Ep. 7 - Burning Hall

"Now, lady Melanie, let me properly introduce myself. I am Mastria, the head of maids that work for his majesty and I will be responsible from you from now on.

Your room is being prepared downstairs. Please follow me to the guest's hall. If you are famished, I can tell cooks to prepare a dinner to be brought to your room."

Melanie followed Mastria back the corridors they came from with Alys. They left the royal hall where the rooms of three royal siblings located in, climbed down from the stairway they climbed before, passed the big door which no longer has light nor voices coming from the other side and went to the left door of the great hall where her and Alys went right first time she came to the castle.

The door led to a corridor that was complete mirrored version of the other one. Again there were a bunch of doors, but this time they were on the left wall, and again a big open door, this time it stood on the right.

Mastria continued walking until she reached the last door on the left wall. She opened the door and turned to look at Melanie who was just behind her.

"This here will be your room for now. We might change your position when prince returns from his trip."

Melanie looked inside through the now open door. The room was decently big for a guest room. It had a window at the wall opposite to the door, a decent sized bed standing beneath window, a wardrobe, some shelfs and a desk.

"Are you sure you are not hungry? Our chef can quickly prepare some food for you."

Melanie shook her head implying she wasn't hungry. So many things had happened last days and she just wanted some rest.

"Very well," said Mastria as she turned to leave. Just before leaving, she turned and handed Melanie a bell.

"One last thing, don't leave you room no matter what. Most of the demons in this castle doesn't know about you and may mistake you as prey. If you need anything, ring this bell and I will answer your need."

Melanie nodded with a scared face and Mastria left with the smile she never dropped since they had met.

After the tall women left, Melanie took a better look inside the room. The whole room was illuminated by a single lantern hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room.

The walls of the room had orange wallpaper that featured red tulip figures at the bottom and little fire pattern in a slightly darker orange all throughout.

The wardrobe was made of dark oak wood. It had two doors and two drawers beneath them. There were gold painted handles for these doors and drawers. There were fire motifs engraved around every cover.

The shelves didn't look special. They were made of oak wood and offered a decent surface for books and stuff like that. There were three books, an ink and a quill standing on the shelves.

When Melanie opened the books, two of them turned out to be empty, probably there for guests to take notes.

The other book had the same tower motif that Melanie saw both on the fountain in the garden and on the painting at the prince's room. From a brief look Melanie figured that it was a history book. It wasn't that long but Melanie didn't have any energy left in her to read anything so she placed it back to where she found it.

She walked over to the single bed that stood parallel to the wall that the window which opened a door to the vast starry night sky and lay down looking at the ceiling.

She thought for a lengthy time about all the things happened to her recently. She was due to an execution just a week ago and now she was adopted by a demon prince, lying down on the softest bed she had ever lay on, in the biggest castle she had ever see or even heard of.

She thought about her orphanage. What were the others doing, she wondered. They were probably asleep, but she wasn't sure because she didn't know the time.

She realized then that there were no clocks in the room. It seemed weird, a guest room with no clocks. And from the notebooks it was clear that the room was used for official uses, wouldn't a clock be a must in those kinds of situations?

She looked around the room a bit more and there it was. A flat, round mechanism on the wall where door stood. But something was different, that thing wasn't a clock, at least Melanie had never seen something like it. There were a bunch of circles rotating, but no indication of the time.

"It's either a clock that I don't understand, or a really weird and tasteless decoration." Melanie thought as she looked at the brass mechanism ticking on the wall.

She looked out of the window, the sky was clear. The moon shined bright while the stars danced around it. Melanie watched this cosmic performance as her eyelids got heavier and fell down upon her vision.

The blue haired girl woke up in the same room she fell asleep in. She felt well rested and not even hungry, which was weird since she hadn't eaten anything since a the day prior.

The girl looked out of the window to see that it was still night, but not the night that she fell asleep upon. This night didn't have a moon that shed it's light to the darkness, or the sparkling stars that danced around the magnificent lightbulb of the sky. This night, the sky was pitch black.

She got off the bed and looked around the room, it was the same. She wanted to go back to sleep, but she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep again when she was this well rested.

She took a few steps in the room to stretch her legs and maybe get back some of her fatigue from before she slept.

But as she got close to the door, a sudden feeling blossomed Melanie. She had to leave the room. She didn't know the reason but she knew there was something important behind the prohibited door.

Melanie remembered what the red haired woman said and turned and looked at the bell she had put on the desk. 'Should any unforeseen circumstance necessitate your departure from this chamber, do not hesitate to give this bell a gentle ring and your humble servant shall attend to your every need' the woman said, and this was exactly a situation like that. But, the little girl thought, it was too late in the night, I shouldn't bother her with such manners. Also everyone is probably asleep, no one hill be out there to hunt me.

After justifying her actions, Melanie slowly grasped the brass handle and opened the wooden door.

The hallway had no source of light except now open door of Melanie's room. The girl stuck her head out of the door and looked around. After confirming that no one was at the long corridor except herself, she stepped out of the room and closed the door behind her.

When she closed her door, the last light source had died and the hallway descended into complete darkness. Melanie couldn't move for a solid thirty seconds, after which her eyes adapted to dark and she could see again.

The castle was dead silent, so silent that she could hear her heartbeat. She turned right and started to walk through the path she came from. The echoing sound of her footsteps, which the thick red and orange carpet beneath her feet didn't pipe down at all, made the castle sound emptier.

As she got close to the end of the hallway, which she knew led to the main hall where she entered the castle for the first time, she heard a sound. She stopped walking and held her breath to listen the vague sound better. It was a sound of crackling, and it came behind the door at the end of the hallway.

Melanie held the door handle which looked the same with the handle on her door. Now that she was close to the door the crackling of fire sounded louder. She was hesitant to open the door, but she knew she had to do it, even though she didn't know why.

As the black haired girl turned the brass handle and pushed the door, a burst of smoke hit her face, making her fall back. She wanted to get back up, but hands made of heat held her in place.

It didn't last long though. Her body got used to the heat and most of the smoke had exited the room into the corridor which is now completely lit by the dancing flames in the other side of the door.

The blue eyed girl passed through the door and entered the burning room with no walls nor ceiling. Whichever direction she looked, there were flames getting bigger and bigger the further they were. Even the door she entered through looked like it didn't stood on a wall but rather on it's own, which was stupid because she had just gotten through a corridor.

Melanie looked around in the burning room, trying to understand what was happening. As she was looking, she realized that the flames created a path for her to follow. So she did, she walked on that narrow path clear from flames.

After maybe a minute, maybe an hour long of walking the blue haired girl saw something. She narrowed her eyes to see better, and realized it was not something, but rather a someone. It was a woman, sitting on some kind of a throne, her body is completely ablaze, her hairs turned coal black and her head looking down.

Melanie wanted to help, she didn't know who this woman was but it didn't matter, she had to make a move even though she didn't know what.

The panicked girl took a step forward to do something that she didn't know what but something that she would've found on her way and something that would help the burning woman. But before she could take a second step, the coal haired woman raised her head and looked at Melanie. Or at least Melanie thought she looked at her but she couldn't have known, because the woman's eyeballs were vaporized, her lips were dry and her skin was peeled off.