ysabara
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- Jun 24, 2007
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This started out as a rework of a fairytale and has since grown considerably. here's the first chapter, introducing Eric King ~ The Nithing King. 
I’m don’t normally suffer from hallucinations but given the amount of alcohol I’d consumed the night before it was perhaps understandable that I awoke with a king sized hangover and a Princess sitting on the end of my bed. She didn’t fit the mould of my usual fantasies either. I wasn’t into layers of tulle and tiara’s. My fantasies run more along the line of Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider. I closed my eyes and waited for her, and my headache to disappear.
The bed moved. Up and down, up and down and so did my stomach. She was bouncing on my bed, chanting. It wasn’t some magical incantation. It sounded more like, “Wake up you lazy lump of dog excrement.” I may have misheard her.
I opened my eyes, closed them again. Swore off alcohol for the rest of my life. Concentrated on my heaving guts. Managed not to puke. Opened my eyes again. She was still there. For a hallucination she carried a fair bit of… well I’ll be kind and say puppy fat. She was a spotty faced, double chinned, greasy haired nightmare in pink, probably no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. I looked her in the eye, willing her to disappear. She looked me in the eye and stayed right where she was, bouncing on the end of my bed.
I was obviously still asleep and dreaming. I decided, since I didn’t seem to be able to wake myself up that I might as well see where this dream was headed. First things first.
“Will you stop that!” I asked her.
“Stop what?” she said.
“Bouncing up and down like that. You’re making me queasy.”
“Excuse me,” she said sarcastically. “ I didn’t realise you had such a delicate constitution. I thought anyone with a purple ceiling like yours must be made of stronger stuff. If you can’t handle a little bit of bouncing on the bed how are you going to cope with dragons and monsters and evil wizards with pointy swords?”
Since the only monster I could see was bouncing on the end of my bed and I wasn’t entirely sure if her comment about pointy swords was supposed to be allegorical, I didn’t answer. She shook her head in exasperation. “Come on. Get up. You have to rescue me.”
“I do? Why would I want to do that?”
She gave one final bounce, which jarred my teeth. “ Because I am a beautiful Princess under an evil enchantment and of all the heroes in all the world, I have chosen you to save me.”
“Gee. Thanks.” I tried to sound enthusiastic. “What, are you like… Sleeping Beauty or something?” Now, I tried not to snicker.
“That old bag!” the Princess said scornfully. “She could be my grandmother. Nobody even wants to try and wake her up any more she’ s so ancient. She’s been asleep for 100 years already. I’ve only been enchanted for ten.” She tugged at my sheets. “ Come on. Times a wasting. I’m not getting any younger. I need to be rescued now!”
I tugged the sheets back. I sleep in the buff and there was no way I was going to expose myself to a fat fifteen-year-old, hallucination or not. She gave me a look, which I gave back to her, then she closed her eyes. I dragged myself out of the bed and hurriedly threw on some clothing. When I was dressed, I turned around to find her watching me.
“Not bad,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Eric.”
“Eric the what?” she asked.
I shrugged.” Just Eric,” I said. She made a moue of distaste.
“That’s not a particularly heroic name,” she muttered mutinously.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Myrtle.”
“Myrtle?”
“Sleeping Myrtle,” she said proudly. “You must have heard of me. I’m the most famous enchanted princess in all the seven Kingdoms.”
“Sleeping Myrtle?”
She frowned, obviously not liking my tone of voice. One slipper-toed foot began to tap ominously on my shag pile rug. “Are you mocking me, Eric the Nothing?” she inquired softly.
I held up my hands. “No, of course not. Do you want to explain just where I fit into all this enchanted Princess thing?” I waited, interested to see what my hallucination was going to come up with next.
It seems that ten years ago Princess Myrtle had seriously cheesed off her own Fairy Godmother, so much so that she had laid a spell upon her. Myrtle was cast into an enchanted sleep that could only be broken by the kiss of the man who was able to penetrate the wall of thorns which surrounded her castle, kill the monster chained at the door then defeat the evil wizard who stood guard over her bier. The evil wizard had a pointy sword. A really long, sharp, pointy sword, Myrtle stressed, eying me askance.
“What?” I asked, nettled by her calculating stare.
“Well Eric,” she said, looking me up and down. “You certainly look like a hero. You’re certainly built like a hero, but I don’t know if you’re really up to the job. Where’s your sword?”
I opened a drawer on the table next to my bed and took out the revolver I kept there. Myrtle looked dubious. I tucked the gun into the back of my jeans. Then I asked her a question that had been bugging me. “How come if you’re in an enchanted sleep somewhere, you’re also here at the same time?”
“Easy,” said Myrtle. “What you see here is actually an astral projection of my spiritual aspect made manifest by the innate power of your subconscious.”
See, I told you I was dreaming!
Having grabbed some spare ammunition I then followed Myrtle to the window of my twelfth floor apartment. “That’s where we have to go,” she said, pointing down. The city below had disappeared, replaced by a grey mist. I raised an eyebrow.
“So we like…jump?”
“No stupid! We slide down that.” A rainbow appeared, starting outside on my balcony and arching down into the mist in a coruscation of multi coloured light.
“Okay,” I said. “Ladies first.” Myrtle rolled her eyes at me. Then opening the door she clambered onto the rainbow and down she slid, her pink skirts billowing up over her head. Not a pretty sight. Still intrigued as to where this dream was leading, I followed her.
When we hit the ground the mist disappeared and we were standing before a wall of thorns that towered twenty feet or more above us. “This part is easy,” Myrtle said. “There is a pattern that you need to follow to find the path through. I’ll give you directions.” It was a maze. A huge prickly maze, but by following Myrtle’s instructions I was able to make my way through virtually unscathed. Except for once when she told me to turn right when I clearly needed to turn left and I ripped my thigh open to the bone. “Sorry,” she said. I managed to unstake myself from the thorn that had pierced me and limped out on the other side of the maze with blood running down my leg and squelching in my shoe. As dreams went this was turning out to be a particularly painful one.
We stood now in front of a castle. Well, more of a big house actually. A dilapidated, falling down sort of house. “Now for the Monster,” Myrtle said. I cast my eyes around, trying to see what I would be facing. The Monster lay on the front steps, tethered by a short chain to a huge iron post. Not having seen too many monsters before I thought it looked suitably monstrous but Myrtle pulled a face, looking peeved.
“Sleeping Beauty has a dragon outside her bier,” she muttered. “I’ve got that thing.” She turned to look at me. “ Off you go Eric. Get out your sword and slay me that monster.” She sat down in a froth of pink, her face expectant.
I pulled my gun out and limped towards the Monster. At my approach it lifted its head hopefully and thumped its armour plated tail. It was a friendly kind of Monster and I felt reluctant to kill it. “ Maybe we can just slip past it,” I said to Myrtle. She frowned.
“It doesn’t work like that,” she snapped. “You have to kill it.” And so I did. I had 100 rounds of ammunition and it took 98 bullets to finish the Monster off. It was covered in hundreds of small pieces of overlapping plate armour and finding a spot that could be pierced by a bullet proved tricky. It felt like shooting fish in a barrel. The Monster jumped around on its chain, yelping. Only once, after the ninety seventh shot did it lash at me with its claws, catching me unawares and laying open my side from rib to hip. When it was finally dead I felt kind of bad. Both metaphorically and physically. Myrtle got up off the ground and came over to where I stood, swaying.
“Two down and one to go,” she said gleefully. “You’re doing really well Eric. Come on.” She pushed the door at the top of the steps open.
The evil wizard turned out to be the easiest of all the tasks I had to perform. He stood there sneering, waving his pointy sword. I didn’t even have to get close to him. I shot him with my ninety ninth bullet and he dropped like a stone.
“Cool!” said Myrtle. She grabbed my hand and dragged me over to the bier. We both stood, staring at the woman who lay there sleeping.
“Wow!” said Myrtle. “I’m hot!”
And she was. Her hair hung over the side of the bier in a profusion of honey, cinnamon and chocolate. Her skin was alabaster, her lips red and plump and her body… Well, even in a state of near delirium from pain and acute blood loss I felt my body respond with instant lust. I looked from the woman on the bier to Myrtle, fat and spotty beside me.
“Don’t forget I’ve been lying there for ten years,” she said.“This is how I looked when I was first enchanted. I’ve grown up since then.” Placing her hand in the small of my back she gave me a little push towards the bier. “Well go on you fool,” she said. “Kiss me.”
Leaning forward I placed my lips against Sleeping Myrtles. Her lips were warm and I managed to forget the pain of my wounds in the sweetness of that kiss. Maybe this dream was looking up. Sleeping Myrtle opened her eyes. They were blue as the sky. She pushed me away and sat up blinking. There was a popping sound and teenage, nightmare Myrtle was gone, leaving me and my heavenly vision alone.
Myrtle turned to me, opening her blue eyes wide. “Eric,” she said. “You have broken my enchantment without thought or favour for your own safety. There you stand, mortally wounded…”
I interrupted her. “I’m not actually mortally wounded. It’s nothing that a little rest and a blood transfusion won’t cure.”
Myrtle pursed her lips. “Not mortally wounded?” Did she sound disappointed? “That’s …awkward.”
“Awkward?” I was feeling pretty crappy so I sat down heavily on Myrtle’s bier. She knelt before me, taking my hand in hers.
“Yes Eric. Awkward. You see I am a Princess and you… Well, you’re Eric the Nothing. I can’t marry you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her. “Royalty marry commoners all the time. Look at Fred and Mary. Charles and Di.”
“Well, we all know that ended badly, don’t we?” said Myrtle. “Anyway, they were Princes. It’s okay for a Prince to marry a commoner, but a Princess can only ever marry a Prince. Now, since the parameters of this particular enchantment state that I have to marry the man who awakens me and since I patently can’t marry you there’s only one thing left for you to do. You have to do the decent thing Eric and free me to marry a man of equal status to myself.” She reached down and picked up my gun, then placed it in my hand, wrapping my unresisting fingers around it.
Did she want me to kill myself?
Myrtle patted my hand. “Come on Eric. Do the honourable thing and fall on your magic sword.”
She did want me to kill myself! The Bitch. A word to the wise, all you Princesses out there. Never reject a potential suitor when he has a loaded gun in his possession. I raised my hand and aimed the gun between her baby blue eyes. Then I squeezed the trigger and blew her away with my one hundredth bullet. If any of you think my actions were questionable, remember, it’s just a dream.
I lay back on Sleeping Myrtle’s bier and crossed my arms over my chest. I waited to wake up.
And waited.
And waited…………..
SLEEPING MYRTLE
I’m don’t normally suffer from hallucinations but given the amount of alcohol I’d consumed the night before it was perhaps understandable that I awoke with a king sized hangover and a Princess sitting on the end of my bed. She didn’t fit the mould of my usual fantasies either. I wasn’t into layers of tulle and tiara’s. My fantasies run more along the line of Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider. I closed my eyes and waited for her, and my headache to disappear.
The bed moved. Up and down, up and down and so did my stomach. She was bouncing on my bed, chanting. It wasn’t some magical incantation. It sounded more like, “Wake up you lazy lump of dog excrement.” I may have misheard her.
I opened my eyes, closed them again. Swore off alcohol for the rest of my life. Concentrated on my heaving guts. Managed not to puke. Opened my eyes again. She was still there. For a hallucination she carried a fair bit of… well I’ll be kind and say puppy fat. She was a spotty faced, double chinned, greasy haired nightmare in pink, probably no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. I looked her in the eye, willing her to disappear. She looked me in the eye and stayed right where she was, bouncing on the end of my bed.
I was obviously still asleep and dreaming. I decided, since I didn’t seem to be able to wake myself up that I might as well see where this dream was headed. First things first.
“Will you stop that!” I asked her.
“Stop what?” she said.
“Bouncing up and down like that. You’re making me queasy.”
“Excuse me,” she said sarcastically. “ I didn’t realise you had such a delicate constitution. I thought anyone with a purple ceiling like yours must be made of stronger stuff. If you can’t handle a little bit of bouncing on the bed how are you going to cope with dragons and monsters and evil wizards with pointy swords?”
Since the only monster I could see was bouncing on the end of my bed and I wasn’t entirely sure if her comment about pointy swords was supposed to be allegorical, I didn’t answer. She shook her head in exasperation. “Come on. Get up. You have to rescue me.”
“I do? Why would I want to do that?”
She gave one final bounce, which jarred my teeth. “ Because I am a beautiful Princess under an evil enchantment and of all the heroes in all the world, I have chosen you to save me.”
“Gee. Thanks.” I tried to sound enthusiastic. “What, are you like… Sleeping Beauty or something?” Now, I tried not to snicker.
“That old bag!” the Princess said scornfully. “She could be my grandmother. Nobody even wants to try and wake her up any more she’ s so ancient. She’s been asleep for 100 years already. I’ve only been enchanted for ten.” She tugged at my sheets. “ Come on. Times a wasting. I’m not getting any younger. I need to be rescued now!”
I tugged the sheets back. I sleep in the buff and there was no way I was going to expose myself to a fat fifteen-year-old, hallucination or not. She gave me a look, which I gave back to her, then she closed her eyes. I dragged myself out of the bed and hurriedly threw on some clothing. When I was dressed, I turned around to find her watching me.
“Not bad,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Eric.”
“Eric the what?” she asked.
I shrugged.” Just Eric,” I said. She made a moue of distaste.
“That’s not a particularly heroic name,” she muttered mutinously.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Myrtle.”
“Myrtle?”
“Sleeping Myrtle,” she said proudly. “You must have heard of me. I’m the most famous enchanted princess in all the seven Kingdoms.”
“Sleeping Myrtle?”
She frowned, obviously not liking my tone of voice. One slipper-toed foot began to tap ominously on my shag pile rug. “Are you mocking me, Eric the Nothing?” she inquired softly.
I held up my hands. “No, of course not. Do you want to explain just where I fit into all this enchanted Princess thing?” I waited, interested to see what my hallucination was going to come up with next.
It seems that ten years ago Princess Myrtle had seriously cheesed off her own Fairy Godmother, so much so that she had laid a spell upon her. Myrtle was cast into an enchanted sleep that could only be broken by the kiss of the man who was able to penetrate the wall of thorns which surrounded her castle, kill the monster chained at the door then defeat the evil wizard who stood guard over her bier. The evil wizard had a pointy sword. A really long, sharp, pointy sword, Myrtle stressed, eying me askance.
“What?” I asked, nettled by her calculating stare.
“Well Eric,” she said, looking me up and down. “You certainly look like a hero. You’re certainly built like a hero, but I don’t know if you’re really up to the job. Where’s your sword?”
I opened a drawer on the table next to my bed and took out the revolver I kept there. Myrtle looked dubious. I tucked the gun into the back of my jeans. Then I asked her a question that had been bugging me. “How come if you’re in an enchanted sleep somewhere, you’re also here at the same time?”
“Easy,” said Myrtle. “What you see here is actually an astral projection of my spiritual aspect made manifest by the innate power of your subconscious.”
See, I told you I was dreaming!
Having grabbed some spare ammunition I then followed Myrtle to the window of my twelfth floor apartment. “That’s where we have to go,” she said, pointing down. The city below had disappeared, replaced by a grey mist. I raised an eyebrow.
“So we like…jump?”
“No stupid! We slide down that.” A rainbow appeared, starting outside on my balcony and arching down into the mist in a coruscation of multi coloured light.
“Okay,” I said. “Ladies first.” Myrtle rolled her eyes at me. Then opening the door she clambered onto the rainbow and down she slid, her pink skirts billowing up over her head. Not a pretty sight. Still intrigued as to where this dream was leading, I followed her.
When we hit the ground the mist disappeared and we were standing before a wall of thorns that towered twenty feet or more above us. “This part is easy,” Myrtle said. “There is a pattern that you need to follow to find the path through. I’ll give you directions.” It was a maze. A huge prickly maze, but by following Myrtle’s instructions I was able to make my way through virtually unscathed. Except for once when she told me to turn right when I clearly needed to turn left and I ripped my thigh open to the bone. “Sorry,” she said. I managed to unstake myself from the thorn that had pierced me and limped out on the other side of the maze with blood running down my leg and squelching in my shoe. As dreams went this was turning out to be a particularly painful one.
We stood now in front of a castle. Well, more of a big house actually. A dilapidated, falling down sort of house. “Now for the Monster,” Myrtle said. I cast my eyes around, trying to see what I would be facing. The Monster lay on the front steps, tethered by a short chain to a huge iron post. Not having seen too many monsters before I thought it looked suitably monstrous but Myrtle pulled a face, looking peeved.
“Sleeping Beauty has a dragon outside her bier,” she muttered. “I’ve got that thing.” She turned to look at me. “ Off you go Eric. Get out your sword and slay me that monster.” She sat down in a froth of pink, her face expectant.
I pulled my gun out and limped towards the Monster. At my approach it lifted its head hopefully and thumped its armour plated tail. It was a friendly kind of Monster and I felt reluctant to kill it. “ Maybe we can just slip past it,” I said to Myrtle. She frowned.
“It doesn’t work like that,” she snapped. “You have to kill it.” And so I did. I had 100 rounds of ammunition and it took 98 bullets to finish the Monster off. It was covered in hundreds of small pieces of overlapping plate armour and finding a spot that could be pierced by a bullet proved tricky. It felt like shooting fish in a barrel. The Monster jumped around on its chain, yelping. Only once, after the ninety seventh shot did it lash at me with its claws, catching me unawares and laying open my side from rib to hip. When it was finally dead I felt kind of bad. Both metaphorically and physically. Myrtle got up off the ground and came over to where I stood, swaying.
“Two down and one to go,” she said gleefully. “You’re doing really well Eric. Come on.” She pushed the door at the top of the steps open.
The evil wizard turned out to be the easiest of all the tasks I had to perform. He stood there sneering, waving his pointy sword. I didn’t even have to get close to him. I shot him with my ninety ninth bullet and he dropped like a stone.
“Cool!” said Myrtle. She grabbed my hand and dragged me over to the bier. We both stood, staring at the woman who lay there sleeping.
“Wow!” said Myrtle. “I’m hot!”
And she was. Her hair hung over the side of the bier in a profusion of honey, cinnamon and chocolate. Her skin was alabaster, her lips red and plump and her body… Well, even in a state of near delirium from pain and acute blood loss I felt my body respond with instant lust. I looked from the woman on the bier to Myrtle, fat and spotty beside me.
“Don’t forget I’ve been lying there for ten years,” she said.“This is how I looked when I was first enchanted. I’ve grown up since then.” Placing her hand in the small of my back she gave me a little push towards the bier. “Well go on you fool,” she said. “Kiss me.”
Leaning forward I placed my lips against Sleeping Myrtles. Her lips were warm and I managed to forget the pain of my wounds in the sweetness of that kiss. Maybe this dream was looking up. Sleeping Myrtle opened her eyes. They were blue as the sky. She pushed me away and sat up blinking. There was a popping sound and teenage, nightmare Myrtle was gone, leaving me and my heavenly vision alone.
Myrtle turned to me, opening her blue eyes wide. “Eric,” she said. “You have broken my enchantment without thought or favour for your own safety. There you stand, mortally wounded…”
I interrupted her. “I’m not actually mortally wounded. It’s nothing that a little rest and a blood transfusion won’t cure.”
Myrtle pursed her lips. “Not mortally wounded?” Did she sound disappointed? “That’s …awkward.”
“Awkward?” I was feeling pretty crappy so I sat down heavily on Myrtle’s bier. She knelt before me, taking my hand in hers.
“Yes Eric. Awkward. You see I am a Princess and you… Well, you’re Eric the Nothing. I can’t marry you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her. “Royalty marry commoners all the time. Look at Fred and Mary. Charles and Di.”
“Well, we all know that ended badly, don’t we?” said Myrtle. “Anyway, they were Princes. It’s okay for a Prince to marry a commoner, but a Princess can only ever marry a Prince. Now, since the parameters of this particular enchantment state that I have to marry the man who awakens me and since I patently can’t marry you there’s only one thing left for you to do. You have to do the decent thing Eric and free me to marry a man of equal status to myself.” She reached down and picked up my gun, then placed it in my hand, wrapping my unresisting fingers around it.
Did she want me to kill myself?
Myrtle patted my hand. “Come on Eric. Do the honourable thing and fall on your magic sword.”
She did want me to kill myself! The Bitch. A word to the wise, all you Princesses out there. Never reject a potential suitor when he has a loaded gun in his possession. I raised my hand and aimed the gun between her baby blue eyes. Then I squeezed the trigger and blew her away with my one hundredth bullet. If any of you think my actions were questionable, remember, it’s just a dream.
I lay back on Sleeping Myrtle’s bier and crossed my arms over my chest. I waited to wake up.
And waited.
And waited…………..
