Golden Fantasies Chapter 4
By Jupiterstar
The night shone brightly over Winden and the King slept alone in his bed. The Queen occupied the guest bed, still trying to come up with a way to save her daughter from death. The soldiers were tired and cranky and leaned against the wall to support their heavily armed bodies.
From a small window a dim light appeared. It was followed by a child’s footsteps going down the hall to the newborn’s darkened room. As the door opened, Nina’s young face peeked through the opening.
She tiptoed over to the baby cradle and looked over the edge. Charity slept softly with her golden wings tucked under her pink bundled torso. Nina struggled to pick up the sleeping baby and finally succeeded in carrying her to a basket on the other side of the room.
Nina placed Charity in the basket and dragged the basket with the baby outside past the sleeping guards to the riverbank that led downstream to the nearby town of Lotte. There, Nina hoped Charity would be safe from her sentence of death.
Nina hugged the baby tightly to give her warmth on her long journey.
"I’m sorry baby Charity. You’re going to be killed, but I know you’re not the evil one. Somehow, you’ve escaped the demon’s curse. Father is going to kill you because he doesn’t see that you are good and beautiful."
Charity cooed at her big sister and Nina embraced her again. Then she carefully set the baby in the basket and put it in the water. It floated, luckily, and the current began to carry Charity downstream. Nina watched her sister float away with tears running down her face.
She watched until the basket was out of sight, then journeyed back up to her room. She quietly snuck back past the guards, still sleeping against the cold stone walls, and re-entered her room. She didn’t notice Jewel standing in her own bedroom’s doorway.
Jewel watched her older sister go into her room and lock the door and her eyes flashed in the darkness.
* * *
Off in the distance, an old magic woman stood after she watched the scene with Nina and Charity and frowned.
"No, she said to herself, "The child is not evil. But how did the curse get deflected from her?"
She waddled into her hut and looked into a spell book for deflection spells. After determining that the spells were all far to difficult for the children or the Queen to have learned and cast so quickly, the old woman ruled that Charity’s own power must have done it.
"Perhaps…um perhaps…her wings…such a lovely golden color…gold is the color for magic…hmm…perhaps her wings deflected the curse by themselves. Surely they could not have simply absorbed the spell, they must have just sent it to another being. Hmmm…very interesting…"
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