Once Upon a Dream (2 page)

“I thought we had done with the last of you,” the king growled. “Do not meddle in the affairs of kings, hag. It is not your place.”

Maleficent looked sadly down at the helpless little baby, who was still smiling despite what was going on around her.

“Poor child,” she murmured. “My powers are not strong enough to prevent this wicked transaction. Not the way matters stand now. But I swear on my own life I will be back and set everything to rights. On your sixteenth birthday, goodness and nobility will be restored to this wretched kingdom.”

And she vanished in a puff of green smoke.

As the days wore on in the wretched kingdom, the little princess Aurora grew in grace and beauty. She sang and danced to the delight of everyone around her.

Her parents, meanwhile, made good use of the powerful demons and fearsome magics given to them by the fairies. They waged strange and terrible wars upon their neighbors that not only decimated their enemies but punished the land itself, rendering it infertile and foul. Only horrible black and twisted things grew where the king and queen’s army had passed.

Soon that was most of the known world.

The peaceful valleys, lush orchards, sparkling rivers, and snow-capped mountains that the queen and king had so envied and wanted for themselves were now nothing more than a blasted wasteland blown through by hot and deadly winds, occupied by only the most vile, unnatural creatures born of darkness and magic.

And the monsters, having consumed everything else, began turning their hideous eyes to their masters’ castle.

Meanwhile, the good little princess was mostly neglected by her parents and often wore rags—except for the rare occasion when the king and queen noticed her and decided to dress her like a proper member of royalty, so all who remained could see and admire her.

Aurora took her mistreatment surprisingly well, making friends with the dwindling number of cats, mice, dogs, birds, and squirrels who lived within the castle walls. All the people who still made the castle their home loved her utterly.

But they were frightened of her parents more.

At sixteen years of age, Aurora, now a beautiful young woman, knew full well that her birthday celebrations were less important than the apocalyptic events that were occurring in the world around her. She forgave her parents in advance for most likely forgetting that special day—as they had for the last fifteen.

Still, she dressed in her finest gown and prepared to greet everyone with the grace and good humor for which she was known.
Someone
would remember and wish her congratulations, perhaps whispered so her parents wouldn’t hear.

As the clock struck noon in the middle of her birthday, the three evil fairies appeared.

“We have come for what we have been promised,” the first one said.

“We can no longer control the magics you gave us!” the king protested.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t make deals with the devil,” the second fairy said.

“You must save us!” the queen cried.

“No,” the third fairy said. “Now hand her over.”

Confused, Aurora looked from her parents to the fairies.

“What…what is meant by all of this?” she asked, hoping against hope she didn’t understand.

“You must go,” the queen said wearily, gesturing to the fairies.

“NO.”

As had happened sixteen years previously, there was a puff of green smoke. Maleficent appeared. She did not look like she had before; now she leaned hard on a staff, and her beautiful face was drawn and hollow. Black robes wrapped around her like she was an ancient pilgrim at the end of a very long journey.

“It has taken me the full sixteen years to prepare, but now I shall do my best to prevent further evil in this kingdom,” she said, her voice still strong. She raised her staff and green light glowed from the crystalline orb at its top.

“You have no power—” the first fairy began.

“
BEGONE!
” Maleficent cried. She threw both her hands into the air and green fire shot from her body.

The three fairies shrieked and dissolved backward, the essence of their being returned to whatever evil place had spawned them.

“Oh, foolish king and queen,” Maleficent said. “What evil you have done can
not
be entirely undone. The land will shriek forever from the pain you have caused it. Perhaps, however, I can save what little is left.”

She raised her arms again and chanted. Green fog flowed out from her fingertips and through the delicately paned windows of the castle. It ebbed around the black and twisted trees that now grew in the dried-up moat. Vines and thorns began to sprout from the ground. These grew rapidly and reached up over the castle walls, crisscrossing quickly like the warp and weft of a spinster’s loom. Soon the whole castle was enveloped in a dark green shadow.

Unholy cries of frustration rang out from the blasted land beyond.

Spent, Maleficent fell back, her white face even paler than before.

“We are safe.”

The king, about to give her royal thanks or some such, was not allowed to speak.

She held up her hand and he was silenced.

“
You
, however, will receive a punishment far kinder than you deserve considering the things you have done,” she said coldly. “For selling your own daughter to the Dark and destroying the world outside these castle walls, you
should
die. But as the new queen of this castle, I will show leniency and lock you in the dungeon forever, where you may think upon what you have done and repent.”

And the guards of the castle, and the people within, did nothing to stop this—and may, in fact, have helped push their old king and queen down the stairs.

“Sold me?” Aurora murmured. “I don’t understand….”

Maleficent put her hand on the poor girl’s head.

“I am so sorry, child,” she said. “This is a terrible thing to have happened to you and the world you knew. But at least now you and those still here may live, and we shall survive and prevail.”

And so Queen Maleficent, Aurora, and the survivors in the castle lived happily ever after, while the world lay dead and deadly around them.

THE PRINCESS AURORA
was spinning again.

She couldn’t help it.

When the corridors were wide, inviting, and empty…When bright bands of actual sunlight slipped through the vines and the windows, golden and slow, puddling on the ground the way she imagined it did in real forests…When the soft carpet beckoned, patterned with dark colors and bright spots the way meadows were supposed to be…Then she would sing and spin, twirling down the corridor, feeling the warm moments of light on her skin as she flung her arms out. Trying to recapture snippets of dreams that once in a while involved the woods.

Sometimes she took off her golden shoes.

She would sing whatever came to mind and seemed appropriate for the moment—bits from the nicer tunes the minstrel taught her, proper ballads from her music tutor, half-remembered lullabies, snippets of her own invention. Sometimes, right before sleep claimed her, music rang in her sleepy ears, entire orchestras and choruses proclaiming sternly but joyfully some unremembered thing. Sometimes she would try to remember those tunes, and sing them, too.

This was usually a good corridor for twirling. It was on the southern side of the castle, just above the great hall, and if the hot winds outside managed to scrape away the layers of smoke and soot, sunbeams would sometimes form. The far end of the corridor led to a wide set of formal stone stairs that had balustrades good for dragging the tips of her fingers dramatically along while pushing herself back and forth to each side, like a deer happily tumbling down a waterfall.

Or maybe it was fish who did that. She couldn’t keep them straight.

At the bottom, she tried to cross and uncross her feet quickly the way she had seen some of the troubadours and girl performers do. Her golden hair fell like a ripple of costly fabric, first down one shoulder and then the other, as she quickly shifted position. She lifted the hem of her dress so she could watch her feet and make sure they were doing what they were supposed to. But it was all so utterly graceful that anyone watching would have thought it was part of the performance.

Of course, anyone watching might also have wondered at a young woman—much less a royal princess—prancing about like that.

She pirouetted alongside a table in the lesser banquet hall, did a little leap through a side pantry, shuffled past an only
slightly
surprised serving boy, and briséd through what was once an orangery but whose glass was now covered in thick, protective vines like the rest of the castle.

Aurora only paused her singing and dancing when she came to the wide ironclad door that led to the
special
dungeon.

At the bottom of a long, winding flight of cold stone stairs were several small, rounded chambers that looked like the lairs of mud dauber wasps. Most of them were empty—there was little to no crime in the castle since there was no place else to go, no one you could escape from in a remaining population of less than a thousand. And nothing worth stealing.

When the minstrel got a little too drunk and out of hand, the queen would throw him in the stocks. Only once did she ever send him to the dungeons to dry out.

No, the only people down there now were the architects of the end of the known world: Princess Aurora’s parents, King Stefan and Queen Leah.

Once she had snuck down there, to look upon her progenitors.

Her aunt Maleficent had never forbidden her from doing so—her aunt had never forbidden her anything. Aurora didn’t know why she felt she had to do it on the sly.

But she had waited until Maleficent had been down and come back up so she knew there would be torches still lit and the way would not be utterly black. Aurora had slipped off her golden shoes and tiptoed, sticking closely to the rough-hewn walls, flattening herself like a child playing hide-and-seek.

The king and queen had been daze-eyed and silent, sitting on the one hard bench in their tiny cell, staring at nothing at all. There was no emotion on either of their faces. They were like statues waiting for the end of time, for the castle itself to crumble down around them.

Chilled, Aurora had fled back upstairs as quickly as she could and found her aunt Maleficent and wrapped her in exactly the sort of hug the older woman didn’t like but put up with on occasion, for the sake of her adopted daughter.

Aurora had no intention of ever going down to the dungeon again.

For now she just shivered and moved quickly past the dungeon door, all desire to dance withered and gone.

Her parents had danced, it was said, as the world tumbled down around them.

Their sickness, their evilness, their greed and heartlessness that ran so thick through their blood—it was in Aurora’s blood, too. Naturally.

Feeling a rise of panic, she began to race to the throne room, stopping just before the door to enter at a more regal rate, smoothing the front of her dress.

Maleficent sat upon the throne with an easy elegance Aurora wished she had. Her long fingers languidly pointed here and gestured there as she spoke. It was almost time for the Midvember ball; a full month had passed since the previous festivities. The room was filled with servants and minor royalty, all with last-minute requests for magical adjustments to their costumes, or additions to the menu, or royal approval of a certain dance.

Some of the servants weren’t strictly human.

Some of the servants were black and gray and strangely shaped. They had beaks instead of mouths, or pig snouts, or, worse, no mouths at all. Their feet were cloven hooves or spurred chicken claws or huge, splayed trotters.

But they were needed to keep the fouler monsters at bay, the ones from Outside. Maleficent summoned them out of clay and spirits from another world—a not very nice world, the princess guessed.

Their intelligence was negligible. Their silence was insisted upon by the queen, who saw the effect they had on the uneasy human residents of the fortress. Aurora was torn about this; the good-hearted girl rued the unfairness of the strict orders they were under.

And yet they were so unsettling….

Maleficent’s eyes caught Aurora and her face cracked into a pleased smile.

“Come, my girl, over here. You’re a welcome break from these weary preparations.”

“Auntie,” Aurora said with relief, approaching the throne and standing beside the queen. As always, her fears and doubts subsided the moment she was near the Savior of the Kingdom. She felt
safe.
“Really, you shouldn’t bother yourself with all this. You do so much else for the kingdom!”

“Ah, but this is important for morale, my sweet,” Maleficent said, raising an arched eyebrow as she smiled down upon her ward. “With none of us able to leave the castle until the world heals—well, we
need
these diversions to keep our spirits up.” She lifted a long finger and tucked a lock of golden hair behind Aurora’s ear. “Besides…your parents neglected you for
sixteen years
. Sixteen years without a ball or a birthday for a royal princess! Even peasants do more for their children.”