spread, dull at first, growing into pure agony.
"Now," she said, "let's see what happens when you feed an Ageless rat poison."
As it turned out, Nadia had a fixation on poisons. She brought down an entire display of glass vials filled with brightly colored liquids and set them all down out before me. "I must say, Jillian, you have quite the tolerance to my little potions. I've seen you drink half a bottle of snake venom that accidentally found its way into your dinner, yet still, you woke the next morning." She picked out a ruby-red vial, swishing it around in her long fingers. "So we'll do one of these every couple of hours, just to see where your limits are."
My lips were already cold and numb when she fed me the second bottle, and I barely felt anything. My mouth started to foam as I started to slip into a feverish dream-like state, caught somewhere but consciousness and death. Then third bottles' contents trickled down my throat, and that's when my body expired.
My heart stopped beating as I slipped into unconsciousness, deeper than ever before.
I was on the top floor of a towering glass skyscraper, looking out over a city of white marble. Past the columns of boxy skyscrapers, an aqua river glittered back at me, the sun's reflection dancing against the bubbling white foam.
The Hudson River had never looked so beautiful in my life. And New York City had never looked so white-washed and clean.
“Nice view, is it not?” my own voice asked from behind me.
I spun around towards the source of the voice. I was standing in a long boardroom with glass walls on three sides, a glossy black table stretching out down towards the doorway. My doppelganger sat in an over-sized leather chair on the far end of the table, still wearing her black dress, busy reading the contents of a manilla envelope. Behind her, a massive projection screen flickered green, displaying a simple screensaver. The name 'Gravative Industries' bounced diagonally back and forth across the screen, changing directions each time it hit an edge.
"Take a seat, Jillian." My doppelganger looked up from her paperwork, and her eyes glowed orange. "I just finished reviewing your file-" the folder snapped shut "-and so I've organized this meeting today to discuss the best way to murder this Highburn skank." She pointed at the conference line sitting in the middle of the table. "Now are you expecting anyone else to dial-in, or shall we get started?"
There was something familiar about the way my doppelganger's eyes pulsated from dull amber to bright orange. The eyes drew me in, beckoning me to get lost in their soft glow.
"I know those eyes," I said slowly. "You're not me."
She gave a warm grin that creased her face with laugh lines, one that didn't belong to me. I knew that grin too.
"What are you doing in my head, Caollin?" I asked.
The lights of the board-room dimmed, the blinds rattling down, one by one, to blind us from the panoramic view of the city. The room went black, and then they all snapped up in unison, washing the room with light again.
The tall figure of Father Caollin had replaced my doppelganger, dressed in a sharp black suit with a dull brown tie. In the day-light he looked older than I remembered, the creases lining his face dark and pronounced. "I could not leave here even if I wanted, my child." His eyes still pulsating from brown to orange, fixed on me. "Trust me, I have tried."
"How is this possible?" I asked him. "You...here?"
"I'm not really here. Not the same Caollin you know and despise, at least."
"I don't understand," I said. He pointed at one of the empty leather chairs, but I stood standing stubbornly.
"The Trial of the Mind creates a lasting connection," he explained, leaning back in his chair with a creak. "Caollin is a creator, yes? I am yet another one of his creations, one born of traumatic experience. A shadow of the real man left to linger here in the aftermath of your shared experience."
"You're here because we drank that potion together?"
"That is my current conclusion. The drug creates a powerful mental connection between any couple that undergoes its psychosis together, a bond that is too deep to be severed entirely." He gave me a sad smile. "Perhaps a shadow of you has been in left in the real Father's mind as well, harassing him as he tries to sleep with your asinine little quips."
“You,” I said, staring down Father Caollin. “You did this to me.”
He shook his head and reclined in his office chair. “I did not.”
“Liar,” I began to walk towards him, pushing leather office chairs out of my way. “Cayno. Nadia. You sent them all after me. Killed Victor. Hendrik.”
“You give me too much credit. I do not have any control over that harlot. She decided she wanted you dead all on her own.”
“You made me a queen with an impostor of my husband. That was all you.”
He smiled. “And I was going to protect you. We are Ageless, Jillian. Gods playing with insects. You deserved to be queen more than any of those sad parasites like Malstrom and Nadia. We are special, they are nothing.” He crossed his arms, and the smile faded into pain. “But we both made mistakes. I...misjudged the best way to manage you, and then you dismissed me. You have no one to blame for this mess but yourself, Jillian. Hopefully, you've learned a valuable lesson from all this.”
“Go to hell.”
Father Caollin rose from his chair and walked over to look out at the view of the Hudson. “New York," he said, looking out over the gleaming city. "I wanted to make my own New York here." He placed a hand on the glass wall. "Somewhere along the way, I got lost."
Slowly, I moved over to stand next to him, pressing my nose against the glass. "That's not the real New York," I said, peering down at the white-washed streets. "You can tell because the streets aren't lined with trash bags."
"Yes, a nostalgic memory is a funny thing. Glosses over the ugly, doesn't it?" Caollin sighed. "Still, I miss this. Home. I do wonder if I'll ever come back here, one day. I left a wife and a kid back in New York...to live in a land where one does not age. It was an easy decision at the time -- I could spend as much time as I wanted here, and they would always be waiting for me upon my return, right where we had left off. And to this day, they still are waiting for me to return to them. But Russell the husband died...he died in my mind long, long ago. The loving father can't come back to them anymore, because that man no longer exists.”
"Don't be so dramatic," I said. "You've dicked around here long enough. Go be happy with your family now and stop terrorizing this place."
He smiled. "Sadly, that is not my decision to make. Only the real Russell Graves can choose to return home."
"How do I get home?" I asked him.
Russell shrugged. "Jack knows. He was in charge of bringing people back."
"Where's Jack?"
"I do not know. I have not seen him in many, many years. You could also ask your husband too. Apparently, he's found his way home once before."
"And just where is my real husband?"
"I do not know. Learning that he had returned here with you was a great surprise to me."
My attention wandered back to the screensaver on the conference screen, the words still bouncing around on the screen above him. "Gravative," I said, "that's your company, isn't it? Did you make Lentempia?"
"Not personally." He steepled his fingers, his face still inches from the glass. "I was on the board that funded it. Surely, you can see the allure of a realm where people can live forever?"
"I get that."
He nodded. "Any other questions?"
"I do not know. Learning that he had returned here with you was a great surprise to me. Any other questions?"
“Just one more," I said. "Am I dead?”
He was still looking down at the tiny taxis milling up and down the grid of streets. “I do not believe so." He sounded lost in thought. "Your mind is still healthy up to conjure up this happy delusion. Without my help, you may die very soon, though."
"You can help me?"
He turned away from the glass and gave me a grandfatherly smile, his laugh lines surfacing. "Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I am a part of your mind it seems. I only exist as long as you live."
I laughed humorlessly. “Sure you can help. You do realize that at this moment I'm chained to a table, being tortured to death by the richest bitch in this pretend medieval kingdom? You going to help me out of that pickle?”
He eyes flashed orange. “I could.”
The world was starting to quiet around us, the room so quiet that the silence was starting to become uncomfortable. I started to tap my fingers on the table, just so there was something to break the silence. “How?”
His eyes were starting to pulsate now. “Do you want to hurt her?”
“Nadia?”
“Yes, Nadia. Would inflicting agony on her bring you pleasure?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
Caollin frowned. “You have to mean it, Jillian. Now I'll ask you again, do you wish to make Nadia Highburn suffer?”
I stopped and gave the question careful consideration. I thought of Victor, the look on his face as he disappeared into the roaring flames. I pictured Nadia's white smile as she ordered Cayno to murder those that protected me, her laughter soft and musical.
“With all my heart,” I said, looking the priest dead in the eye.
His face broke out into a warm smile that was almost fatherly. “That is wonderful news to hear.” His voice was deepening, layers overlaying and harmonizing on top of one another. “I believe we can get started.”
“Okay. Let's go.”
The lights dimmed, and from beyond the window, the sun faded out of the sky, replaced by a navy sky. “Breathe deeply. In, then out. That is it. Good.”
I was losing myself in the priest's eyes, which seemed to pull me towards him like a force of gravity.
“Jillian, I can teach you how to bend another person's will. We will stay here and work at it until you have it down.”
His voice hummed comfortably, echoing around me. “But what if I can't learn? Nadia will kill me first.”
“Relax, my child.” He grinned, and the room shimmered around me. “We have plenty of time.”
“We do?”
He nodded. “Time moves much more slowly in one's dreams. All thanks to the miracle of time dilation, we have much time to get this right." The glass of the boardroom began to ripple. "Shall we begin with your first lesson?"
"I'm ready."
"Good. Now, as you may have noticed, I am quite a skilled hypnotist. This is something I've refined over many years of practice. Do you know where the true power of hypnotism comes from?"
"Not a clue."
"It comes from the subject themselves. In order to understand the power of hypnosis, you must first understand their desires. Learn what makes a person tick, and then weaponize that against them. Everything beyond that simple exploitation is smoke and mirrors, parlor tricks that trick the subject into thinking that I have placed them under a dark spell. They believe that they are helplessly under my control and I maintain the illusion. In reality, they are naught but a slave to themselves, surrendering the last of their free will willingly."
The lights faded to darkness, the only source of light in the room Caollin's eyes. "Normally, it takes thousands of years to develop my level of skill, and unfortunately, we do not have that much time. So you must settle for the basics -- the subtle art of manipulation. Listen closely, for you will only have one chance to get this right."
Submitted March 25, 2019 at 05:33PM by ghost_write_the_whip https://ift.tt/2OriNmH
No comments:
Post a Comment