Queen's Gambit Chapter 33

Draconic Fortune (Noelle)
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Draconic Fortune

Chapter 21

Creator, you Traitor
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Her head shook, and a heavy nausea overcame Noelle when she regained consciousness. She was sure she had just fallen off a cliff, but she was alive. She couldn't see anything, but she could clearly feel herself lie on something. Something solid but flat. And she couldn't move, something was holding her hands and hooves in place.

With a flaring burst, a torch was lit about a dozen feet away from her. One by one, it was used to light braziers all around her, allowing her to finally see what was around her. It was a Mistress, one of the adult, curvy Susies - now in a full, skin-tight leather suit - carrying the torch, and there were three more of them standing in different corners around Noelle.

She was in some cave, sealed from the outside world with solid rock in all directions. Noelle was stripped down to her underwear, strapped to some wooden table, tied to all the corners by her wrists and calves with rope, and with a few strands of rope wrapped around her waist to better hold her in place. Another one of the Mistresses carried a water tank towards her and placed it next to the painfully uncomfortable 'bed'. She gave the Mistress a questioning look, but the grinning dragoness simply pointed to the ceiling.

A big mass of a thick, black liquid stuck to the ceiling above the water tank. And slowly, drop by drop, it dripped down to where it was meant to gather. As the drops sped up into more of a continuous dribble, the devil's voice echoed from the black mass itself. "This is all we are to you, isn't it? Ink. Lifeless ink. Once a heartfelt confession in the making, now the meaningless byproduct of a confession never to be made. Seeing as you cast it aside and us along with it."

She looked for the Sinwielder, but he wasn't anywhere around. "I guess we should have anticipated this...disconnect. After all, you didn't even bother to hand-draw us directly, the way the human did with his creations. You used a machine to print us onto paper. So little personal touch. You never cared for anyone or anything but your current whim, did you?"

The moment it dawned on her that for all she knew, he very well was the clump looming above her, the terror that gripped her before, settled back in. "That's not - that's not true!"

"AND YET - you pay no thought to the one you made us for. You never showed us to him, in fact you avoid him now. You stripped us of our meaning. The ink is trapped in patterns such as myself and left to decay without purpose."

After enough of a torrent of it had fallen into the basin, it accumulated into an upright form which grew as more ink added itself to the body forming next to her. "Yes, you heard me right. I'm not as clueless as my less..." As soon as his form was coherent enough to form something akin to a head, he twisted it in an unnatural way. "...my less...fur-laden fellows. I've met a very good-looking and very knowledgeable friend of yours."

Even once his body on the ground was big enough to tower over the frozen doe, his face never took shape again, it remained covered in black slime as though his horns were melting down onto it. To replace it, an empty maw opened itself below as the ink creature grabbed the bed and supported itself to speak to Noelle from above.

His voice changed into a out-of-sync choir of various voices, coalescing into something similar to Asriel's familiar voice, but nightmarish at the same time. "He told me EVERYTHING about you. And about WHAT we are."

At last, the last bits of ink had dropped into the basin and added themselves to the devil's body. But it never compressed or solidified itself. His horns were clearly visible, as were his arms and legs, but they were all disjointed and out of proportion. His bow tie was stretched and twisted all wrong, and none of his body became solid or in any way natural-looking. He remained an oversized, constantly fluid blurb, a mockery of the caprine shape he tried to emulate.

Even after he let go of the bed and left the water tank to stumble in a wide circle around Noelle. "This is the reason we haven't been travelling for so long isn't it? The void that tears us all apart from the inside. The madness that drove Temptress to turn on us. To forever break the trust we placed in her AND each other. IT WAS ALL YOUR DOING! You DISCARDED us, JUST LIKE HOW YOU DISCARDED HIM! Just like you discarded another one in your life in favour of A COMPLETE STRANGER! All out of sheer impatience and changeableness. Out with the fancy Dealmaker, in with the raw and more sexual Sinwielder. IT'S JUST ALL ABOUT SEX WITH YOU, ISN'T IT?"

In a shocking surge, he rushed to the bed and rattled the rickety surface with his slimy hands.

"Does this get your rocks off somehow? Does seeing Daddy not be so well fill you with the urge to replace the sophisticated for raw, physical force? Are your romantic choices truly so easily steered by your desire for a strong, solid father figure to hold onto? Why does your relation to your father shape your preferences this way? If he shapes what you lust after so much, why don't you just latch onto dear daddy himself then? It isn't that far off from how far gone you already are."

Then, the ink creature let go of the table and took a few steps back. Finally, the black liquid compressed together and reformed Donatien's regular goat body. He grinned at Noelle with a tilted head and his stretched out fingers placed upon his bare chest.

"I mean, don't mistake what I say. None of us are free of sin. But to confuse the cravings of the flesh with the cravings of the heart, replacing love and affection for people you personally know with short-lived fixations on people you know nothing about: That is a fatal mistake. The cravings of the flesh do not last. They're all fun and games, so long as you keep them in your mind until they pass." He wagged his finger at her. "But you can't let them control you like that. You will only wind up lonely, depressed and empty-handed if you do."

He around the table and while passing by, tapped the trembling deer's nose with the clawed end of his index finger. "Now you're not the first person I ran into with your mindset. It was the exact same with Temptress when she joined forces with the Knight. I know exactly what you're thinking." He walked to a corner opposite from where he was before to rummage through a few bags that lay there, guarded by one of the Mistresses.

"I immediately knew when I saw that judgmental look on your face. The irony is not lost on me by the way. No-one in your life knows, no-one in your life said or did anything, and yet you already feel 'wrongfully' judged. Judged for thoughts you never ushered to anyone. A well-buried, but deep-seeded, lingering anger over acts of persecution that never actually happened. Possibly never will. 'They're all wrong', you think to yourself."

He pulled out a scourge, a medieval torture instrument nowadays only used for sexual purposes and stretched it out with both hands. "But you never ask yourself: 'Who is 'they'?' The people around you never said or implied anything. They can't because you left them clueless. They didn't come up with the judgments on your character that you project onto them. You know who did? You know who came up with the thing you're trying to convince yourself that they're wrong about?"

He got up and dug his claw into Noelle's chest. "You. That was all you. The 'they', whose judgment you feel crawling on your back every second of every day, is no-one other than yourself. You yourself knew better from the very beginning. Deep down, you always did."

He then turned around and began marching around the table. "But you're trying to convince yourself otherwise. The saccharine delusions 'they're' wrong about, feel good and comforting at the moment, so they must be good, right?" He stopped or a brief moment and flashed her a toothy grin. "Right?" And then resumed his march. "The decisions they err you to, must be correct."

He stopped to glare at her again. "Right? The future you saw in your vision is just hunky-dory, right? If something feels good and right in the moment, then it MUST be good and right. Am. I. Right?" He stopped to get back to the table and circle her nose with his finger. "Well, according to you, I apparently am." The whinging deer shook her head. "I myself am not quite convinced for reasons I will MAKE you feel."

He leaned onto the table and bent his head over hers. "You already know what I'm going to do to you, don't you?" He raised his flogger and stretched it out before her. "And yes, I WILL enjoy this for many reasons. Not least, you must know, I'm not just a nudist, I'm a sadist as well. I enjoy hurting people. Inflicting physical pain and the tells of physical suffering are what 'floats my boat', so to speak. The way they SQUIRM when they're in too much pain to keep control of themselves. It gives me a rush unlike any other...oh please don't look at me like that."

He laughed at her. "After all, who are you to judge? Now where was I? Seeing as you seem to think indulging one's perversions is a moral good, or a person's right, surely you wouldn't mind...." He raised his scourge and struck a piercingly blow. Causing a surge of pain that sent every part of her body trembling from the shock. "...if I INDULGE myself a bit. Hurting others, while at times EXCRUCIATINGLY PAINFUL for my targets, feels good to me. Therefore hurting them MUST be a good thing, right?"

"No - no, no, noononononono..." She stammered. "P-please..."

She begged him to stop, but he only flogged her a second time, making her twist and shake and drawing out her breath. "They're not me, so as far as I'm concerned, it's a victimless crime. Don't you think so, too?"

"No - no, stop, no!"

He hit her with it again, each blow felt as if her body was being carved up with a buzzsaw. "You see, this nice little toy draws its power from the guilt of the people it strikes. If you were fully convinced that the path you're considering is a good one, you wouldn't feel a thing." He struck her again. "SO DO YOU!" Knowing it wouldn't help, just out of sheer desperation, the trembling deer tried to wrestle herself out of the cuffs and ropes holding her. "Yes, struggle, that only makes it even more enjoyable."

"No! please, stop!"

He leaned over her and spoke with a glee that he had long anticipated putting on display. "But dear Noelle, it feels so good, therefore IT MUST BE GOOD, RIGHT?" He struck her again immediately, throwing her off from any attempts at freeing herself.

"No! No..."

"I can't hear you, can you speak up a little bit? Because all I can hear IS HOW GOOD THIS FEELS. IF IT FEELS GOOD, IT IS GOOD AND RIGHT, RIGHT?"

"No! No it's..."

"IF IT FEELS GOOD, IT IS GOOD!" And he struck her again. "IF YOU BELIEVE IT, SAY IT! IF IT FEELS GOOD, IT IS GOOD."

"No..."

"I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

"NO!"

" 'No' what, exactly?"

She was already past the point of tears, the pain was so much, him not adding more of it didn't make it subside. "N-no. It's not good."

"IT'S NOT GOOD IF WHAT?" He did it again.

She screamed off the top of her lungs: "It's not good even if it feels good!"

At last, for once, the devil answered without sending more waves of pain through her. "Finally, a little epiphany. And all it took was a few minutes of torture. Perfect timing, too. Because you've arrived at your destination." He took a few steps away from her, and then closed that gap again, one step for each word he spoke. "It. Is. Time. To wake. Up." He slapped her face with the back of his hand.

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With a sudden shock, she woke up. Wrapped in her warm red robe, under the skies of the dark world. Noelle struggled and pedaled about in panic. She was on the same wagon she had been with the devil, back when she looked into his mirror. But the devil was gone. "Hey! Hey!" She was grabbed and held in place by what turned out to be Dasher. The archer was the only person at this wagon. "What's gotten into you?"

"Where is he?" She pulled together and looked around in search of her torturer.

"Who?"

"The d- Donnie. Where is he?"

Dasher's expression softened up. "He's long gone. You fell asleep not long after we headed out. He and his sins left the moment we arrived. Speaking of which, welcome to Carpentown." Ahead of the large fleet of chariots, wagons and carriages, lay a town much bigger than Tiller Town. With buildings set up in all manner of different shapes, some simple, some outright artistic. All of them made out of wood.

"N-no." She struggled even with him. "I didn't just fall asleep he - he did something." She refused to believe that this was all just a dream. It fall felt much too real to be a dream.

"Did what?"

She stopped. "I'm...I'm not sure. But he - I..."

She was held in place again by the archer. "Look, I will tell the guards to keep him away if he comes back, all right? You can stay here if you're still a little freaked out. Me and Ralsei will come with the Emperor and see if we can get an audience with the Empress. Right now, the guards aren't letting any of us in. You get some more rest and wake up for real. We'll see if we can get entry to Carpentown."

She found it reassuring that they had things covered so she could unwind and wrap her head around what she had just been through.

The people in the other wagons looked tense, but not shaken up enough to believe they had just witnessed someone getting flogged. So as far as anyone could tell out here, nothing actually happened, after she looked in Donnie's mirror. It was a vision, just like he said. It only felt so real, as if she had really been there.

Just sitting in here wasn't going to do much for her to unwind. She got up to stretch her legs and walk around a bit. The villagers from Tiller Town were all still here. She saw one come back to their family's wagon here and there, angered about being denied protection by the Empress' guards.

The Emperor wasn't here, he had gone ahead with Dasher. But as she wandered around between the wagons, something relating to him caught her eye. Next to the emperor's golden riksha, the man tasked with steering it leaned against a tree. He stood out to everything around him in the same way she and Kris usually did. He was fully visible as though he were in a well-lit place even when he was in the shadow of a tree, under a night sky.

A human with black hair and with skin in nearly as dark a shade of blue as Noelle's fur. He wore baggy white trousers and his chest was covered only in a wide assortment of long jeweled chains and gold and pearl necklaces. His lips had a conspicuous, contrasting shade of red and he had a red symbol involving a reverse arc and a dot in the middle, painted upon his forehead.

What drew Noelle to him, was the calming song he played on his bansuri, a little side-ways operated flute from the middle east. When she came into his field of view, he raised his eyebrows and stopped playing. "Wait, no, go on."

The blue human chuckled. "You like it? I can play a little more." He did so for a few more minutes. "Hello. I - I'm uh..." He stopped and looked around as if trying to come up with a name. Then he raised his flute again. "This must look like a piccolo flute to you...Piccolo. Call me Piccolo."

"All right...Piccolo."

"Say, you seem terribly worn out for someone who has been asleep for so long."

She tried to laugh off his assessment. "Yeah, I had a really bad nightmare."

'Piccolo' put his flute away for good and offered her his hand. "Say, we both have some short respite. Why don't we take a nice, relaxing trip while you tell me everything about it."

Maybe it was something about his refreshing, almost flirtatious tone in his voice, maybe the reason was that Noelle recognized who this 'Piccolo' was, but it left her smiling. "Do I have a choice?"

Piccolo took his hand back and placed both of them on his hips. "As a matter of fact, no you don't."

Aside from the wagons, there were no walls, everything out here was open. He led the way to the side, to an inland lake near the town. Piccolo stood to the edge of the water and pointed towards the lake with an open hand. Noelle was shaken enough to stumble backwards when suddenly the water parted and two giant snakes rose up from the depths.

They slithered onto the surface and coiled themselves around one another, forming a huge circular platform out of their bodies. They left an opening in the middle, from which a giant flower sprung up and spread its pink petals out over the entirety of the snakes' bodies. "No reason to worry. The serpents bend to my will." The human got onto the strange surface and once a few steps onto one of the petals, sat down with his legs crossed. He patted the surface next to him, signaling her to come onto the serpentine platform.

She was surprised at how solid it was when she stepped on to it. Walking on its surface was easier than expected. Once there, she even made efforts to sit down the way he did. "So, tell me about this nightmare of yours. It couldn't have been that bad."

"It was!" She began retelling it, but kept to vagaries to not involve him any further than she had to.

The only part where she got specific, was how within her vision, Donatien posed as her therapist, played along with how no-one except Noelle could see the monster, gave her pills that made the monster more dangerous telling her they did the opposite, and how he flogged her with a scourge once the vision was over. "Phew, a lot to unpack here. He certainly seems to have some justifiable anger. "

"I just don't understand why he would do all this to me."

"'Doing' things to you is a strong way of wording it, don't you think?"

"Huh?"

"For a start, do you have any wounds to show where he hurt you?" She reached under her robe, to the place on her stomach where he kept hitting her. There were no wounds, no scars, nothing. It was as though none of it had happened. So she shook her head.

"Then all he did was leave behind a memory of something that never occurred and a future that hasn't happened...yet. That aside, this doesn't sound like he was just taking things out on you. In fact it seems more like it was all constructed in an elaborate way to tell you something. He showed you a future certainly wouldn't want, caused by a decision you currently want to make. And to highlight the mistakes that led to it, he made the victims of your decisionmaking haunt you for the rest of that vision."

His defense of what Donnie did, left Noelle in distress. "This...no. If he was just trying to tell me something, why would he make it so awful?"

"As he would put it, all he did was hold up a mirror and the thing you're taking issue with, is what you saw when looking into it. Sure, his methods may not be the most comforting, but resolving personal issues rarely is."

"You're starting to sound like him!"

Piccolo laughed. "Maybe that's because we see eye to eye. We merely differ in how we convey things. But even the devil himself, in all his pretenses and attempts to torment you, is doing it for your sake. It just might not seem that way, because his way of helping you, is to show things you're not comfortable with. All he did, was show you that a future with that 'new' flame of yours won't be as rosy as you make it out to be. You need to see the positive here, because I think you don't appreciate how much of a favor he has done you."

With a swipe of his hand through the air, he conjured faint images, drawn from Noelle's vision. "The future he showed you hasn't happened...yet. You can still make a better choice in your life and avoid it entirely. By letting you indulge your current errors within the realm of imagination, he has granted you a second chance at a good life. It would have been more cruel to not show it to you and let you walk right into it, headfirst, with no way of going back. Now, thanks to him, you have an opportunity to make a serious change to where you're headed. Most people in your shoes aren't so lucky."

Explaining her all this left her melancholic and zoned out, so he grabbed her to shake her a bit. "Hey, I know that's a bit much to take in, but still, you've got to see the positive. Things don't have to go exactly like in your vision, right? You can just make a better decision ahead of time."

"It's just...I'm afraid. I get what you're saying, I know where you're going with this, but in so many movies and games, I saw the opposite. People choosing to be with someone they can start a family with and not being happy, and people choosing someone like the 'new' person, and being happy."

The blue human laughed. "Art isn't always a faithful reflection of life. Especially high budget art with a lot of vested interests making it possible, is not so much a benevolent guiding hand, but rather a paid advertisement, for decisions profitable to who paid for its creation. But those decisions they advertise are rarely beneficial to the person making them, or society as a whole." He tipped her nose with his soft, round finger. "It's time you looked less to 'woke' movies, books or games for ideas of the world, and used your own mind to make sense of it yourself."

"I mean...how would I even start? Finding this 'better' path?"

"Well from what I heard, the devil seemed to imply that you already knew someone for that, and simply turned away from him. Or considered turning away. You could simply change your mind on that matter."

"Yeah, there was someone. I thought we had something. I kept waiting for him to make it something. But he never did. I figured we really were just friends."

Piccolo giggled again: "Little one, if he is a better match for you than that 'new' one - if he is the least bit like you, I'd wager he's a rather timid person. Did you ever consider that if he feels the same way about you, he might be as scared to take that step forward as you are? Maybe all it takes, is a little encouragement. A little signal, subtle enough to deny it, but direct enough to reach out to him."

A new, cold breeze rushed by them and prompted Noelle to wrap her robe a little more tightly around herself. "Are you sure things will work out if I try this?"

Piccolo gave her a confident smile. "I am certain of it. The devil showed you the path you intended to take, and he had no qualms laying out that this trail leaves you to become nothing but dust in the wind. But a better path would see to you finding fulfillment in life, happiness, comfort..." He raised his hand and above them, the dark of the sky tore itself open for bright, golden light to shine upon them.

Within the bright sky he created, she saw images of herself cooking, tending to a home, holding children in her arms, reading stories to them, and in the arms of a familiar face. Smiling with a visible happiness she wished she could say she had now. "...and most importantly, a legacy for the ages. Like a god tending to the world through his avatars, you will leave your mark upon it through your descendants."

The bright sky revealed by the rift in the air above them filled itself with faces and profiles of all kinds of monsters. Men, women, boys, girls, monsters in all shapes and sizes, dressed as though from different times and places, but all of them had antlers.

Then, the rays of light hanging out of the rift in the sky like strings pulled themselves back in, and the rift closed, allowing the dark to settle over them again. The blue stranger raised one finger. "But that goes only for if you HAVE descendants to begin with. In order for that to unfold, you must make use of that second chance you got. And make it count. Now go. It looks like something over there is stirring."

Noelle could tell what he meant. In the distance, she could see the Emperor, Ralsei and Dasher coming back with a few of their servants. It was best if she hurried to join them. Half-way off the flower petals, she turned back to Piccolo. "Thank you. For everything."

He said nothing. He didn't even bother to get up. But when she had fully gotten off the platform he erected from the water, he took up a meditative pose. The sky parted above him again, filling the area with the same golden light as before. Except the rift opened up much more widely. Piccolo closed his eyes, and the flower and snakes rose up out of the lake, into the sky, and vanished through the rift.

Then the rest of the lake poured itself into the sky and through the rift as well and the grassland beneath appeared as unaffected as though nothing had been here. The rift closed itself behind it all. Leaving only drops of water to give any indication of him - or that entire lake - having been here.