Princess Calantha of Alvein
Drachenhold Prison
The Jördlands
In the days that had passed since Princess Calantha awoke from her hibernation, she had put most of her effort—or rather her thralls’ effort—into furnishing her new home away from home; far away from the Jördlands Province of Vinterlund was a massive prison called Drachenhold. The princess’ Blood Knight and their thralls had made quick work of slaughtering and brainwashing the guards, giving them a place to make a more permanent camp for however long they would be there. It was here that they had left from to hunt down their quarry—the Magnussons and their elf pets.
Princess Calantha thought somewhat fondly over the memory of the traitors all gathering around their fireplace in the time that she was preparing her new base. She remembered watching them all via her invisible, telepathic presence, which floated amongst them days ago. It reminded her of the cozy moments she would share with the Magnussons in winters past in front of a fireplace when they were children.
And they threw that all away, the princess had thought to herself.
Now she sat on top of her closed, crimson red coffin in what was once the office of the chief warden of the prison. In her hand, she held an ornate black goblet filled with blood, and at her feet was a quivering man in burlap clothing. The imagebearer used to be a prisoner here at the prison before her minions acquired it for her. Now the man served her as a sort of errand boy. He was nowhere near as disciplined as the palace servants back at her family’s castle in the Dark Province, but he managed.
“And where did the corpse of my knight end up then?” she said to the man. “Hmm? Dunchie? Where’s my Blood Knight?”
Dunchie looked up at her, struggling to actually meet her in the eye.
Which is for the best, for his sake. He has no business looking me in the eye, and I would hate to have to go through the work of punishing him again.
“They burned it, I think, Milady.” Dunchie finally said.
“Ugh…now why would they do that? I could have at least brought him back as a walking corpse…oh well, no matter. How many elves did we end up collecting from Vinterlund? Tell me you’ve tallied them all up by now.”
“Yes, yes, yes! Of course we have, Miss. It’s um…It’s just, uh, just under four hundred.”
Calantha said nothing at first. She instead put down her goblet and glared at the man. “That’s it? That’s the best you could do? That’s barely enough to let two vampires walk around in sunlight!”
Before Dunchie could even defend himself, Calantha made a gesture with her hand, and Dunchie’s neck gave a loud SNAP.
Then, after his body slumped to the floor, Calantha took a deep breath, counted to ten, slowly exhaled, and then gestured again, conjuring up eddies of undeath that bubbled up around the fresh corpse.
As she gently tugged on the strings of the Rotting Praxis that would stitch Dunchie’s ghost into his dead body, the princess groaned loudly. “Good grief, man. Pull yourself back together already and breathe again. I have more for you to do before I let you rest.”
As commanded, the corpse suddenly sat bolt upright, coughing and crying out in abject horror—no doubt over what his ghost had gotten a glimpse of on the other side.
“I’m…I’m alive? I died?” Dunchie said, looking at his now blue hands. “What am I? What have you done to me, witch?!”
The princess raised an eyebrow. “That’s quite the mouth you’ve come back to me with there, Dunchie. You act as if I let you rot or something.”
“You killed me! You just killed me!”
“Yes, but I promptly brought you back, didn’t I?” She watched as the Jörd’s face slowly turned to rage. “Well, sort of.”
“What do you mean, ‘sort of’…my mistress?” He added that part in after Calantha raised another hand in the air, as if she were about to gesture another kind of spell into action.
Calantha responded by hopping off her coffin, walking over to the window of the office chamber, and placing her hand on one of the rather dusty curtains before removing it to show the imprint in the dust her hand left behind. “You see this? This mark in the dust? Is this mark my hand? No. It is simply an imprint of it. In the same fashion…you are not really Dunchie. You are merely an echo of the soul that he was. A soul-echo. A ghost. An imprint that the soul who was Dunchie left on the fabric of reality. You’re my toy now! Nothing more. Up up up, no no!” Calantha raised a finger to stop the Jörd from complaining or questioning further, and with a snap of her fingers, a needle and thread popped into existence in front of the dead man.
The needle and thread then began piercing in and out of Dunchie’s lips, sewing them up snugly, and completely indifferent to his cries of pain and protest.
“You’re done talking.” The princess said, as her new toy continued to writhe around in pain on the stone floor. “Now it’s time to listen. Stop complaining. Your nerves will rot out soon enough anyway. Then you won’t feel any pain at all. Now come. Get up, Dunchie. Get up, go prepare me some stew, and have an elf waiting there for me for when I arrive.”
*
The Prison Kitchens
“Mmm, smells delightful!” said Calantha as she walked into the kitchens, with an undead Dunchie following closely behind.
The prison kitchens were really just a large maze of ovens, hearths, and prep stations. At the centre of it all was a circle that comprised a small table filled with what looked like several cooking ingredients, and next to the table was a very large black cauldron. Standing next to the cauldron obediently in burlap clothes of her own, with her eyes locked onto the floor, was a dainty, quivering young elf woman with periwinkle blue skin, black hair that was tied back in a bun, and freckles on her face. This was the frost elf that had been told about earlier—the one that had been found skulking around with a pair of human fighters in the depths of the dungeons earlier that night.
With every step that Calantha made towards the elf, her shaking increased dramatically. When she was close enough, Calantha brushed the woman’s hair aside—revealing her pointed ears and watery brown eyes, and said, “What’s your name?”
The elf’s lower lip quivered terribly. “…Sylvi. My name is Sylvi…”
“Did you make this stew, Sylvi?” She gestured to the bubbling concoction that was in the cauldron. “Hmm? Did you?”
“N-No…” the elf whispered. “No…it wasn’t me…” The elf was shaking so much that Calantha thought she might actually fall to pieces.
The princess removed her hand from the elf’s hair and walked up to the bubbling cauldron. The savoury smells it was producing were filling the air. She couldn’t quite place what it was, but that didn’t matter. She had ideas on how to improve it.
It was then that she spied the bloody and chopped up slabs of meat that were on another table nearby. She recognized the smell of it instantly and was surprised at herself for not noticing it sooner: it was human meat—thick and juicy.
Calantha snapped her fingers twice and in doing so had won the she-elf’s attention back from the floor. “Fetch me that jar on the table. The one with the red mushroom caps…NO. The large mushrooms…good girl. Now pass me the ladle and the human meat.”
“N-NO!” shouted the frost elf, genuinely shocking Calantha. Sylvi pleaded, “They…I must bury them. You can’t just eat them!” The elf sunk to her knees, sobbing. “They weren’t just meat—they were people! And they had names…Krundy and Maja…I…I’m the one who got them into this. I got them all killed…please…let me bury them…”
…How adorable. The poor thing wants to have a say in the matter.
Calantha looked down at the elf, then knelt down to her level on the floor, and smacked her hard across the face. Sylvi let out a terrible yelp of pain before the princess said, “I don’t like it when my elves talk back to me.”
Then Calantha grabbed her by the hair, wrenched Sylvi back up to her feet, and tossed her at the table, with Sylvi yelping loudly as she slammed into that table with the human meat on it.
“Don’t you dare knock any of that food onto the floor!” Calantha barked at her. “And don’t make me ask you again, Elf…Bring. Me. That. Meat.”
After turning her head back to throw the princess a tearful yet venomous glare, Sylvi finally did what she was told.
As she worked away on the stew, the tears finally flowed freely down the frost elf’s face. The sobbing only worsened after that, and a bruise grew on the side of Sylvi’s face where Calantha had struck her.
“Dunchie? Is the World Tree’s anti-magic barrier around the province still fading?” When no answer came, Princess Calantha turned to find the undead thrall just glaring at her with his mouth still sewn shut. “Ah. Right. Well, make sure those undead kinsmen of yours that I conjured up are stationed around the border of Vinterlund. I cannot risk our people’s secret about the elves getting out, so from now on, until I say otherwise, no one leaves that province alive. If anyone tries, have the dead cut them down and add their corpse to our ranks. And shoot down any carrier birds anyone tries to send as well.”
“Wait. What? What secret about us?!” said the elf, somehow looking even more panicked than before. “What are you planning on doing to—AAAAGH!”
Calantha had transformed her one hand into clawed fingers, and with them she had cut deep gashes into the frost elf’s bruised cheek. She then forcibly grabbed hold of the she-elf’s jaw, effectively scaring her into what was assuredly a very painful silence.
“Shhh…from now on, speak when spoken to, and only then.” Calantha’s eyes lingered on the Elven blood that was now bleeding into her hand. For whatever reason, Sylvi’s elf blood wasn’t as bitter as that of her kin’s. Quite the opposite, in fact. It reeked of sugar.
A half-blood, Calantha thought to herself. She’s only a half-elf…
“On second thought,” Calantha started, “I was going to keep you around for a little longer—to let the stew…well, stew for a bit longer—but I think I’ve just changed my mind.”
SNAP!
With Sylvi’s neck broken, globs and dribbles of the stew splashed onto the stone floor as the upper half of the frost elf’s body slumped into the bubbling cauldron. Then, with just a little effort, the princess lifted the legs of the still twitching corpse and it slid down gracefully to the bottom of the cauldron.
After several minutes, the stew took on a more reddish hue as all the bloodied meat finally mixed into it fully. Then she stirred the stew around with the ladle, and once she was satisfied with the overall taste of the meal, Calantha took a bowl-full for herself, being sure to add a large piece of the human chops to her bowl.
Then something strange happened—of all the things in the stew that she expected to bob to its surface, a sceptre wasn’t one of them. The crystal at the top of the magecraft instrument flooded the room with a raging red light, and Calantha actually winced at the heat coming off of the furious thing.
“Ah, so the elf was a sorceress, was she?” said Calantha as she went to pick the mourning sceptre out of the stew. “And you belonged to her, no doubt. And now you’re in mourning. Poor thing.”
With a sense of anticipation, Calantha raised the sceptre, its intricate carvings glinting in the light, and attempted to cast a simple spell to gauge its power. However, she had to quickly dodge a powerful blast of crimson energy that whizzed past her, narrowly missing her head. If she didn’t possess the supernatural speed of a vampire, the murder attempt might have been successful.
Calantha tutted at the object. “Now, now. That’s no way to treat your new mistress, is it? Oh, no matter, I suppose…in time, you’ll learn to obey me.”
Then, the vampire princess placed the still-raging sceptre under her arm, and picked back up her bowl of stew.
“Go along.” Calantha said, waving off Dunchie in passing, as she made her way to the nearest window sill. “Carry out my orders. Oh, and tell the living thralls to work on the modifications for the prison architecture. If this place is to be my new home while we find a new source of elves, then I shall have it be made into a castle fit for Alveinian royalty.”
With nothing more than a simple—if not begrudged—bow, Dunchie left the room, the feel of disappointment clinging to him like a second skin.
As the princess sat on the windowsill and looked out at the World Tree—which could still be seen even from this far away—she said to the empty room, “Nine of you. Nine of you red-haired brats and not a single one of you thought to tell me you were leaving? I might have helped. I could have come…Fine. So be it, Lords and Ladies Magnusson…so be it. I’ll save our people without you—without any of you, old friends. I’ll save them, and once our people are unleashed, we will rebuild this world and take possession of everything that should have been ours from the start of this Age.”
As the snowfall outside gained momentum, Princess Calantha beheld the formation of her nascent dominion upon the foundation of the conquered prison, and allowed herself to envision a more hopeful tomorrow. The road ahead was lined with obstacles as far as the eye could see, but she was undeterred and ready to face them head-on.
“Nothing will stop us. It’s all up to me now…it’s all up to me…”
The End.
