The Dragon's Kiss

Two days.

That's how long Kel had been unconscious, locked alone in a room with the Dragon Emperor.

Despite the number of questions she asked in the following days, however, she couldn't get a real answer from anyone about what happened during that time. Either everyone was under strict orders to keep their mouths shut… or nobody actually knew.

Even meeting with the emperor proved difficult. Supposedly, he was holed up in a nearby room, suffering from the same odd fever Kel had been afflicted with. Doctors were completely baffled trying to identify the cause.

As Kel's body slowly worked on healing itself from the mysterious affliction, she worked on untangling the threads in her mind that had gotten completely twisted by her hectic emotions.

If she wanted to find out the truth behind Barclay's death and everything that followed, she first needed to get the pieces of the story she was missing.

"Lewshie," she murmured with a mouthful of porridge.

The maid was placing small spoonfuls of the bland goop in her mouth as she had been doing four times a day since Kel woke up. They were currently in the middle of the mid-afternoon feeding.

"Yes, Princess?" Lucy chirped.

Kel swallowed the bite in her mouth, putting a hand up to block another incoming spoonful.

"When will you allow me to feed myself?"

"Hmmm.. maybe when you grow up a little," the maid mused, waving the spoon as if she was coaxing a baby.

"Stop that," Kel grunted, pushing the spoon away. "What do you mean by grow up?"

"When you're old enough to stop playing immature pranks," Lucy smiled, her squinted eyes glinting fiercely. "Like, for example, sending your maid away and then running off?"

Oh. Lucy was angry.

Kel gulped, dropping her hand from in front of her face. "Listen Lucy.. I'm really sorry abou-"

"Shush, and eat your food."

"..Yes, ma'am."

By the time Lucy came back with another serving of porridge, she'd softened enough for Kel to start a proper conversation.

"So you want to know what happened after you all came back from the forest?" the maid sighed, setting down the empty bowl.

"I don't remember hardly anything," Kel admitted. "There's a giant hole in my memory with a few fuzzy images of the trial and such."

"Where do I even start…" Lucy trailed off.

The maid had spent that fateful evening doing the activity she did most often those days: pacing the west building, hoping her miss would be alright.

The poor princess had been forced to meet with the emperor almost daily, and he even sent her out into the city to arguably the most dangerous places.

Earlier that day, news had come of another alarming situation happening, and, unsurprisingly, the emperor whisked the princess off to go investigate.

The most unsettling part, however, was that the princess had hardly been back in the palace for a few hours before the emperor took her away again, to an unspeakably deadly place at that.

The haunted forest.

Everyone working in Serin's palace knew to avoid that part of the grounds. It was a heavily wooded area--the remnant of the old forest that was removed for the castle's construction. Most people said it was haunted by those who had died at the emperor's hands during his bloody rise to the throne.

But others believed it was haunted long before that, the curse of the Serin's bloodied history.

The rumor, at least in recent years, was based on the frightening unearthly screams occasionally coming from that place after the sun went down. Many even claimed to have seen shadows moving through the treetops.

To make things even more cryptic, an entirely separate unit of knights were reared and tasked with guarding that place. They never spoke or mingled with anyone else and were rumored to be some sort of demons summoned by His Majesty.

Lucy was one of the few who knew the truth of the forest, the source of the unsettling screams and shadows darting about, but that only made the area even more terrifying.

The regimen of knights dedicated to that place was actually the emperor's personal unit. The members moved quickly and silently, accomplishing any task given by their master, no matter how horrific. Their faces and names were erased from society, and they lived their lives jumping from shadow to shadow.

The ones who didn't quite make the cut, however, were assigned to patrol the grounds of the emperor's forest.

They knew too much to be stationed as regular soldiers again, but weren't qualified to serve as shadow knights. So they were sentenced to that dismal place, instructed to neutralize all trespassers.

The hair-raising screams were produced by the victims of their blades. Apparently it was the human body's natural reaction to the moment amatoxin enters the blood. No matter their age or gender, everyone emitted similar ghastly howls.

Knowing that those tortured cries weren't restless spirits still dwelling on the earth but living beings, soon to be begging for death, made Lucy sick to her stomach every time she thought of it. As a result, she'd mostly tried to ignore the haunted forest and its dealings.

She did, at least, until the princess's anguished wailing mingled with the chaos coming out of that forest.

"They brought Sir Barclay into the main palace, kicking up quite a ruckus," Lucy recalled to Kel. "It's the first time that anyone has been brought out like that."

"Brought out like that?" Kel questioned. "I'm not sure I understand what you mean.."

"Plenty of people meet the same fate as Sir Barclay in that place, but they are usually silenced and moved covertly," the maid explained. "Even for the knights who came to perform the rescue, it was their first time setting foot in the forest."

"If that's the case," Kel mused, "I wonder why the emperor took me there."

Lucy remembered her heart racing as she ran to check the commotion happening at the main palace that night. A sort of sickening relief washed over her when she realized it wasn't the princess, but the other hostage, who had been stabbed.

It was clear the emperor's extraordinary reaction to the situation had something to do with the fact the princess had been there. But what had he hoped to gain by taking her there in the first place?

Lucy sighed, shaking her head. "I wonder too."