I still haven´t given up on my dream of being treated like a princess by someone, and that certainly showed in how we build our new house. It was nearly identical to our last one, with a slightly larger kitchen, but it also had a moat at first. There was no water in it though, so it was absolutely useless. After a year or so, we decided to fill it up again and planted a few flowers instead. They were poisonous of course.
In any case, I learned of my mistakes and concluded that I overshot by quite a bit. I wanted someone to read every whish from my lips and act accordingly. Sadly, that also meant allowing them a level of intelligence that was by no means low. So for my next person, I wanted someone stupid who didn’t think beyond what I allowed him to.
“Can´t do. Humans usually don’t come down here.” It appeared as if Aska couldn’t just give me a new human easily and shot down my request. For one week, I was quite angry and refused to give my best at cooking, but I also knew that this wouldn’t change anything.
On my eighteenth birthday, absolutely nothing happened. We both forgot my birthday which was kind of sad in hindsight. A week later though as he realized his mistake, he began to teach me how to use a sword. Honestly, it was quite boring and tiring to use it and became my most hated way to fight pretty quickly. Even a fistfight with Aska was more interesting than swinging this piece of metal. I mean, swords were for heroes, for people who saved a princess like me, but not for me. I was no hero.
And so, I threw it away one day and rather fought Aska with my fists than pick up this wretched piece again. Don’t get me wrong, I would still use it against my enemy if I wasn’t given another weapon and I was quite experienced with fighting after twenty years of using it in training, but I wouldn’t use it in normal combat if I could avoid it. Sadly, I also knew that swords were incredibly widespread.
Fighting with my own two hands was interesting as well, but I lost quite fast each time I tried. I was nearing my fortieth birthday as Aska gave me a new weapon. I was pretty old going by human standards, but I didn’t change at all after the incident with my guard. I mean, the days were quite similar down here, so there was no reason to actually change my behaviour drastically.
And so, time went on and I improved my spear fighting. It was so boring. Do you know who dies first in a battle? I mean, after the idiot that charged ahead? Yeah, it´s the spearmen. I was already dying each night, so I didn’t want to die when I actually went into battle. After ten years, I discarded the spear as well, just right on time. My trusted compass pointed to another place.
It didn’t take me long to find the person. She was a human, around twenty-four years old and armed to the teeth. Unlike my guard though, she didn’t fall for my trickery and I had to use some creative persuasion techniques to bring her back. And so, her training began in another shack we build.
At first, everything was perfect and her brainwashing proceeded smoothly. I intended to train her as my maid, but I didn’t come that far in the first place. As soon as she regained some basic level of intelligence, she started to look around. Not for an escape or anything, but rather out of pure curiosity. That in itself wasn’t a problem, but I couldn’t take where she was looking.
While my guard had only eyes for me, my maid looked at Aska a second too long in my opinion. There were probably no feelings involved at all, but I still couldn’t help but compare myself to her and that didn’t go well. I was quite flat while her bust size was voluptuous. She was tall and mature, while I still looked like a child, despite my age. Judging by Aska´s naughty books I found under a floorboard, she was exactly the type of person he liked. Needless to say, she died the very next day in a terrible accident. I mean, who could have known that the flowers I put in her food were poisonous?
It wasn’t her that made me give up on creating my own toy. It wasn’t even the next one or the person after that. It was someone that appeared during my one hundred ten living year. It was a little boy, barely eleven years old who immediately cried as I approached him.
“Come with me.” He didn’t even try to resist as I dragged him by his hand towards the shack. Aska was strangely unmotivated to start over again and didn’t bother to join me as I began to torture him. There was just a slight problem. First of all, I didn’t want to hurt him for some reason. And second of all, as I finally found the determination, I couldn’t sink the blade of my dagger into his belly at all. Heck, I couldn’t even cut off a finger as the blade stopped mere centimetres away from his skin each time I tried. It wasn’t some weird magic that stopped the blade, it was me. I was trembling and couldn’t hurt him one bit. Even letting the dagger fall down on him was out of question.
“You cannot hurt him and you don’t even want to. Why bother continuing this?” Surprisingly, Aska appeared behind me and said something that I nearly couldn’t believe. The god of death wanted to spare a human. Still, there was something else that I noticed immediately. I became angry once again because he knew things about me I haven’t even realized. It was true, I didn’t want to hurt this boy for some reason, but how did Aska know that? He never read my memories, I had him promise that, so how did he know so much about me? Still, this was something for later to discuss in private and as I was also interested in his first statement, I calmed my anger.
“Why can I not hurt him? Is he invincible or what?” The dagger stopped just a few centimetres before his skin, so maybe it was some protective barrier, or so I thought.
“The seed of life still hasn’t disappeared within this boy… how should I put it… I fought desperately with the god of life once about when humans were allowed to die … don’t look at me like that…” I lived around a hundred years together with him, did he seriously not think that I wouldn’t detect such cheap lies? “… alright, we gambled. Are you happy now? Whatever, he cheated and since then all intelligent beings have a seed of life in them that they lose at some point. They can still die of course, but I´m not capable of killing them anymore.” Although he looked a bit sad, he said everything as if he didn’t care at all. I mean, being restricted by something this arbitrary would make me freak out, so why wasn’t he?
“And? Did you kill the god of life after that?” Maybe he already dealt with it himself, but couldn’t find a way to remove the curse that was placed on him.
“What? No, we are friends.” Wait … he had friends? That was quite a surprising development for me considering that I haven’t seen a visitor even once. On the other hand, he was disappearing for several days a month, so maybe he didn’t want me to see them?
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“Whatever… and what does this has to do with me?” He looked towards the boy who was still crying loudly, chained on a table. He couldn’t even look at me as he said his next words, probably fearing how I would react.
“It seems that it is … hereditary?” Why was he fiddling with his shirt? I mean, did he expect me to explode in anger just because of this? In reality, I was probably really near stabbing him, but not because of my newest defect, rather because he hid it so long from me.
“Ah.” Disappointed, I walked out of the shack and prepared a meal for three. The boy, now clean and completely dressed, soon joined us in our lunch and ate plenty. I was pondering the whole time what to do with him but couldn’t come up with a great solution yet. Aska wasn’t very helpful either, but rather entertained the boy by reading him stories. Flabbergasted, I did the dishes while I compared my childhood with this. Just a moment, I was envious of him, but that quickly disappeared as I heard the first plate crashing onto the ground outside.
Half a day later, I stood in front of the mirror and stared at me. I didn’t look at one spot in particular, but rather at everything. It dawned on me quickly why I didn’t want to hurt the boy. He just looked young and that was probably the sole reason.
“Aska, do you like how I look?” I stepped to the side and looked at Aska that sat on the edge of the bed. He seemed to read a book, but I knew that his gaze was glued on my back the whole time.
“Yeah, why do you ask?” I turned around and looked at him very carefully. I didn’t want to miss any second of his reaction to the words I was about to speak.
“Is it because … because … are you actually a paedophile?” His reaction was rather disappointing. There was a slight hint of anger, but not much. I was actually slightly surprised by this development, but not really in a good way.
“If you mean your apparent age, no I had no influence over it. And by the way, you are still a virgin after one hundred years of sleeping with me, do you really think that I am attracted to younglings?” I couldn’t understand his words at all. I mean, he was definitely attracted to me, so I couldn’t really decide if I was an exception to the rule, or if he lied.
“No … you didn’t want to hurt the boy either, did you?” I honestly didn’t care as either way was fine, so I quickly switched the topic back to a more pressing matter.
“Not really.” I closed my eyes and let my shoulders hang down in disappointment. This was going just as I predicted and like any second of it.
“Aska … why are we so similar? You knew from the very beginning that I didn’t want to hurt him, didn’t you?” Or be it food. We had the same taste. Or our favourite colours. Black and red. These things could all be coincidences, but they piled up over the years. What was even more worrying was that I could accurately predict what he would do in any given situation, just based on how I behaved. And claiming that I was raised to be like him didn’t work here either as we never talked about dealing with children before.
“My dear, that is something you should find out yourself. But I do swear that I didn’t read your mind.” And with this, he basically stopped our conversation. I asked a few more times, but I would have gotten better results if I just talked to a wall, so I let it be at some point. The day after that, Aska sent the boy back to where he came from but made sure to mess with his memories a little.
In the end, I was quite unsure what to think of myself. I needed to revaluate who I was, who I wanted to be and how Aska played a role in my life because back then, he was my life.