Of Curses and Wishes

The Silent Castle

  The cell surrounds me, if you can even call it that. It's more like a hollowed-out bit of rock. The jagged walls are crammed full of little white tally marks, each one representing every painfully long week I have spent in this cramped cell. I've been here for a very long time now, the last person in the castle had died or left at least fifty years ago.

  I brace my hands on the edge of the cracked and dirty slab of stone which acts as my bed. I slowly stand up, pushing myself off with my grimey hands. I hiss at the sudden stinging pain on my left palm. I go to look at it but all I see is a fleeting slash of cruel red, leaving behind unmarked skin. A tired sigh escapes my chapped lips, I don’t know why I even bothered trying to looking at the cut. It has been the same ever since the sorceress took over my kingdom just before I was crowned queen at merely sixteen. She cursed me with eternal youth the second she layed eyes on my cowering self, it's more like eternal torture. But this hellish curse does come with some perks, though the downside of being locked up and never dying outweighs them, I heal almost immediately and I seem to have some sort of power that crackles inside of me but I’ve never dared use it, knowing that every little thing I use it for comes with a painful price. At least that’s what my father told me so long ago it feels like a dream. He used to tell me bed time stories as he sat on the edge of my luxurious four-poster bed in the years before his death. Each story ending with the magic user having to pay a exceadingly tall price for what they had done.

  I shake off the thought of my ever fading past as I turn to look out the small window at the back of my cell. A broken courtyard stretches out beyond my window. A crumbling castle surrounding it. An old podium stands in the middle of all of it with a sunken throne on top of it. My mother used to sit there many years ago… and so did the sorceress. I was meant to sit there as well but it doesn’t matter now, even if I did get to, there would be no-one to rule over. This kingdom had fallen to time long ago. Food had stopped coming to my cell long before the sorceress left, the pain of hunger and thirst always eating away at me. I had forgotten the names of the people I knew long ago and I barely remember their faces.

  I had deliberately forgotten my mother’s face when I realized that I wasn’t going to get out of this god forsaken cell. My Father’s features had hung on by a thread and for everyone else I knew, well, they were a lost cause.

  My bare feet crunch on the dried-out straw on the floor as I walk over to the barred wall to which I had come in by. But as I look at it there is no door to be found, I had realized this, to my ever growing dismay, a while ago, though I had sworn that there was a door before. Its probably one of the sorceress' tricks, trying to take away all of my hope of escaping or maybe it was just to play with me, to make me think that she was the one with all the power and that she could do anything to me if she wanted to.

  I can feel the power roiling up inside of me. The burning hot rage coiling into a fist in my hand. I slam it into the bars in front of me, the castle seems to shake in response. A frown twists my features as I try to figure out what I had just done, why I hadn’t done it before. Before I can work out what I was doing I slam my fist into the bars again, some rust crumbles to the ground. I hit it with my power again, then again and again and again. I can feel my conscience yelling at me to stop, to think of all the consequences that would come of it. But I don’t listen. All the years of solitude, of hunger backing my blows to the cage wall. What ever power was stopping the bars from breaking was dwindling, but so was my energy. My hits became weaker and weaker until… I stumble forward, the bars completely gone. I turn around, looking at where I had just been, where I had been for what seemed like an eternity. I feel a tear slip down my dirty cheek. Then another and soon I'm on my knees, my face in my hands.

  I only stop crying when my tears refused to come. I slowly uncoil my body from where it is on the floor and look around. On my left the corridor stretches on into darkness but on my right the passage veers off in another direction. I take a tentative step forward, throwing a quick glance back at my cell before I turn the corner, leaving my hell behind.