The Poison Princess (8 page)

Though, she really wasn’t sure that was it.
She thought she was thirsty, hungry, or tired, but nothing sounded
quite right. There hadn’t been much down there to eat though. Aside
from the luminescent mushrooms guiding her path, she’d only seen a
few insects and a pair of frogs. She continued to hear the stream
of water, but it remained maddeningly out of her reach. Earlier,
she had convinced herself that she didn’t need food or water
anymore. Sleep seemed beyond her, despite repeated attempts and
growing exhaustion. When she had been wandering around above in the
Abyss, Ruby didn’t have any of these problems. Maybe the effects of
the spell were starting to wind down, and she was returning to
normal. The princess hoped for that, but she was not so naive that
she thought it could have actually been true.

Her only companion through the rocky
labyrinth was the little, purple imp that had named itself Sniggle,
and he was of little help or solace. It offered no suggestions,
preferring to lazily slumber on her shoulder. Unlike her, it seemed
not to be bothered by the exhaustion over the past days. It needed
no food or water, but it certainly slept enough. She was quite
jealous of that. Her last dream was of the demon Scarlett, and
despite her protests, the princess wouldn’t have minded seeing her
again. Sleep, however, would not come to her, so she walked. She
would find the way out, or she would die searching.

Above ground, in the Abyss, Ruby had used her
poisonous abilities to send out a dozen little sludge-crafted imps
in search of an exit. She’d considered doing that again, but she
felt too weak. Despite that, she’d attempted to create one of the
little creatures, but the toxins wouldn’t harden into anything
useful. She would have to continue forward on her own.

Ruby’s goal had become finding the stream of
water that she could hear somewhere behind the walls. The sick of
the serpent still covered her, and she wished to finally clean it
from her skin and matted hair. Though it wouldn’t matter because of
the poison, she just wanted to be clean for a few minutes before
the secreted sludge ruined it once more. There was one section in a
particular hall that the princess kept coming back to. The water
could be heard the best from there, and she had searched its
corridors repeatedly in vain.

She stood in the middle of that hall, with
her eyes closed, trying to focus on the sound. It swept through the
rocks of the cave. It wasn’t just a small trickle; this was a
full-blown stream. The water was so close. The sound was almost on
top of her. Why then couldn’t she find it? Without moving, she
mapped out the cavern’s twists and turns nearby. Every last
corridor had been explored. A trail of sludge marked each one.

“Where is it?” she shouted, spitting poison
from her mouth and jarring Sniggle from his slumber.

So disoriented was the imp that he managed to
slide off Ruby’s shoulder and into a heaping puddle of her secreted
poison at her feet. He splashed as he landed, and the princess
looked down to realize how long she must have been standing there.
The puddle was so great that it had begun to dribble toward one
wall. The floor sloped, she realized. Sniggle too discovered this,
and it walked toward where the sludge was drifting. The little imp
looked up at Ruby and pointed in that direction.

The princess got down on her knees to see
what it was pointing at. She grinned, when she realized where the
poison was going. Ruby grabbed Sniggle and gave the slime creature
a kiss, before sitting him to the side of the large opening at the
bottom of the cave floor. The wall had jutted out and the light of
the mushrooms had hit the rocks at such an angle that the opening
was obfuscated without being down at the floor’s level. The crevice
was big enough for her to slide through, and that’s exactly what
she did. Ruby didn’t look before she squeezed through; she was too
desperate for escape. It ended up not mattering much, as the other
side proved quite safe for her.

From the new chamber, Ruby reached back
through and snatched Sniggle, placing him back on her shoulder,
where he resumed his nap. The new area of the cave was darker than
where she had previously been, but ahead she could see a patch of
the mushrooms illuminating a slow moving stream. The princess
rushed toward it, eager to get clean after the long time she’d been
forced to wear the serpent’s sick on her skin. She plopped Sniggle
down on the ground and jumped into the waist deep water, not
bothering to remove her dress first.

Ruby submerged herself in the water, running
her hands through her dark hair and untangling the matted strands.
Only coming up for occasional breaths of air, the princess tried to
scrub all of the serpent’s viscera off her skin and clothing as
well. The water was icy and frigid to the touch, but she didn’t
mind at all. She felt good to get the grime off her after all that
time slogging around in it.

The princess felt fresh and good for the
first time, since she’d eaten that poisoned strawberry. The
sensation was doomed to not last too long, as her poison quickly
continued to dribble forth from her mouth. At least it was isolated
to just her own sludge and no longer the snake’s as well, she told
herself.

As good as the impromptu bath made her feel,
Ruby still felt some emptiness inside her. She wasn’t certain that
it was thirst exactly, but she had to start somewhere. Pooling a
bit of the water in her cupped palms, the princess raised it to her
mouth and tried to take a sip despite the dripping poison. Though
she managed to swallow the fresh liquid, it didn’t have the effect
she would’ve hoped for. Rather than replenishing her, the water
instead made her feel sick and worse than she had before the drink.
She felt the liquid come back up, and she retched it out along with
the poison. Ruby couldn’t even swallow water anymore.

The pangs in her gut were yearning for
something else it seemed. Her only other guess was that the
sensation was some twisted version of hunger. She hadn’t seen much
to eat in the caves, but Ruby guessed that near the water was as
good a place as any to find life. The princess pulled herself out
of the water, her dress completely drenched and dripping with water
and the fresh poison spilling down on it.

She started to move forward, but the soaked
gown was so heavy that she thought it would only slow her down.
Stretching her hands around to her backside, Ruby managed to undo
the ties keeping her dress on, and after a time, loosened it enough
to remove it. The princess slipped the straps off her shoulders and
wiggled it off down to her feet, leaving her standing in only her
plain, white chemise that had a stain of purple down its front
where the poison had seeped through. Ruby laid out the soaked dress
on the rocky floor, hoping to allow it to dry faster that way.
Sniggle, meanwhile, who had been sleeping peacefully at the side of
the stream, woke up and took notice of the strewn out gown.
Naturally, he moved over to it and decided to continue his nap
there on the softer palette.

While the dress dried and Sniggle slept, Ruby
went in search of food along the underground stream. She feared
eating the glowing mushrooms would be a mistake for some reason, so
she was hopeful that she could find another frog. Eating a raw frog
didn’t strike her as something she would have ever thought herself
doing, but times were desperate. She needed sustenance, and that
was the best she could manage. Without her long flowing dress, Ruby
could move much faster and quieter, so she expected if she were
able to find one, she would be able to sneak up on it. She had
something of a chill and tremored a bit, but she was able to work
past that.

The princess walked along beside the stream’s
path for what she expected was a couple of hours. The way had been
simple, and it would be impossible for her to get lost on the way
back, so she didn’t worry about how far she had traveled.
Eventually, Ruby came across where the stream widened into a small
pond in the middle of a large, open cave. She was optimistic that
she could find something alive in there. She was half right
anyway.

Getting closer to the water, she discovered
that the liquid was black and plagued. When she had cleaned herself
in the stream, it must have washed down through the current, not
filtering out the toxins at all. Dozens of fish had been killed and
drifted up to the surface, floating and suspended at the top of the
water. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she thought that she
should feel guilty. Feel bad about the fact she killed all those
fish. That she polluted the stream and pond and all the life in it.
She didn’t. She didn’t feel a thing, and that was what worried
her.

Ruby laid down at the side of the water and
stretched out her arm to grab one of the fish within reach. Barely
able to scrape her fingernails across the underbelly of the fish,
she scratched at its scales enough to get it to begin to drift
toward her. Eventually she succeeded, and she snatched it out of
the pond. The princess flicked the excess water and poison off it
and crawled back away from the water, crossing her legs and staring
down at her catch. She prevented dribbling the ooze from her mouth
on it, not eager to make her only food source any filthier than it
needed to be.

The princess was not particularly hungry for
the fish, as she looked down at it. She needed to eat, though.
Knowing this, Ruby raised the fish to her mouth and bit into its
soft belly, unenthusiastically. Tearing through its scaly flesh,
the princess attempted to chew and swallow a large chunk of the
beast. Again though, her system resisted this source of sustenance.
She dropped the rest of the fish, as the chewed portion came
barreling back out of her mouth. Scales, meat, and a bit of bone
lay splattered on the rocky floor along with her noxious spit. She
felt worse than she did before. She felt utterly empty, but still
the ooze poured forth.

“What do you want?” she shouted, still
spitting chunks of fish from her mouth and echoing the words
throughout the cavern. “What do I have to do?” She stood up and
yelled at the ceiling. “What!?”

It was then that she saw something hanging
down from the rocky roof overhead - the curled, white blissroot
fruit that the serpent had been eating for centuries. The fruit
kind of reminded her of a much larger white banana. That wasn’t
entirely a good thing. When Ruby had been a little child, she’d
been given her first ever banana to try. Afterward, she’d broken
out in a rash all over her body, and her eyes became red and
agitated. From then on, the princess blamed the banana for the
distress, assuming that she was allergic to the fruit. The truth,
however, was that Ruby had eaten the banana immediately after she’d
petted a cat for the first time. Cats, she had found, she really
was allergic to, but in truth, she probably wasn’t allergic to
bananas. She’d simply transferred the effects of that cat to the
banana and had sworn them off. It was only later that she’d been
told that there had been a cat involved in that event at all. That
certainly wasn’t a part of her memory. Naturally, you might assume
that with this additional information she would have gotten over
her banana aversion. You’d be wrong. She still found that she was
quite repulsed by the yellow fruit. This aversion was somewhat
transferred onto the toxic blissroot hanging over her head. Maybe
that was why she hadn’t even thought about what this white fruit
had to offer.

She remembered the story about it being
toxic. Maybe that was what she needed. Poison. It was after all who
she was now, the poison princess, as Scarlett had called her. The
one she’d seen in the ceiling over the pond, however, was too far
up for her to reach. Looking around at the rocky roof, Ruby found
that they were growing all over the place. She traced her steps
back the way she had come, where the top of the cave wasn’t so far
up in hopes of finding some lower hanging fruit.

Eventually, she did come upon one that was
almost within her reach. She was just a bit too short to grab it,
outstretched and on the tips of her toes. Surveying the area, Ruby
saw a large boulder that she thought she would be able to shift.
Rushing over, she crouched down and leaned against it, managing to
push it closer to where the blissroot was extending down. Jumping
back atop the rock, Ruby reached up and grabbed the toxic fruit. It
was wedged into the earth pretty well, but she shifted and pulled
at it until it fell out with chunks of earth alongside it.

The princess held the large fruit in her
hands, as she stepped down off the boulder. The blissroot was warm
to the touch, and she could smell the hot spices permeating off it.
Overhead, the roots and vines of the fruit released the toxic gas,
but it drifted up through the earth and away from the princess.
Wiping away the dirt and rocks from the surface of the white
blissroot, Ruby actually began to think that this was what she
needed. She could feel it inside her. It was right. The princess
bit into the fruit, taking out a large chunk and swallowing it
almost whole. The fruit was exceedingly spicy, but it was good.
Everything was good. She felt restored. Ruby breathed a sigh of
relief and turned to sit down, leaning against the rocky wall.
Everything was going to be fine. She had what she needed.

Ruby woke up with a sense of Deja vu. She felt like that day had
already come once before, even though she knew that was nonsense.
Her father had an important announcement that day regarding the
future of their kingdom, and though she was afraid of what it would
mean for her, she was still a willing participant. She roused
herself from her comfortable bed and prepared for the day.

An attendant entered her room to help her,
but Ruby didn’t quite recognize the young woman. She must have been
new. At the same time, the woman struck her as someone she somehow
knew, though she ultimately conceded that she did not. She had
long, orange hair that ended in ringlets, and the princess thought,
at first glance, that the woman’s eyes were red. When she looked
back, they were an ordinary green, so she shook her head, laughing
at her own imagination.