The story about how a princess has met her fate in an eternall locked metal body.
The Eternal Princess
“There, I think that has it, the damn thing should be recording now. I don’t mean to be offensive, but I’m not entirely convinced that you’re real, much less alive, I think I must have hit my head pretty hard when I fell into this chamber.”
“It is alright. I am not wholly assured of my own vitality, either.”
“Before I get any further, are you three separate? Who’s really talking?”
“I speak through my attendants. It is the only speech we possess.”
“So, What are you doing down here?”
“Sleeping.”
“Oh… well, um, I’m sorry we woke you?”
“Do not be. I have surely slept for long enough if you were able to pass through the mountain which entombs this place.”
“I… see…. Well, in that case, um… who are you? Erm… were you? Are you?”
“Were, and are. Though I have no name as most do.”
“Alright… so… I don’t suppose you can tell me what happened here?”
“You wish to know my story? It is not a happy one. It is the tale of the death of an age.”
“Well, yes. History has its dark spots, just because something isn’t happy is no reason to ignore it.”
“Very well then. My story began almost assuredly with a small carriage traveling decidedly too fast along a dirt road, the then current Baron of Endaria inside. I imagine he was scribbling copious note that no-one, including he, would ever read, because that’s the sort of man my father was. Princess Forever had returned.
“Oh, but I’m forgetting, you wouldn’t know about… her. Everything possible was done to erase her existence, after all. You see, the kingdom had its share of problems, mostly solved by the royal family’s primary duty being to insure heirs. LOTS of heirs, in the hopes that there’d still be one or two around when the monarch died. It once was only every generation or two that one would lose the heir to the throne to some marauding sorcerer or dragon, but by that time is was so frequent as to nearly exceed the capability of any royal family to keep up, if they spent very much time on anything else.
“No one is precisely sure what her original name was, either. Well, alright, that means that I don’t know, and everyone else of that time is long since dead. It had been an unusually quiet span in the kidnappings, and the current queen’s children had actually gotten the chance to grow up and have children of their own. But then they started again, with a pace seemingly set as though to make up for lost time with interest. Within 5 years, fully thirty heirs to the throne had been kidnapped. I have always wondered why these kidnappings have never deviated the line of sucession, start to finish, but it was because of this that one young princess, then the very end of the line of sucession, youngest daughter of the current queen’s youngest daughter, felt compelled to jest at the queen that someday she herself might sit upon the throne.
“All chatter is said to have fallen silent. Nobody ever talked about the kidnappings, as though afeared that if they did, more would follow. Except the Queen. She merely chuckled, and said ‘Nay, dear child. Be not dismayed, you shall be a princess forever.’ If she had known what fate those words would thrust upon so many, would she still have said them? No matter, say them she did.
“As one might expect, the vast mass ahead of this princess in line did not take kindly to her making a joke about their disappearance, and decided amongst themselves to deal with what they saw as a troublemaker of the highest order. It began with pranks, glueing her tiara to her hair, her gowns to her body, booby trapping her place a the dinner table, merely enough to make the nickname stick to her more firmly than anything else, as, at this point in time, as soon as their pranks were discovered, they were remedied by some nearby adult, who would sigh and tsk about mischievous children.
“But then, the old queen died, and a new one ascended the throne, and exercised her spite to its limit, using the long past joke as the basis for a proclamation that this princess was to become a symbol of princesshood, that she would truly be known as ‘Princess Forever.’ Putting her to death might well have been kinder. It has always been the case that pinceses have not had as much freedom as most believe, but Princess Forever now had none whatsoever, nights she spent bound to her bed, so that when it was morning she could not struggle against the servants whose job it was to wake her and glue her into the day’s regalia. Bustled constantly from event to event, little more than a thing, the coating of glue between her and her garments thick enough to prevent all but the smallest of motions unaided, tiara secured no longer to her hair, but to the one thing they did not remove for the nights, a porcelain mask stuck firmly to her face.
“Despite her later deeds, one does have to pity her somewhat, for the crime of a joke, she lost everything. She was the plaything of the court. The first time some minor nobleman took her aside and had his way with her at a ball, it was far from sanctioned practice, but he went unpunished, since the queen had not thought of this further degredation, and rather enjoyed the grisly prospect.
“Some years later, Princess Forever was put to what all then thought was her final use. A dragon came, and she was the eldest potential heir to the throne. They even went so far as to flood her skirts with glue, making them a solid mass, and covering her with it so that she would even be glued to the dragon as it took her away. The damnable fools.
“At any rate, back to father’s recklessly speeding carriage. Riding atop the dragon who took her, Princess Forever had returned. It seems that particular dragon was held under a geas requiring it to pierce the virginity of its victim before eating her, and to submit to them should it fail to do so. This had provided Princes Forever a dragon with which to maraud about, hunting down mages who had been expelled from the Consortia Magustus, and compel them to do their best to release her bonds. And so it was that with her mask eroded away leaving her masked just with the glue, and the outer layers of her clothing freely removable for the first time in years, Princess Forever invaded the coronation ceremony of her torturer’s successor, citing prior claim to the throne over the person to be crowned.
“With a dragon breathing down their necks, and fully prepared to breathe a little harder, it did not take long for the priesthood to decide that her claim was valid enough for them, though her choice of name should have warned the kingdom what was to come. She was crowned Queen Forever.
“Father was, above all else, a scheming, backstabbing little scoundrel, whose baronetcy escaped annihilation at the hands of his enemies solely through the fact that it sat square atop the richest mines ever known to exist, the entire mountain was made of valuable metals, likely a result of some ancient magical experiment gone awry. And now he was going to use that wealth to attempt to curry favor with the new Queen.
“He hired the Consortium to work on me, to have some use spells to prevent me from being harmed while others molded a metal shell onto my body. Solid silver turned my legs into sticks with pointed toes, pulled in my waist further than the tightest of corsets, wrapped me head to toe, ever so… cleverly layered and jointed so that even though I could still use my arms and hands, no hint of flesh escaped. The mages took great pride in showing father where they’d ‘improved’ on his designs. My face was to have been behind a mask, simply with a hole in it to drink through, they made it two. One mask with a metal tube, holding my mouth stretched wide around it, the second with a shaft resting in that tube, and a falsely serene smile on the equally false lips. The inner mask had no eyeholes, instead covering my eyes with gemstones, and the outer could be removed to allow me to drink. It took fully a decade for my eyes to be of any use deciphering their horrendously faceted sight. They killed my scalp, sculpting my hair and then dipping it in molten gold to seal it forever. Father’s design was just going to close my loins away, they made them as my face, one layer to hold me wide, the other to hide what lay within. Again the second layer was removable, though for no purpose as noble as sustenance of life.
“Queen Forever had declared that a new symbol of princesshood was needed, you see. Her elevation to the throne could only mean that her predecessor’s methods were faulty, and commanded all of her vassals to present their youngest daughter in the castle courtyard at the end of the month. Three would be chosen, one to become the new symbol, and two to be the new symbol’s attendants. When this decree came, I had already spent 3 months living, if it could be called that, as a silver doll with diamond eyes, and nipples, loins, lips, and hair of gold.
“Father’s gamble with my life paid off, Queen Forever selected me. I wasn’t particularly surprised, or upset, when, after getting the Consortium’s file number for what father had them do to me, she had him executed for the impertinence of tampering with her raw materiel. Why should I have been upset? However his gamble went, my life was over, if I hadn’t been selected, the best I could’ve hoped for was to be given to the Consortium, and that certainly wasn’t much.
“Why would that be so bad, you ask? There’s a reason that wizards have always kidnapped princesses. It’s not with the intent of giving the knights something pretty to look at, I assure you.
“The Queen decided to expand on father’s idea, and make the attendants part of the symbol as well. She had the consortium entomb them as they had entombed me, though my silver and gold became their cast iron and brass. Their mouths were left unbound, the mask secured to them simply containing sufficient space inside for them to drink, or chew anything they could get through the small holes they were left for eating, a magical compulsion used to prevent them from talking. The Consortium didn’t even balk at her command to place an enchanment of unaging on the three of us, so long as they were appropriately paid, all of their scruples had been satisfied.
“Then it was time to ‘get dressed’… for the last time. First were mages of the smithy, welding jewelry onto me, earrings, a necklace, a tiara, and a cast iron maid’s uniform onto each of my attendants. She thought it was funny to have them sculpt a magically ever-turning wind-up key to attatch to each of our backs, as well. Next came tailors building a dress around me. Bright pink boots, with heels to match the permanent arch of my feet, possibly the frilliest bustier ever known, as it had no need for structure, cloth has no reason to try to reshape metal, and pale white gloves reaching up to my armpits, all secured with magically enhanced ooze. Queen forever decided to take advantage of the perversity of the mages, my gown was the first the kingdom had ever seen with a series of buttons at the crotch. A block of foam was placed between my legs, and I was inverted, so that they could secure each layer of petticoats with more of the ooze, with the eventual result that the dome of my skirts was permanent, filled with a slightly squishy, but eternally irremovable mass, and the cutting away of the foam confirmed my fears as to what duties I was likely to be expected to perform.
“Where her chains had been private, ours were made blatant, as you can see. Admittedly, our necks had no motion left to them even before these collars were welded on, but they certainly made it clear our station in the order of things. Chains connected us at the necks, the wrists, and the ankles. At least they saw fit to allow us to communicate with each other, the mages connected our minds, even though Queen Forever had given no such order. Because of this, when we found the loophole in the compulsion that let me speak through my attendants, I didn’t use it, for fear it would be removed.
“And then we were displayed. Named the ‘Eternal Princess,’ we three, cursed to indeed be eternal, were finished. And with our lives as with our entombment, Queen Forever intended to, in absence of being able to revenge herself on her tormentors, go further than they in every respect. We were on display whenever she held court, the toy at every ball. Frequently she would have the court mage immobilize us, and then challenge the assembled nobles to place us in the most ‘artistic’ pose. We were allowed free reign in the castle at other times, the better to be found in out of the way places by those with a desire to abuse something, but all this was not enough to sate her.
“A special bedchamber was prepared on the ground floor of the castle, the bed with cutouts in the mattress to allow me to lay flat despite the permanence of my gown and key. Like her before me, I was secured to the bed each night, but in addition my attendants were secured to the wall, one on each side of the bed. But that was far from where it stopped. The bedroom’s main door was reinforced, and each night locked from the outside. Magic radiating outward from the lock to have that act open the passage initially meant to be an emergency escape route, but was now freely accessible to anyone who wished to wander in.
“Princess Forever had been made available to any noble who wished to have her. The Eternal Princess was for anyone who could open the door.
“It was probably the fact that we lacked the capacity to whimper or moan about our predicament that caused it. Queen Forever wanted to see us suffer, that we were suffering more than she did, but it didn’t show. It couldn’t show. And so she made it grow.
“First to change were the dungeons. Cells were discarded, replaced with row after row of narrow vertical slats. Between each pair of slats, there was a wide pipe coming up from the floor. Someone sentenced to the dungeons would be bound hand and foot, a ring-gag placed in their mouth, and then placed with their crotch atop one of these pipes, upon which a mage would cause the space to be filled with magical crystal, embedding the poor soul within it, just their face sticking out the front of the block to breathe and be fed. We made frequent trips to the dungeons to try to offer what comfort we could, people ended up there for sentences whose length was far more dependant on the Queen’s mood than any crime which might have been committed.
“It was some years later, when I had taken to spending time in the castle libraries, that the Queen expanded her revenge yet again, first to the other castle servants, they too became permanently trapped in their insignia of office, be they maids, page boys, butlers, guardsmen, anyone in the castle with a uniform to their job would never remove that uniform again. Even visiting dignitaries and nobles soon found that they were expected to stop at an antechamber on the way in to be secured into their clothing, though they were released as they departed.
“But then she did something unforgivable. She commanded that every girl between the ages of 3 and 10 be brought before her, as currently the symbol showed nothing of a princess’s childhood.
“We had until the end of the month to find a way to stop her, everyone in the kingdom wanted to, but nobody else was willing, not while the Consortium was happily allied with her treasury. Finally we found something. The Queen’s hold over the dragon would last only as long as her virginity did. We had one week left until the day when some child would be condemned; thankfully my father’s example had dissuaded anyone from condemning their child in advance. We spent the week sharpening our fingernails.
“The day came, as with every other time of holding court, we stood behind the Queen’s throne as she gazed out over the throng of children gathered to be sacrificed to her. She smiled and stood. We moved. We tore through her clothes. My hand went down. My fingers curled. My hand came up.
“She screamed once as I drew blood, and again when the dragon grinned. She probably screamed a third time, but the dragon’s mouth muffled it fairly thoroughly if she did. In gratitude for his freedom, the dragon then simply left without wreaking further havoc.
“There was silence. The silence was broken by the sound of the gates being broken in by an angry mob, who were somewhat disheartened to find out that they’d missed the rebellion. They didn’t have to wait long for another, when the court mage asked who was going to pay the Consortium now, and the mage wars began.
“I don’t know very much about the mage wars, early on someone decided it might be a good idea to try to end the war by removing the cause, and buried this city under a mountain. From then on, all I know is feeling the ebb and flow of magic as gargantuan spells crashed back and forth, the shockwaves pushing and pulling at the numerous enchantments embedded within us and this castle… and it ended with a final ebbing, and since then I have felt no more.“
From that day, till this, I have wandered these darkened halls, and slept for the gods only know how long. So now I ask a question. What will your modern world do with an ancient magic city, and it’s Eternal Princess?”