Witch Princess: Part 1: Chapter 25
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Chapter 25
Past the stairs, the dark damp inner space was the first basement floor under the tower. Though the space had an unassuming presence, there was a distinct lack of dust on the floor and many of the shelves. Numerous shelves and tables scattered the room, though the size of it looked too small compared to the tower.
The spirit floated towards a bookshelf pushed against the back wall, little wispy tendrils trailing behind it. Distressed, the spirit quivered near an intricate bottle. As Amirya reached for it, the spirit latched itself to her hand and arm.
She did not resist it, and it guided her. They knocked down a couple books on the shelf below, and behind them, there was a strange shape in the case. The bottom of the bottle fit perfectly, twisting into place. A small whir came from behind it, and it slowly slid to the side.
Amirya stepped through the opening behind it. The hallway was dark but lined with unlit candles on the wall. She tried to ignite them with a snap of her fingers, but it only fizzled. She pursed her lips, annoyed - she had improved, so she thought after her recent practice, her capabilities would amount to at least this much.
“Ignite,” she muttered, snapping her fingers while imagining the energy in the air concentrated in little balls on top of the candle wicks, mutating them to a fire energy. This time they flickered weakly but caught, and light and shadows bounced around the hallway.
The door on the left opened to a supply or storage room, and the door to the right opened up to an office with three desks; both rooms obviously used. As she walked down the hallway, the sounds of her footsteps echoed down, and every step stirred the spirit more. She did sense auras at the end of the hallway, but they were weak and subdued.
The hallway switched from brick to stone, and it led them to two more doors on both sides with a stairwell leading down. Her heart thumped loudly in her ears. Really, she did not need to have gone this far. The plan was to hide as soon as she found the place and let the knights and warriors sweep and find the rest. She kept ruminating on the emotions of those floating spirits, though, and thinking of the ones who might still live.
With her hand on the left door first, the spirit attached to her began screaming. She yelped and grabbed her ears.
“Stop it!” She yelled. She fell to her knees. “Shit, stop! I can’t do anything with you screaming like that!”
The scream whimpered off. She pushed the door open, throwing her body weight into it, now off-balance. The smell made her gag immediately. She covered her mouth. It was the room in the memory. And it was so much worse.
Instruments that simply looked like torture tools hung off the walls, different tools sat on top a metal table, blood old and new staining it. The shelves were filled with bottles, objects, and a few books. A stand made to chain someone up in a X faction was pushed in the corner, and a desk with needles and potions against the right hand wall. A small, dull pink spirit hovered just off the floor.
“This is beyond horrific,” Amirya whispered.
Thankfully, no one was present. All she had to do was sit and wait. She should go back to the main basement and wait. Her eyes trailed over to the other door and the stairwell.
She only needed to wait, and the rest would get taken care of.
The spirits did not make any commotion.
She pushed off the door and threw open the other door.
“Oh - goddess!” Amirya cried.
The room was lined with human-sized tubes and restraints nailed into the wall, and all but one held a child or young teen. She stumbled as she rushed, the first tube filled with green liquid. She touched the glass; the young - five at the oldest - child curled in a ball on the inside did not stir. The next one, a young girl - maybe eight - with bear ears had numerous scars on her body, also held in a green liquid. The opening was not in sight. There was another spirit in here, a soft yellow. The pink one had followed Amirya and the green spirit.
She went to the first pair of restraints, a young teen boy whose veins were black and spidery hoisted on it. Shakily, Amirya undid the leather straps on his feet first, but they were bolted. With a quick power, she tore them apart with her mind and moved on to his hands. She caught him as he slumped, gingerly lowering him to the ground.
“Don’t touch him,” a weak, hoarse voice said.
On the pair stood a young boy with black cat ears and a tail. Amirya’s stomach felt like it dropped out of her body. She hastily unstrapped their feet, not caring at all that she showed this young boy her telekinesis in the effort.
“He’s… one of the ones they… did the demon experiment on…” he said, falling into Amirya’s arm as his wrists were freed. Amirya held him, amazed she held back her cries. It wouldn’t help him.
“Yes?” She responded softly, caressing the top of his head. “Demon?”
The teen on the ground hadn’t moved or made a sound at all. The small boy curled in her arms, nodding against her chest. A small murmur came out, “She… said she was… going to find… the perfect way to… make a berserker.”
“She? Berserker?” Amirya glanced down at the boy and then hushed him. “No, it’s okay. It’ll all be okay now. Don’t talk, I know it’s hard.”
Shouldn’t she have known what she’d find her? Did she simply not allow her mind to wander?
Unwilling to let the boy out of her grasp, she reached out with one hand, snapping restraints one by one until the next one was free, catching them with effort with her telekinesis, waning them down until they gently sat on the floor. She repeated the process with the next one, and the last pair of restraints were, thankfully, empty.
All the while her thoughts raced. The demons here were not demons from hell. She had not seen what they called ‘demon’ in this world until her death. The queen and her minions. Black tendrils crawled over their body, becoming one with them, veins transformed into ooze.
They were crazed, almost like zombies, and sought out other life forms to either eat or infect. The entire reason every settlement on this planet acted like they were in constant war was because they were under constant siege from those monsters. Their appearance isolated almost every settlement and killed an incalculable number of humans, elves, and other life - entire cities, towns, and even kingdoms were destroyed.
Beyond Aurelius’s eastern border, those lands were known as the beastlands. Prior to the demonic invasion, nomadic beast tribes roamed and ruled a large portion of the land, creating lucrative trade routes between numerous settlements. The demons displaced them, which was how so many immigrants from their tribes ended up in Aurelius.
They had no way of knowing how many or which or where those beast tribes resided now, if any survived, but the stories of those people were taught in school. Kingdoms that saw themselves as more civilized did not try to conquer the beast tribes, except for one, who was nearly instantly annihilated in retaliation.
They were naturally physically stronger with better senses and longer lives. Beast people were sometimes seen as less because some did not have aura. Amirya, though, knew this was not true - every beast person she cast her eyes on had spiritual energy; it was that some of them had a prowess different than a human was capable of, and when used, it was invisible.
Despite the invalid reasons for their othering, they held a rare and desirable trait - berserking. A state of both mind and body regarded as unstoppable. It was not unheard of in the Aureliun kingdom. Who the hell was ‘she’ though? What did these creatures and beast people have to do with each other?
“My friend…” the boy said almost inaudibly, “she’s still downstairs…”
They will come. She needed to stay put to give the royal army an excuse to search here. The battered boy in her arms grabbed her shirt in a fist, barely able to hold on. The spirits with her drifted near the stairwell as if to urge her.
The hate and anger that radiated from the green spirit had eased slightly over the last few minutes. Amirya steeled herself. She sat the boy near the girl who was next on the line up and went to the stairs. She refused to let herself think for a second. The stairwell was pitch black. She breathed heavily, manually controlling her breath to prevent hyperventilation.
The pink spirit shyly snuggled into her hand. She turned her palm over, feeling how numb and deeply sad it was. Energy leached from it into her - light. She brought the power into her hand with a gentle swirl, and it lit up.
The only sounds were a repetitive drip of water and the taps from her feet. At the end of the short stairwell, the images from the spirit’s memories came to life. Five cells, two on each side and one on the far end. The two on the left had bodies lying in unnatural positions and the horrid smell that flowed all the way upstairs concentrated on that side.
The light shined closer to the cells on the right, casting light on two children in the first cell, who looked terrified and malnourished but not badly hurt. The next had three children, in various states of disarray with visible wounds. A purple soul cuddled next to one of them. The room at the end had two adults, who stared at her with dead eyes.
She closed her eyes, and the green spirit touched her cheek. She clenched her hands into tight fists, and the metal locks on the cages crumpled with the motion.
“Help is coming very soon,” she promised.
They did not move. They did not trust her. It was fine, she consoled herself. The knights would come and appear as saviors and then they would know. She did not know what to do. She could not forcefully move them.
She turned for the stairs, and a boy in the first cell darted out. He stopped, trembling and watching her movements. She went up the stairs but left the light behind, keeping it lit from a distance. She planned to sit with the cat boy and the others. The spirits cried at her, but she ignored them.
Amirya stepped into the room. The boy peaked his head outside the stairwell, one of the other children right behind him, hesitant. The frequency of the three spirits that followed her grew even louder. She closed her eyes as her head throbbing in pain.
Danger, danger, danger.
She finally heard.
“Yes, it’ll be over so-”
A scream snapped her eyes open. The boy in front was no longer in sight; instead, a young man with short brown hair had his leg raised in the air from a kick. He wore robes with a sash with a design that signified he was an upper alchemy classman.
“You-!” Amirya screamed.
As she pushed out, he dipped his hand in his robe, bringing out a whip. He cracked it, energy endowed in it flying out, down the stairwell. Amirya shoved him with her mind, and he flew back, crashing into the table in the other room before he could land a hit. She rushed forward, barely able to even think with how loud the spirits were screaming.
DANGER, DANGER, DANGER!
“No shit!”
She assumed they were screaming about the man. The moment she stepped into the hallway, fully focused on the man, someone else grabbed her hair and yanked her back violently. Amirya yelped and instinctively reached up to free herself, but then a glass bottle smashed into her face.
Amirya screamed, falling to the ground. Oddly, her first thought was how mad everyone will become when they learned she did not immediately hide and follow the plan, despite her repeated assurance. She held her face while crying out, it felt like a swarm of wasps stinging, over and over, and the cuts from the glass felt worse.
The person laughed, “When the alarm went off while I was upstairs, I never in a thousand years would have thought of you, Princess Amirya.”
That voice - she knew that voice. And upstairs? Damn, she was a fool! She thought they wouldn’t utilize upstairs in case it was seen from the outside! Amirya scooted away blindly, hitting a wall.
“Why the hell are you here? Hm?” The voice was closer, right next to her face.
Gwynna. Hale’s sister. The bully teacher she, admittedly, took some of her frustration on - not that it wasn’t deserved, especially now. The one she saw in the alley.
“I would say, don’t worry, that potion doesn’t scar, maybe it’ll affect your vision, but… does scarring matter if you can’t leave here?”
Scuffling sounds - the man in the other room was back up. He was yelling at the children.
“Hurry up and take care of it,” Gwynna spat. The whip cracked.
Amirya let out another groan, leaning her head back. Gwynna walked away, then returned. Cold liquid splashed on her face and Amirya flinched back, gasping, but the stinging began to subside.
Gwynna snatched her face, thumb and fingers digging into her cheeks, turning Amirya to face her. Amirya grabbed her hand. She couldn’t speak from the tight grasp. She maintained eye contact, trying to force her thoughts into Gwynna’s mind. This was leagues different than influencing a knight, who was open and at ease with her. As she pressed, images surged. Amirya’s eyes rolled back, unable to dive deeper while trying to grasp what was grabbed.
Flashes. Hale’s face. Children on tables. Words she couldn’t hold onto long enough to hear. Pride. Excitement. Creating beasts and soldiers.
The queen wants progress, we don’t care what you do.
“Hey, pay attention,” Gwynna shook her roughly.
Amirya grunted and glared.
Gwynna laughed, “I don’t know what the hell this is, but aren’t you stupider than I thought? Who cares if you’re a princess, you have no real power. You’re out of sight now. Even if you disappear, no one will truly care nor mourn. You get that, right? You get there’s no leaving here? Oh, but I don’t have to kill you - maybe you’ll end up helping me! You have extremely little spiritual power, right, Princess? I’ve been experimenting on how to artificially increase spiritual power. Along with some other things. Maybe I should save you as a gift for my brother? He never got over that ridiculous obsession with your mother. He’d be sure to love getting his hands on you.”
Gwynna loosened her grip slightly. Amirya couldn’t throw her away while Gwynna held her - she’d fly with her.
“What does the Queen and the Royal Commander have you doing here?” She muttered through the grasp.
“Oh ho,” Gwynna cocked her head with a smirk. “Think you know something, do you? You know shit all, Princess.”
She dragged her into a standing position, dragging her into the room. “Qaylin, come here. And you... I do nothing for them. I’m the brains here. Do you have any idea how intelligent I am? And yet I’m teaching brats? Because alchemy is considered bottom tier these days. What hogwash. I’m going to create the best army the world has ever fucking seen. The queen and my brother will wield it, annihilate the demons, and finally take control over the other regions! Subjugate the world! But the true master, of course, would be their creator!”
“Delusional,” Amirya replied.
The east, north, and central had a stronger military than the south, despite their efforts. They did all this to children to try and create human weapons? When they already had the claim to the throne through Cassivan?
Gwynna released her face. The pink and yellow spirits were far away, but the green one burned brightly with unkempt rage, buzzing above her head. Amirya moved to knock her away and steady herself, but Gwynna was quicker. She slapped the princess. Amirya barely recovered before the man - Qaylin, grabbed her around the waist, lifted her, and slammed her into the table. With all the breath knocked out of her body, Amirya gasped. She kicked at him and Gwynna, putting up better resistance than they expected.
“Whip her already!” Gwynna screeched.
Amirya, the moment Qaylin stepped back, had a chance to throw him away into the wall. The opening was there. But, at Gwynna's words, an image flooded her mind. Corentine, and her maids, with Petra, standing with a switch. Her entire body locked up. Before she regained control, returned to the present, he brought down the whip, cackling with his energy for a harsher hit. She barely held her arm up in time to take the impact.
She cried out in pain again, struggled to free her other arm from Gwynna, and the whip landed on her thigh this time, making her legs curl up. Gwynna managed to strap Amirya’s wrist she had and backed off for a second, grabbing her ankle.
“You think no one knows where I am?!” Amirya screamed.
They both paused. The princess started to laugh, “Oh, now you pause? You’re so fucking intelligent,” Amirya spit blood at her, “but you didn’t even consider that before showing yourself?”
Qaylin looked to the professor, waiting for instruction. Gwynna studied her face before slowly grinning and leaning in, “I don’t believe you.”
The pause was enough this time. Amirya pushed her free hand out and Gwynna flew back into a shelf. Amirya kicked towards Qaylin, his body smacking into the wall. She grabbed the restraint on her wrist. She freed it within seconds thanks to her telekinesis, but as she faced Gwynna to defend herself once again, the woman held another glass bottle. The bottle flew, already headed for her face again, but she dodged.
Smoke billowed from the clear liquid in the room. The green spirit, the entire time, screamed, and it flew into her face, yelling. Amirya staggered back and quickly realized neither Gwynna nor Qaylin moved. She glanced between them both, confused; the spirit screaming. She focused on it for a second.
DON’T BREATHE, DON’T BREATHE. DON’T BREATHE.
Amirya immediately held her breath. Upon another look, Gwynna already was doing the same while smirking. Everything swayed and doubled. Amirya’s head went light. She grabbed the table for support, but she could not resist it. They fought with potions, not auras, and they took her by surprise, overtaking her so easily - all her weak points she wasn’t aware of.
Gwynna grabbed two items off the shelf, a bronze looking mouthpiece with a rune. She stuck one in her mouth and tossed the other to Qaylin.
Amirya glared.
If she goes down now, those children…
She rose her hands and clenched them. Both the student and professor grabbed their throats and wheezed.
Amirya’s heart sped up. She had never thought to use the threads like this. Her body shook. The spirit buzzed over her with loud excitement.
It’s better if they’re dead, she comforted herself. This isn’t wrong. It isn’t. Us or them…
Unfortunately, Amirya could not hold her breath longer than it took to strangle someone. Against her will, she opened her mouth and sucked in. She immediately tried to hold it again, but everything became blurry. She tried to hold on as best she could, but her vision went black and her mind numb.
“Spunky brat,” Gwynna said, her words muffled and slurred by the mouthpiece. She had fallen to her knees. “How the hell did she do that?”
“It’s the princess, Professor,” Qaylin said after he caught his breath, “What if someone comes?”
“Don’t you see something missing?” Gwynna motioned for him to pick up the girl and place her on the table. “That damn beast she brings everywhere. Or a maid, or servant. The princess ran off without supervision again. My brother told me about her little outings lately. Who knew she was up to something like this?”
“But why?”
Gwynna scoffed at him, “Like that’s important.” She smiled, full of glee. “What is important - what will we use her for?”
“We can erase her memory with a potion,” Qaylin said. “Though it will leave mental defects.”
Gwynna tutted at him, shaking her head. The man did not feel comfortable with this, but he had already performed way worse - and killed a classmate and friend who wanted to report it all. It was already too late.
...
[This little sketch does not fit this chapter at all, but it's all I have haha. Amirya, Finri, Yana, and Seph spelling out L O V E. I thought it was cute when I saw the reference photo I used. I missed updating earlier in the week cause unfortunately my depression is giving me a hell of a time lately. I really appreciate you reading the story! Hope you like it!]
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Thank you for the chapter! Princess NOO! Also, don’t beat yourself up about it. I know how difficult it can be, doing anything with depression. You’re so strong that you can write and post this lovely story. I really hope you get better
Thank you for reading!!
Thank you for saying that, it means a lot to me. It comes and goes like waves with it's intensity so I'm just ready for it to ease up so it can be easier lol
the sketch , there it is. its them doing the time traveller's handshake.
I'm imagining as background like a sailor moon transformation lol
tftc! take as much time as you need!
Thank you!!
Thanks for the chapter, hopefully she can be eaved before anything too bad happens.
Thank you for reading!
Thanks for the chapter. Haaaah, amirya really was stupid with this. So will it be finri or sir raven who saves her? Or maybe even Cinna who detected this.
Amirya just runs straight ahead into danger without a second thought even though it literally has killed her before lol. She gonna be stressing everybody
Finri better hurry the hell up, her waifus in danger
Right!
@Verlie also, shame on you for this cliff!
@HonestMistake I'm sorry! Wednesday!
I am very much not impressed. She has proven to be more powerful yet here she is even more incompetent. Shame.