the haunted kingdom by Charles E.J. Moulton (snow like ashes txt) 📕

Steven caressed his wife’s breasts and kissed the nipples as he entered her again and again.
She moaned, raised her head and squeezed her eyelids shut. She whined agonized and full of joy, grabbed his head, kissed and bit his neck, his hair hanging down across her face, penetrating her. She wrapped her legs around him. Outside the crickets hummed under the moon. They fall asleep that night, never letting go until the morning with Steven still inside her when they commenced again and again until they could feel the taste of the other one better than their own taste. A voice far away was telling them what was in actual fact a never to be escaped fact. It was a voice they were trying to escape, making love through the night, their emotions in a whirl of lust:

There is no turning back now. No turning back. Not ever. Soon all of this will be gone. Death will replace this potent pleasure. Decay will be served with a rotting grin.


Friday, September 25th, 1422, Iuventus Theatre, East Wing, Afternoon – 19 days left

Steven and Belinda held hands as they sat in the first row laughing their heads off at the wonderful antics of the cast, the music a sheer joy to listen to, the orchestra gorgeous, the theatre full of maybe a thousand candles lit by hundred stagehands hired for the job.
The singer Pamela’s song “Landrea the great bacchanal glutton,” brought down the house and Geena was even heard shouting: “Can I sing that one later?”
Bantrard as the funny waiter made Rolf laugh so hard he had to stand up and scream, which made the actors have to stop singing. The audience laughed with him. Sieglinde and Alex tried to keep a good face but started laughing when Rolf started stamping his feet and howling with laughter, tears streaming down from his eyes.
Nomed’s wonderful aria in the middle of the opera: “Thou art the bliss I aspire and your love brings me an angelic desire.” It made Belinda lean her head against her husband’s shoulder and cry.
Finally, the Finale of Delights was so well written, twenty different melodies working at once, and the ovations would never cease. The walk back stage was a joy and Belinda asked her father if they couldn’t have more plays and opera’s here in the future. What a shame to let this five hundred seat jewel stand empty so much. He agreed to the fact that more plays would be performed within these gentle walls on the boards of life and would see what he could do.
Maybe some Prosperanian touring companies could come and entertainment or just Bantrard and Nomed hold evenings for them here for the sake of good fun. The party never seemed to cease. All guesthouses full of people, sometimes the entourage took little trips over the lawn, wine bottles in hand, and came back with torches in the morning, drunk and giddy and lusty. Marie-Louise’s fiancée opened up as usual and he spent quite a long time talking to the king one evening and Marie-Lee was so happy to have her Robert and that he was not shy anymore.
Everything was turning out so well for all of them.
There were games and there was joy over the next weeks. Blind man’s buff, charades, guessing games, hide and seek, storytelling, dancing contests, riding contests, one single fencing tournament, which Morgana and Patsy won with equal points.
There was laughter and there was song and Nomed wrote Belinda a tune called
“When dreams come true I sing to you.”
It was a dream in itself, a lovely unrealistic dream.


Tuesday, October 13th, 1422 A.D. – Morning – 0 days left to go

Alexander and Sieglinde were standing on their balcony, each with a drink of newly pressed plum juice in their hands, smiling. They were looking down at Steven and Belinda tickling each other and laughing on the grass lawn. Everyone had a mutual breakfast in the garden with about twenty people that were still around. The youngsters sat under the tree and were talking.
The newlyweds had packed their bags because they were leaving in a few days for the Resort of Urbania in Alliland just a week away by carriage. Its thermal baths, inns and service were legendary. The romantic atmosphere of the nature, the mountains, the waterfalls, and the canyons, the footpaths along the rivers, the theatres and bridal suite would be perfect for them.
Sieglinde laughed, moved by the sight. She took her husband’s hand and leaned against his shoulder. He was so happy and so was she. The laughter of the young couple kept on going as the king and queen walked into the chambers. They left the newlyweds to themselves making love in the grass.


CHAPTER SEVEN
LUCINDA

Tuesday, October 13th, 1422 A.D. – The Eve of Infamy

The only one not sitting down was Alexander and those of the guests who had been standing prior to the crash soon sat down when it came over them. The king’s luscious bass baritone sounded not angry but lost when he shouted. It had been a cry of surprise, a cry drenched with thirty years of patient, hectic tension.
He had been proposing a toast to the royal couple to his immediate right when the muffled sound from above made all the courtiers search for the origin of the sound. To everyone that heard it, it sounded like someone lifting a piece of furniture up into the air and then dropping it recklessly upon the oak floor. Looking in different directions, they hoped to detect the origin of the thud.
Then the crash made a hundred people cover their eyes, holding plates and books and hats in front of their faces. Almost to the day exactly 30 years after the exile, Lucinda came back. She crashed through the ceiling chandelier of the Grand Hall of Iuventus Sacrum. Crystal and precious stones sprinkled across the room and a large piece of wood thudded downward and broke into three large pieces. A few wax candles were rolling about on the floor, the flames fluttering and fading.
There was a scream and then a remarkable, stunned silence as Lucinda simply hung there in the air for a bit and slowly, ever so slowly descended toward the ground. It seemed the 36 main representatives of Medatlantian politics that sat, lay or crawled along the front wall now were fixed on one thing alone: the two creatures that had just crashed through the ceiling.
Lucinda herself was dressed in a black flowing gown that fluttered in the breeze that seemed to fly around her as she descended toward the floor.
She was the battering ram that in spite of precautions had managed to break in.
Lucinda was petting a creature that she held on a leash as she sunk to the floor. Now and then she was rattling the leash. It was very hard for the assembled to decipher what kind of a creature this was. Alexander knew Greek folklore and it was clear that the monster was a descendant of Cerberus. This mythical creature was told never to have existed, but here it was.
Alexander remembered his old tutor reading through old accounts of Greek mythology on ancient parchments with him. He spoke of the Κέρβερος as a Greek word that meant demon of the pit. Kerberos was a fiend that at certain times was said to have fifty heads.
This creature had no less than ten heads. The necks were thin and serpentine like and all came together on a very furry neck that ended in a mane that was very like that of a lion. The tail was looked as if it actually belonged on a serpent.
Alexander was fascinated and repulsed by this demon at the same time.
Wasn’t Cerberus the guardian of Hades, the creature that let souls in?
He didn’t know. All he knew was that this monster was the perfect guardian for Lucinda.
The heads bobbed in different directions all at the time. The beast drooled, it spat, it cackled, it farted, it belched and sneered. Sometimes the different heads looked at each other and sneered, always nodding and bobbing. This beast, wherever it came from, was a fitting companion for the royal persona non grata upon her return to the scene of the crime.
Lucinda sneered at the tapestries of Roman legends and laughed at the artwork of the king above the fireplace, she shouted at the players to cease with their dreadful gibberish and she howled at dogs to die, she shouted at children to snuggle up to their parents because soon she would show them what real magic was. She walked across the solid oak floor and took away the cap with bells from the jester, she cackled at the posh, arrogant furniture and sniggered at the plethora of cuisine. She did all of that and more without even uttering a single word. In complete silence she terrorized them all.
So, she was back, the demon with the angelic face whose dog’s heads now all seemed to form a straight line with the floor with sheer heart attack in her voice and wide-open eyes.
The dog was a complete recluse demon from the sixth level of conscious hell.
His eyes were gloating at the people who didn’t shiver at the thought of the sister coming back. It screamed with a human voice and so did the guests at the sight of this weird lion from the backwaters of the darkest tunnels of the underworld.
Heartbeats sped up, sweat poured down brows and all that Alexander Roderick Winsletenna could see or hear is everything moving slower, as if life had been slowed down. All that was, all that existed or had existed, was heightened. His pain was stronger now. It was as if all that had happened had more meaning now. He saw his entire life in retrospect leading up to this moment.
Alexander was still holding his glass of wine. Some of the contents in it had been spilled onto the floor. A plate of chicken had dropped due to the chaos. Rolf, who had just been serving Patricia and Morgana some food at their request, was on it. He had tripped over his long tailcoat toga and was now lying with his arm around the edge of table corner furthest away from where the woman was now standing. The scene was as vivid as a fresco from a painting by the old palace court painter Penderesci.
The sound of the king’s shouting voice echoed through the hall. Seeing her within the walls of his palace was like traveling back in time and seeing how all that distress actually made him feel. He had seen her before anyone else did. He had expected her before anyone else expected her and the shout had reverberated through the Grand Hall with fury.
Morgana, for the first time in her life, had her eyes wide open and gazing not upon the crotch of a hunk, but on someone she had never seen before. She looked dumbfounded at something she could not quite understand: in reality. She had apparently not even registered that this could happen. Born in the same year as the unwanted one’s exile, she had always avoided thinking about her discarded aunt whenever Belinda found herself speaking of nightmares and mischief.
Now she gazed and gazed and could not find anything else in the uninvited one but yet another, albeit very perilous, rival. The difference was that this rival petrified her.
The half-closed eyes under the eyebrows made every soul feel that they were actually not physically there at all.