The Poison Princess (31 page)

The princess, still crouching, turned her
head back toward the horned demon. “Looks like it.”

With as much as she was biting down on her
bottom lip, it was a wonder Scarlett hadn’t drawn blood. She hadn’t
realized it, but her breathing was speeding up, and her hands
fidgeted against one another at her chest. Her eyes were transfixed
on the glowing metal hoops, as she thought about where she would
have to return.

Ruby stood, placing the bracelets on the top
of the display glass, watching her demons eyes trace their path.
She left them there and took a step toward Scarlett, placing a hand
atop her servant’s. “Are you alright?”

The horned demon shook with little tremors.
“I thought I could go back… I don’t… I can’t go back, Ruby. I just
can’t.” She backed up, causing the princess’ hand to slip off.

“I need you to do this, Scarlett. I need the
craggy hand demon’s name.”

“What if you decide you don’t need me
anymore? What if you leave me there?”

“I won’t leave you. You’re mine, and no one
else’s. Remember?” The princess moved forward, following her demon,
and she placed her hand back where it had been.  “The opposite
is true as well. I am yours. I won’t abandon you. I need you.”

Scarlett finally looked up from the bracelets
to meet Ruby’s eyes. “It’s so awful there.”

“You’ll be back before you know it.”

The horned demon shook her head. “What if
something happens to you, while I’m gone? We might lose our bond.
It’s all I have.”

“Nothing is going to happen.”

“But--”

Ruby placed a finger to her demon servant’s
lips. “Nothing can come between us.”

Scarlett could feel her heartbeat thumping
away in her ears, and her body heat had risen almost to the level
of a fever. She didn’t even know her body was capable of sweating,
but there it was, dripping down from her armpit and on her brow.
Not knowing what else to do, the demon simply grabbed the princess,
wrapping her arms around her master and pulling her tight. Ruby
followed her lead, placing her hands at the small of Scarlett’s
back. The demon had felt so much confidence since arriving in
Nabiria, but the simple sight of those bracelets that would sever
her connection to the princess and allow her to travel back into
the nether realm had tossed all that aside. If, as a demon, she
dreamed, she suspected that she would have nightmares of such a
place.

Ruby brushed the long orange hair away from
Scarlett’s ears and breathed a warm breath against the sensitive
skin. “I need you to do this.”

The horned demon made a kind of whimpering
sound. Ruby’s words were poison in her ear. “What about what I
need?”

Another hot breath into Scarlett’s ear. Ruby
wormed her way around to Scarlett’s back, keeping her arms wrapped
tightly around her. “What do you need?” Her lips rubbed against her
demon’s lobe, as she spoke.

Again, she released a whimpering sound, but
this one wasn’t because of the fear of the nether realm. When she
had first appeared to Ruby in that in between place, their current
positions were reversed. Now, it was the demon that was being
seduced. She too was a bit uneasy, as her princess once had been.
Her mind tried to stay on the fear of what she was being asked to
do, but that was slowly washing away.

Ruby’s hands unbuttoned Scarlett’s heavy
coat, while she nuzzled against the demon’s ear with her nose. She
slipped the thing off and tossed it to the side. Her hands were
back on her demon’s body. One hand was lightly caressing a breast,
while the other stayed at the midsection. “What do you need?” she
repeated.

“I need…” Scarlett tried. She decided not to
bother with words. The demon placed her hand atop the princess’ at
her navel and then dragged it down. She hiked up her skirt with the
other hand and guided the princess’ fingers to between her
legs.

Ruby smiled and tenderly bit her demon’s
earlobe. “Is that what you need?”

“Mmmhmm.”

The princess slid her finger inside Scarlett
at her insistence. As she touched her demon, Ruby could feel the
sensations radiating back into her and giving her the same
gratification. She’d grown to love the pleasure loop that Scarlett
had once spoken of. The time when she had resisted her horned
demon’s advances seemed so long ago now. She was the one initiating
such things now, and thought nothing of it.

Scarlett moaned at her master’s touch. She
needed every distraction she could get, and she was going to take
full advantage. She grabbed the bottom hem of her dress, pulling it
up and over her head and tossing it to the side with the coat, so
that she was standing naked except for her leather boots in that
arcane archive, with the leering portrait of the dashing young man
watching with his voyeuristic eyes. Ruby’s hand instantly returned
to the breast, while the other continued in its pursuits further
below.

Ruby pulled her wet finger out from the warm
slit between her demon’s legs and pushed her gently forward, until
they arrived at the glass display case. The princess then leaned
Scarlett’s torso forward over the case. She placed a foot in
between her companion’s legs, spreading them apart, and then knelt
down, sliding her tongue in that same warm, wet slit that tasted of
strawberries.

The horned demon’s chest and head were flat
against that cold glass surface, but her body felt nothing but heat
- heat radiating from her princess’ touch. She bit her lip, as she
often did, and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the simple
pleasure. Her hands gripped the far side of the case, and she
rotated her head over to the other side. Her eyes fluttered open
and caught sight of the bracelets setting there beside her. She
knew she had a task to accomplish for her master.

“Ruby…”

The princess stopped for but a moment, “Yes?”
She stuck her tongue back inside.

“I’m ready.”

“Mmm?”

“I’ll go into the nether realm for you.”

Another pause. “Not yet you won’t. I’m not
done with you.”

The scholars of the mortal world didn’t truly
know what the nether realm was. They had accounts from various
demons, and there were the monks of the Cloister and the Glow that
had studied it and the demons for years upon years, but no mortal
could ever know what the place really was. The general consensus,
however, was that the realm was a repository for the souls of
mortals upon their deaths. Though their bodies would die and
decompose, their mind and spirit would live on as a demon of the
nether world. Scarlett couldn’t have said whether that was true or
not. She had no recollection of ever being human. She had certainly
given it thought over her time inside the nether realm and on the
physical side, but she simply didn’t remember.

Sometimes she would fantasize about who she
had been prior to becoming a demon. She wondered if her physical
form was not simply the princess’ desire fulfillment but also a
part of who she used to be. Maybe she had been a woman, though she
equally assumed there was a possibility she had been a man (if she
indeed had been a mortal of course). She thought about how she
could have spent her life. Perhaps she had been a farmer’s wife,
toiling in the field, or maybe, like Ruby, she was someone of royal
blood. Her usual fantasy involved being an explorer, searching for
adventure and new experiences. The one thing she did know is that
the answers to her questions would not lie inside the nether realm.
The only answer she would find in there would be the name of the
craggy hand demon.

Scarlett sat on the bed of one of the long
since abandoned rooms, while Ruby stood in front of her holding the
runic bracelets. They picked one of the bedrooms with a touch less
carnage and stains than the rest. The room they had selected only
contained a few scratch marks on the ground, like someone had
clawed at it.

Wincing, the horned demon held one hand up
toward her princess, and Ruby slid the first cold, glowing bracelet
on her wrist. It felt heavy, but not because of the weight. She
felt weak. The power was drained from her, so that she felt like
nothing but an empty husk. She felt almost like a mundane human in
that moment. She lifted her other hand, notably less enthusiastic
than the first. The princess placed the other bracelet over her
wrist, and Scarlett felt nothing left of her bond to the human
before her. She felt alone. She didn’t like it.

“Do they work?” Ruby asked her.

“I can’t feel you. I’m hollow. Can you feel
me?”

The princess kind of looked down at her own
body in examination. “I don’t think so.”

Scarlett moved her hands together, pinching
her thumb and forefinger into the soft, fleshy part of her other
hand, where there was a pressure point. “Do you feel that?”

Ruby shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Guess they’re working…”

“I’ll be here when you get back. Everything
will be fine then.” The princess backed up and sat in a wooden
chair near the door of the room.

Scarlett’s eyes dropped to the floor for a
moment, thinking about what was being asked of her, before she laid
down, curling herself into a tight ball. She then closed her eyes
and focused on her home, on the nether realm. The horned demon
slowly drifted away into a sleep like state. Her awareness for her
body vanished and all that was left was her mind. That’s all that
could manage to exist there. She knew that her body, which she had
grown quite attached to, was still lying on that bed with those
magic manacles strapped around her wrists. She knew the princess
was looking over her and protecting her physical form, as she went
on this journey, but it was hard to remember that fact, when she
couldn’t even touch her own body anymore.

Her presence back in the nether realm was
overwhelming. Despite her protests and horrible experiences, there
was a kind of beauty in its complete absence of form in contrast to
the busy and chaotic world that her princess lived in. Everything
in that place was built on a thought, out of thoughts, for
thoughts. There was nothing else. Contemplations, ideas, notions,
conceptions, plans, schemes, opinions, conclusions, conjectures,
and intentions. Every way you can flex and twist your mind, there
was a representation of that inside the nether realm. Despite the
lack of form, there was still pleasure and pain, but they were of
an emotional nature. There were no physical senses to provide
context to anything. No touch, sight, sound, smell, or taste. Only
thoughts. Your thoughts and all the other demon’s silently
communicating with one another. Privacy was nonexistent, as
everything was shared. Sometimes, there was no distinguishing your
own mind from someone else’s.

Scarlett wondered how she even had formed an
identity there. How she had managed to carve herself out from the
noisy collective. How she found the willpower to drive herself from
the pack and bond her mind to Ruby’s. How she escaped the nether
realm and gave herself physical form. Now back inside the nether
realm, she worried that her consciousness would amalgamate back
with the collective thoughts. She could feel parts of her own mind
pressing against that of another. She felt alone after putting
those blue-glowing bracelets on, but there, that was no longer a
concern. She was a part of the whole once more. She lost her
identity among the foreign thoughts gnawing away at her
consciousness. She thought that maybe she belonged there in the
nether realm. Ruby’s existence started to fade from the scattered
pieces of her mind that still remained hers to claim.

She shook it off. The once horned demon
grabbed every thought that she could still recognize as hers and
pushed the rest away. She wouldn’t let this place change her. She
had a mission. Her princess needed her, and she would not get lost
in the silent noise of thought. The craggy hand demon. He had a
true name, no matter what he went by in Nabiria. Here it existed
for all to know and see. All that mattered was how deep the demon
had buried it amongst the collective. He couldn’t have hid it
exactly, only protected it, and disguised it. She could find it
easily enough if she could just focus on the objective. Knowing
what she was after would allow her mind to travel the realm to
where it was stored.

While she still had the wherewithal to keep
herself on task, Scarlett focused on the scant images she had of
the craggy hand demon. She thought of his power, the aura he had
exhibited at the Cloister. She thought about what Ruby had told her
of him. She thought about what she knew of Leina, and what the
craggy hand demon had done to her. She focused her every mind’s
muscle on the true name.

Distractions were a weapon in the nether
realm. She remembered them so well. She had to fight off anything
that was superfluous to get at the meat of the matter. Like birds
chirping in the ears she used to have, minds, thoughts, and other
individual entities poked and prodded at her own. They wanted to be
heard, acknowledged. They needed to exist, and that meant being
paid attention to. There was a barrage of thoughts the closer she
got to an answer, calling out to her, begging to be heard, crying
out for help.

There was a barricade of these distractions
placed strategically around the answer to her question. Scarlett
pushed past the rogue thoughts left behind to guard the true name
of the craggy hand demon. She could feel some stick to her mind and
latch on, while others tore off pieces of her and disappeared with
her own thoughts. If sound had existed there, she thought, this
little plot of the mindscape would be deafening. The demon wouldn’t
let anything stop her though. She kept moving her mind forward past
the distractions and nagging thoughts. When she finally arrived at
a place that looked to contain what she was looking for, she almost
forgot why she had come in the first place. There was so little of
her mind left. The craggy hand demon had designed this, she
realized. These traps were left, so that even if someone found his
true name, their mind would collapse under the weight of the
others. The victory of finding his true name was intended to be so
devastating that it was tantamount to a defeat. She had almost
nothing left of what she had entered the nether realm with.