Princess Celestine

you can also read this part on the blockchain now :) 
https://snowtrace.io/tx/0x5c74c0016666efcac24a5033cb8e99a29dd867184e798e2f54a3a379285ef6de

          There once was a princess with hair so fair that when it was wet it projected a shimmering rainbow halo that spun around the top of her head. Celestine was her name, and she lived alone with her father in the infamous Iron Castle nestled in the center of The Forest of Black Spirals. The forest was designated thus, due to the syrupy black substance that filled the great moat that encircled the Iron Castle, and from where sprung, like spinnerets, wide rivers, and long winding streams that weaved throughout the entire lush thicket.

      A peculiar phenomenon that never across the whole world was ever seen again: many of the streams ended in perfectly circular coils. Bubbling, dark, and steaming, the spirals dotted the lush forest plain and gave rise to centuries of legends of men who tripped into the black spiraling pits and were quickly cooked up alive, leaving no other bodily remains, besides a pungent and darkly flickering flame. Other legends told of many men who became hypnotized by the spirals. They’d leave off to hunt and after days gone missing, they’d return to their wives and children with mad looks in their eyes. Shortly thereafter, town funerals would be held for those same children and wives—after the men had been hanged for their monstrous crimes.

      Women with child were warned never to set foot in the Forest of Black Spirals, as it had been known, since before anyone of us were born, that thousands of women had their lost lives after giddily running around for days, inward and outward and inward and outward, around the bubbling black whorls, eventually dying from starvation and dehydration, with blood-soaked legs. Even the most rebellious of young women rarely dared to test their fate, and there wasn't a single witch ever executed who hadn’t shrieked in horror at the utterance of the forest’s very name.

      The townsfolk lived as they always had, and avoided the forest as best they could and made the sign of the cross and prayed when they couldn't. Once a year, they would gather to burn candles for those lives the forest had claimed. They painted, carved, and wove sacred objects to protect themselves and laid offerings along the forest's periphery. Overtime, the myths became part of their tradition, and decade after decade, parents retold to their children the very same tales of warning and caution that their parents had once told to them. Though Celestine, shut up away in her iron keep, hadn't ever been told even one. 

      Engulfed by hectares of trees in every direction, the Iron Castle glittered like a sharp, black diamond set in a sea of deep, rich green. Celestine’s father, Aramis, had enchanted the castle with a sparkling charm that made the evening rain polish its surface rather than oxidize and corrode it away. For an untold number of years would the castle glisten, no matter how flooded the forest and village became.
 
     In the tallest bastion tower’s keep was where Celestine spent her days. The keep had one southerly facing window grated by iron bars, and on the rare occasions when Celestine was allowed to visit the castle grounds and had twice witnessed the setting of the sun, she promptly began to weep, and then just as quickly did she faint.

      With her meals, water, and anything else of want or need delivered in silence through a locked hatch in the door, she grew up inside the keep almost entirely on her own. While she wasn’t mute, without anyone to speak to, she rarely ever spoke. Instead, she hummed the melodies she had heard from the clavacin and flutes that sometimes played below, and she knew the alphabet, and how to read and write. So, she wrote in her diary, and when birds rested on her barred windowsill, to them would she quietly inquire about their days and whisper to them her thoughts and dreams. Most of her days activities consisted of polishing the inside of her iron walls and sewing her dresses made of fabrics dyed with alien colors with origins that still remain unknown.

     Her father, Aramis, was a notorious and socially disgraced sorcerer, who had inherited the Iron Castle through his mother’s prosperous family. Though the generational wealth had long mutated to ancestral curse, Aramis sought to diminish it further through years of gambling, the procuring of prostitutes, buying up collections of ancient ceremonial objects, and exquisite paintings, and the hiring of priests and priestess and high lords of strange religions. 

Over the years, as the stores of gold were gradually emptied out, Aramis turned to selling what his investments had returned. He was unafraid to summon demons of primordial evil, to hex for death and sell disease and sickness. He concocted potions of vengeance for scorned lovers, created charms that allowed murderers to go free, brewed tonics to revive the dead, and for the very well-off, he conducted rituals that protected the recipient from facing the final judgment of death. At the same time, he and his clan of spiritualists worked tirelessly to build the divine alchemical machine that would turn human blood into an endlessly flowing fountain of golden currency. Through this, he discovered unusual metals, created mysterious crystals, and synthesized the creation of innumerable extraordinary materials.

     Aramis’s wife and Celestine’s mother, Emera, had been one of the priestesses once hired by Amaris. Emera came from a faraway desert, and she was the eldest daughter of a large shepherding clan. When Emera was a small child, her own mother fell victim to the hexing of a wicked wizard, who ensnared his prey in a maze of mirages that lead to the entrance of the wizard’s concealed and untraceable cave, and from whence Emera’s mother was never to again leave. The loss of the family’s matriarch was destabilizing, and only worsened as the wizard began to target and kidnap many of the tribe's other women. As the eldest daughter, Emera was made responsible for the well-being of her younger sisters, and at the age of seven, began studying methods of protection, transmogrification, and disguise. Overtime, Emera excelled in the art of sorcery, though her mother, aunts, and cousins hadn’t ever been found or seen again in the flesh, alive. The protection spells often worked, and Emera’s invisibility veils guaranteed temporary safety from the wizard’s wretched glare, but no amount of divination could tell how to find the lost women, and no matter how Emera and the other priestesses tried, the wizard’s power was too great, and they had yet to find a way to trap or banish their omnipresent and life-threatening menace. 

     One somber night of the balsamic moon, when Emera was fifteen, and the clan had lost its thirty-third woman, Emera entered her woolen tent to find in her unsheathed scrying glass the visage of the perverse, kidnapping man. Holding a flame to the black orb, the wizard allowed her to see how her mother, aunts and cousins, now worshiped him with unimaginable devotion, and were all in the throes of wild ecstasy. The wizard, with leathery, wind worn skin and wrinkles cut so deep they looked like sharp cracks across the glass, smiled with a smug knowing as he mouthed an incantation that mesmerized and soothed the horrified Emera. Bewitched by the spell and with eyes wide peering into the black glass, Emera spent her night intertwined with the wizard, as her heart grew ever more slowly possessed. Serene and calm, Emera fell asleep that night more peacefully than ever before, and dreamt of a dark diamond beset in a flourishing verdant green.

     Upon waking, the remaining members of the loss-stricken families gathered around the morning fire in silence, holding hands with one another in a large circle. Emera, wearing white, galloped to the water well and drank loudly, letting water spill down her chest. Her family looked upon her with panic and disgust and pleaded with to her, asking what was wrong, what had happened, worried as they’d never seen anyone act like this before. She smiled sweetly, though her father’s eyes were grieving ,and her sisters wailed her name. Emera decided, and couldn’t be swayed, that she would be departing that very day. 

     Emera’s fate was thus sealed, and as she trekked through the vast desert plains, the wizard followed her through the skies and acted as her patient guide. Gradually, her intuition and inner voice were bound with his, and as she reached the boundary between sand and soil, Emera became unrecognizable in body and spirit.