The curse

By Suzette Drake

Chapter Five
The day the whole world went away


One day Charlotte woke up. She touched her fingers to her face. Felt that it had changed. Charlotte recognized that it had changed rather. She was in bed alone that morning. She walked over to her vanity. She looked at the stones that rimmed it. She looked into a blue stone. And then it seemed as though she fell into it. Memories of herself came back to her. It was like a flash flood. She was back in the grove with the old woman who spoke a language that Charlotte never learned but knew. The woman chanting her hymns within the blue light of the stone touched something within Charlotte. Her gaze broke from the stone and danced to her reflection. She had become darkness. Yet deep within her there still remained an aching light. Her eyes were not quite as those of the queen. Her teeth were not those of the Undranes. They never could be she realized. Though so much of her would change she would still be what she born as. Even still, she was not human. Her people were not human, not her true people. The Undranes were not human either. Neither of them were gods. They were something like the gods though, thought Charlotte. She continued to look at herself. She looked into herself. The old woman, Charlotte realized was never chanting hymns. She had been chanting something far worse. It was never words or praise to the gods. They had been words of accusation. The old woman was a being that lived outside of Time. They had been songs of sorrow and bitter regrets.


Charlotte was beginning to understand so many things in that moment. That one crashing and defining moment she began to learn so much. She began to cry again as she began to understand. The tears were not tainted with blood or darkness. They were not even tainted with the salt that is the water of tears. It was the purest water that fell from her eyes now. It was waters from the beginning. It was water that would have been found in a seer’s gazing pool. The tears washed away the soot that had become Charlotte’s skin.

Charlotte realized that the tears though something loving and pure could never restore who she was. She had blood on her teeth and the taste of it still lingering in her mouth. She spit. She kept spiting but it wouldn’t take away the taste and the sin of it. It could not take away that she had devoured lives when she was broken. That when the prince came to her in the nights her brought along servants to play in their games. They committed acts of carnality and blood. They had taken sweet intoxicating pleasures with the young women and men; Orgies that led to screaming blood baths. She had broken open the throats of the beautiful naked youths. She had drunk in their lives and would forever carry the memory of those tormented souls with her.
Charlotte began to pour water from her basin when she recalled all of this.
“My Gods!” She whipped at her face and mouth with disgust. “NO!” The sound of that cry would carry through the centuries. She sobbed hard with the guilt now present in her wakeful self. This would never wash away. That is how it seemed to Charlotte at that time.

The basin and water pitcher fell from the table where they were kept. They broke into a hundred pieces, the shards flying into her feet and her legs, cutting her in turn.

Charlotte reached up to her neck. It was pulsing and hurting. When she pulled her hand to her line of vision it was covered in blood. “No. No. No.” It had become an almost monotones chant. She passed her bedchambers. From the window to her bed and back again. She now staggered from one side of her bed where her vanity stood and fragments of a broken basin lay along with water and spatters of blood, soaking into the floor. She staggered to the window, a great dark opening, at the other side of the room in her delirious state. She looked out. She could see nothing but darkness. Her gaze turned down. Far down there were stones and a pool of water that never moved.
Her hair was the colour of blood. It was matted with it.

Charlotte wanted to fly away from the awful place. She just wanted out. She wanted away from the place, the room. She wanted to be so far away of what she had become. She placed one barefoot after the other onto the pane less window’s ledge. She made the effort to spread her wings out. She leapt out of the window.

Despite those out-stretched wings, she could not fly. A creature that was made of spirit killed itself.

Her soul could never die though. She would continue living forever, trapped in the body of a lesser being. Charlotte became human and the world she once knew would haunt her dreams and her desires forever. And the constellations would never be as she remembered them to be.

Chapter one, The loss

Chapter two, The nightmares

Chapter three, Strength

Chapter four, In the arms of the dreamer

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