The Poison Princess (42 page)

The princess was confronted with the same
question she felt she’d been asked since the day she was
poisoned.

Do I do what is right, or do I do what I
want?

The darkness was making it hard for her to think. Her every angry
impulse, avarice desire, or lustful thought was pounding at the
inside of her head. The greed for such power refused to let go of
her. That was how she knew she had to rid herself of the toxin.
Ruby stepped away from the folding mirror and retrieved the bag of
dust from the shelf it rested on.

Scarlett rushed toward her princess, seeing
what she intended. “Ruby, no.”

“I have to be rid of this,” Ruby replied,
clenching the soft leather bag in her fist.

“But we’ll die.” The horned demon pointed
back to the mirror. “You’ve seen this for yourself.”

The princess shook her head and gave a glare
toward the mirror. “I refuse to believe there isn’t a way to save
my sister and myself.”

“And if there’s not?”

Ruby’s eyes drifted to the floor. “Then at
least, I’ll have saved my sister.”

Scarlett reached out and grabbed her
princess’ hand. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to go back. I
don’t want to be alone again.”

Ruby looked up and into her demon’s eyes. “No
matter what happens, Scarlett, you’ll never be alone again. We’re
bonded. In life, and in death.”

That was little comfort to the demon, but it
would have to do. She could clearly see the resolve on her
princess’ face. Scarlett released her grip on Ruby’s hand, allowing
her to continue with what she was doing.

The princess nodded thankfully at her horned
demon and then tugged at the slender rope strings of the leather
pouch. Peering beyond the stitched together lining, Ruby saw
particles of what looked like sand. These, however, were a strange
pink color that sparkled as the candlelight reflected off them.

“What do you think I do with them?” she asked
her demon companion.

Scarlett shrugged. Even if she had known, she
wasn’t sure she would have answered.

Ruby poked a finger into the pink sands,
swirling and pushing it around the pouch. She felt no different
upon touching it, but as she retrieved the finger from the sack,
some of the dust and sand stuck to her skin. She took a heavy
breath and then stuck the tip of her finger into her mouth, licking
the sandy particles off and swallowing them down toward that
poisonous lever in her chest.

Scarlett winced at the sight of this act, as
though she were in great pain. “Are you okay?”

The princess still felt nothing from the
pouch of dust. She lifted the remaining powder to her lips and
dumped the entire contents into her mouth. The sand was thick, and
it was almost like swallowing a handful of sugar. Her eyes watered,
as she forced the remainder of the grainy substance down her
throat. Ruby was not willing to take any chances with the cure, so
she took it all inside herself. As the little particles of magical
sand and dust fell through her body, she followed their progress to
where the poisonous lever was contained inside her. The pink grains
began to swirl around the heart of the venomous infection, tearing
at her from the inside. Dropping the empty leather pouch to the
ground, the princess fell to her knees and grabbed her chest in a
futile attempt to quell the pain.

Following her down to the floor, Scarlett
asked with wide, fearful eyes, “Ruby?”

As the grains choked the poison and in turn,
the princess herself, she clenched her eyes shut and reached out to
find her demon’s hand. She clamped her fingers down on Scarlett’s
hand, hoping to numb her own pain by some small amount, but there
was nothing she could do to keep from feeling the infection being
cleansed. Similar to when she forced a maelstrom of poison to
manifest around her, the venom and toxins began to ooze out of her
various orifices. As though she were being cleansed after a long
sickness, the poison was purged from her body by whatever means it
could take. She sweat the toxins out her skin, cried them from her
eyes, and spat them from her mouth. Shuddering, Ruby felt the last
of the noxious substance leave her body and splash to the floor in
a purple pool of congealed muck under her knees.

Opening her eyes, she saw everything that she
had done since being poisoned. It came back to her in a sudden rush
of images. The darkness inside her had blocked her from feeling the
full weight of her decisions, but now that she was cleansed of
that, she felt all the guilt and regret that she once should have.
The emotions of her choices had gone unfelt for far too long.

Looking down in her mind’s eye, she saw a
man’s face. He wore an agonized expression, as venom pooled into
his mouth, flooding his eyes and nose as well. The face belonged to
the first man that she had killed - the guard that tried to
assassinate her when the poison had failed. She saw the fear and
pain in his eyes, but she hadn’t cared. The darkness inside her had
forced her to kill and to even enjoy the act. Two more men died on
her way toward her sister, back before she knew that Leina had been
responsible for the assassination attempt itself. Ruby didn’t get
as good of a look at them, as she filled the hall with her
poisonous toxins in an instinctive act. Another died in the throne
room, as the anger of seeing her father’s death drove her toward
the craggy hand demon. In a flash, she saw four men die by her own
hands. Clean, clear tears began to stream down her face, as she
recounted her experiences.

Then, she saw the Abyss and the poisonous
imps she created with her yet misunderstood powers. She tossed them
aside like they were nothing, down into the depths of the cave,
using them to help find her way toward a treasure that never
existed in the first place. The princess remembered the enormous
serpent that had dwelled within that place and how she had
generated a ball of poison in his gut. More than a decade had been
lost to the blissroot that grew in those caverns, but it had all
felt like a few minutes to her. Now, though, Ruby felt every
agonizing second wasted away in those tunnels, sucking at the spicy
venomous juice of the white fruit and caring for nothing but her
next toxic meal.

It was only with the help of Scarlett, the
demon she had bonded herself with, that Ruby was finally able to
escape the addiction of the blissroot, eventually making her way to
Gloomport. There, the princess ripped off a rapist’s manhood,
saving the young woman, Clare, from his assault but damning her and
her father to further attacks. Even now, she wasn’t certain that
they had survived her poisonous explosion in the dark city when
Wesley and his Underlaw attacked the tailor’s shop and home. Ruby
slaughtered them all like she had been killing all throughout her
life. Their deaths meant nothing to her; it had all come so easy.
Now though, the princess hated herself for what she had done. She
couldn’t imagine having taken so many lives with so little effect.
By any account, she was a mass murderer from that day alone, and
she didn’t even know if she’d saved the young woman and her father.
During that fight, nothing but satisfying her own hate and rage had
mattered.

After that, she recalled herself being a
torturer. Whether Wesley had deserved to have his mind taken over
by her toxic power was a moot point to her cleansed self. She had
played with him, made him feel terrible things, and cared nothing
for his ultimate fate. The whole crew of the Black Wave and even
Sniggle had perished to the strange beast of the sea all to give
Ruby and Scarlett time to escape its grasp. Though that sacrifice
had succeeded, it made her feel no better about it. The death,
pain, and poison was all too much. Leaning forward, the princess
retched up on the floor of the archive room, barely missing her
demon companion.

Her purge, however, did not stop the flood -
the onslaught - of dark memories and acts. The terrible choices she
had made continued in her head. Lorelai, the strange half
woman-half spider, was her next victim. Ruby gorged herself on the
spider venom, empowering herself but fueling her rage as well. The
princess slashed the blade across the woman’s neck, decapitating
her and killing her instantly, but that hadn’t been enough. She
further mutilated the spider corpse to get at the venom sack stored
within. Ruby drank until there was nothing left inside the fleshy
bag of poison. Again, the princess had cared nothing for the
creature she maimed, but seeing the images without the poison
inside her forced her to experience that anguish for the first
time. She never had seen herself capable of such destruction and
murder, but there lay the proof, flashing before her eyes, forcing
tears to flood out from them.

That was also the day that Ruby and her
horned demon had become physically intimate. Though she shared a
sense of companionship with Scarlett, the princess openly
acknowledged that there was no real love there. It was entirely
based around lust and need. The only thing they had in common was a
sexual attraction, and there, in that cave, they finally succumbed
to those desires. The monks of the Cloister had later warned her
that such intimacy was dangerous for the human in that
relationship, but Ruby never paid the thought much attention. Free
of the haziness the poisons brought on, the princess began to
wonder about such decisions.

There was no interlude to linger on such
thoughts, however, as the mental images barreled forward, showing
her other transgressions. It was because of the connection to
Scarlett that her next victim suffered. Slip, the back alley thief
with roaming hands, had been turned to slush for the simple act of
touching the horned demon. Ruby murdered him in cold blood because
of a jealous rage. Her chest was thick and heavy, her face was
burning hot from the inside, and she hated herself for what she had
done.

The only time she truly seemed to feel any
emotion was not for any action she had taken but for what she had
seen her sister become. When the Hendriks had allowed her a brief
glimpse at the woman Leina had become in her absence, Ruby lost
control of the cold demeanor she had maintained in the face of her
own horrible decisions. The darkness had blocked off her ability to
see herself for what she was, but that didn’t seem to translate
over to the one person she still loved. Learning what had happened
to Leina over the course of the previous decade broke the princess
down to the point she actually could see past the poisonous
thoughts of her own mind. She attempted to reclaim those pieces of
her soul over the next few days, but it was a task she found
herself incapable of performing. Her darkness had ultimately
returned.

Ruby didn’t fault herself for the deaths of
the goblins, as she had some of the others. She was already too
numb from everything else she had seen to worry herself over
killing such vile little creatures. The princess could not say that
about the monks and soldiers she had killed in the Cloister. The
poison inside her had kept her from counting the lives she took,
but now she knew exactly how much carnage she had caused. Ruby had
been personally responsible for the deaths of four hundred thirty
seven monks, twenty-four of their demons, and seven hundred thirty
two of the soldiers from Lavidia. Her body began to shake
uncontrollably at this revelation. The princess started to feel
like what she’d seen hadn’t even been her. These were someone
else’s memories, and she was just an observer. That was the only
way she could go forward and cope with such acts. She had to
separate who she was with who she’d been. The disgusting things
perpetrated by her dark half hadn’t been her. They were in the
past, and she had to be better because of the awful decisions she
had made. She swallowed the choking ball of contempt for herself,
and the flashes of memories continued their incessant march in her
head.

Rashtalg was next. She saw what she had put
her demon through. Though the creatures of the nether world often
received a great deal of derision, Ruby recognized that the demons
were no better or no worse than a human. She had treated the one
who had bonded with her shabbily, and she wished she could take
those actions back. Despite this, Scarlett had stayed true to the
princess through it all and even sacrificed herself in order to
save Ruby from her own hubris and greed. The need for whatever the
enormous creature in the mountain held within Daibhu’s body pushed
her into an unwinnable situation. The toxic maelstrom would have
consumed her along with everything in that chamber if the horned
demon hadn’t escaped the nether world and saved her. Even then, she
couldn’t let the glowing orb go. Her greed for power knew almost no
bounds. It was only when she saw that the terrible creature would
never give up that she shattered the untethered demon’s knee to
give the beast a distraction and meal.

Ruby wished that her horrible actions had
ended there, but the memories continued. She could feel the hot
tears streaming down her cheeks, falling over the edge of her chin,
as the sadness, guilt, anger, and regret tore at her mind. She knew
that the Willow’s Wood would be next. She tried to shut her mind to
what was coming, but the cleansing wouldn’t allow her to flee from
what she had done there. She saw the innocent wardens of the wood
broken, on fire, and poisoned. At one point, Ruby had thought she
could use the darkness to do good, but after what happened in the
forest of her family’s namesake, she knew that had changed. No
longer was she a good person doing bad things for the right
reasons. After Willow’s Wood, the princess had made herself into a
villain, no different than the craggy hand demon that she had vowed
to defeat.

The last of her viewings was the undead
creatures and their wight king down in the undercroft. She had
taken all the darkness and hatred that they had within them and
took it into herself. Ruby had no idea how she had managed to make
the decision to remove the poison with that dark red illness
permeating her very soul, but she had done it.