Dead Man's Bride

Dead Man's Bride

By

Casthavian

Once upon a time, there was a very wealthy King who kept the heads of his enemies, covered in liquid gold, displayed upon the grand walls of his castle, so their spirits wouldn't venture out of his abode and keep at bay. It was his own way to make sure that his ennemies would stay out of his borders. The continents were thus in a time of peace. And so the King was named the Golden King.

The man had only one child; his dear wife had passed away a long, long time ago. His daughter was the rightful heir of his throne and royalty. She was the most beautiful woman in all of the Kindom. Her hair shone with gold under the sun rays and her eyes were so green, so sparkling as gems, that she was called the Emerald Princess. Since she grew old enough, for that time at least, she had been betrothed to an incredibly wealthy prince. He was very beautiful and charming as well as good manners and good looks. She was to be happy with him. If only she would agree to marry him. But she wouldn't. She wanted to have the final word, for she was a proud woman, though she couldn't speak a word of this to her beloved father the King of these lands. The emerald eyes Princess wished to be courted by a man she would meet by herself and fall in love with. A truly happy marriage. But as all good daughters and princesses would do, she had to obey her father.

Upon the time of their first meeting, the Princess wore a magnificently shining dress, adorned with her favourite gems. They were left alone in the most astonishing garden she had ever seen in her entire life. Truly magical. The Prince then bent down one knee before her, lifted a breath taking ring and offered it to the Princess.

"Will you do me the honour of becoming my bride?" he asked. Simple formalities. He knew they were promised to each other, but he just was a charming man.
"No." she would have liked to reply. But she said yes instead, with a knot at the back of her throat.

They were married before all Gods and all odds later that afternoon. The Prince openly mocked those trophies hanging on the walls. He was no superstitious man and found those incredibly ridiculous. Indeed, the Princess wouldn't dare saying a thing, for she had to be a good girl to her new husband, now. On their wedding night, the young Prince lifted her up bridal style and took her to their newly arranged bedchambers where he took her repeatedly, despite her young age and fragile body, against her will. She didn't want to marry him, after all. Not her type for she preferred loving men. As she woke up during the night, standing up to gather some water and massage her sore back, the Princess felt a sudden rush of pain to the back of her head that took her breath away. She couldn't look back and she couldn't stand on her feet anymore. Then all went darker than night. The show was over. The groom had become a widower.

The Prince, who had pierced her skull with one of the guardsmen's arrows, stretched his back, dropped the inert body of his late wife onto the cold marble floor and went to the kitchens for a midnight snack. As he walked back to his room, he looked about, cocking a brow at the corridors and started screaming.

"My wife!" he yelled. "My beautiful wife has been murdered!" He kept on pretending. "Someone help me!"
And on the next morning, the owner of the arrow, one of the faithful guards of the Golden King, was sentenced to death, and the Prince became true heir to the throne, inheriting the Kingdom's fortune. And he stood there grinning, shooting the guard a cocky wink at the last second before the poor blighter's head was sliced by a guillotine.
And, of course, the Prince became the new wealthy King of this Kingdom for Emerald's father, the old Golden King, had died of a broken heart due to the loss of his daughter. And so, his once great Kingdom had fallen into darkness. And the Charming Prince had acquired a new name; the Dark King.


A couple of weeks after the Princess's mysterious assassination, the new King was woken up in the middle of the night. There wasn't anyone at his door. His chambers were empty, and the air blowing in through a slightly open window was fresh. But there was something odd in this air. His cyan hues swiftly spun around, and their gaze locked upon a strange white shape slowly walking at the centre of the enormous room. It appeared like a floating white gown, smoothly caressing the floor. And he saw the Princess's eyes glare back at him before her silhouette jumped at his throat, her form then disappearing like smoke all around the terrified new King.

He spent the night awake and spooked. At the first sight of dawn, the former Prince quickly ran down the castle's steps to demand his guards look for a witch. He would ask her to rid him of the entity. But the old lady couldn't. And so she was sentenced to death. For the entire week that followed, he would call a new witch who still could not give him any help at all. And each night the Dark King would be visited by the dead woman. And each night, it was the same scenario as it had been on the first night. The man had gone paranoid for reasons. The castle's doors had been shut down and locked, barricaded, and no one would either come in or come out, until the servants started to run out of food. As each and every one of them would make an attempt to leave the mad man's castle, they would all be sentenced to death by the King's very own hand.

Until no one was left. The guards weren't spared. It was the King and himself, now. It was those repelling heads on the walls, glaring at him, that made it even worse. He tried, all alone, to take them down, but failed miserably on the first hundred attempts. And so he angrily dropped the project.

Now he had to run away from the ghost of his dead wife. But who could ever run away from someone who's made out of smoke? When the night came down upon him in his empty abode, not only the Emerald Princess would pay a visit, but also his very own servants and guards. He waved his sword at them, batting the air with the blade which would cut nothing at all but mist.
They were coming to take him away, now. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. They would give him what he deserved. Taking away what he had taken away. Life. That was the one thing they wanted. What they didn't have anymore.
And as the Princess approached the impostor, the rest of the dead men and women stood straight and silent behind her. She wasn't the ghost he had seen each night in his chambers anymore. She was angry and horrendous to simply look at. Like a decomposing corpse. She kept walking toward the once Charming Prince who was backing away until he fell down crushing his back on the three steps leading to her late father the rightful King, the Golden King of these lands. Every eye in every head suspended on the walls darted toward the scared man. Glaring. Perhaps you shouldn't have mocked us, they seemed to say.

The departed bride lifted a rotting hand, almost cracking off her smoky corpse, sank the jagged bones from her fingers into her husband's chest, making him scream at the top of his lungs. He then knew what pain felt like. He wouldn't catch his breath back. Not this time. As her fingers sank deeper into the flesh and bones, blood was gushing out of his mouth like a crimson river on deathly pale skin. His eyes were smeared with red and popping out of their sockets as her fingers withdrawn with his still warm and beating heart in a gray, withered palm.

No such thing as escaping fate. Not tonight.