But he didn’t. All Donnacha wanted was a normal life. One where he could be mining away with the rest of his family. Instead of kidnapped and cursed by a Troll Queen.
The memory of his curse burned in the back of his mind, always trying to draw his attention away from anything else. He’d been wandering in the forest, a place he shouldn’t have been, when the Troll Queen and her entourage first saw him.
The dwarves had known the trolls were coming. All others had hidden themselves away, but Donnacha liked to think himself brave. The troll princess had set her eyes on him and decided he was all she wanted. She would have him and no one else. And so, the Troll Queen had offered him a choice.
Marry her daughter that instant, or be cursed as a bear until he gave in.
He didn’t want to marry her daughter. He didn’t want to be cursed in this form because of some game she thought was entertaining. Most of all, he wanted to go home. Back under the ground where the dwarves didn’t care about shiny things. They cared only for each other and the families they had built.
Shaking his great head, he started up the icy stairs. Human feet would have had a hard time with the trek. Though beautiful, the stairs weren’t created with ease in mind. They were far too slippery for booted feet. Even Donnacha, with his claws that dug into the ice, had a difficult time getting up to the castle doors.
Or maybe that was his gut telling him to slow down just a little bit. He wasn’t in any rush to return to the cold castle with its empty halls. The wind whistled through the castle at night, whipping through the nooks and crannies until it sounded like the building itself was screaming.
The double doors, carved with hunters and the beasts they killed, opened at his approach. The Troll Queen had been thorough in her curse and his new home. Everything in it was spelled to have a mind of its own. The castle frequently did what he wanted without being asked.
If only it could break the curse as well.
He snarled at the doors as he went through. The first few times they’d opened on their own, he had broken them in a fit of rage. The next day, they were exactly the same way as they had been before. Not a crack or a change in the carvings at all. As if his anger hadn’t happened.
Donnacha desperately wanted something in this place to change. But it never did. No matter how many times his claws dug into the ice floors, the marks were gone the next day. It was as if he didn’t exist at all.
Perhaps he didn’t anymore. No one else could hear the ghosts whispering in his lungs, the old voices and songs of his people that he couldn’t sing while his body was trapped as a beast.
His memories were his only solace. The old times when he had gathered with his dwarven brothers and sisters, singing the old songs, in caverns where their voices had lifted to the ceiling and bounced from stone to stone.
He could still hear them if he listened closely enough. He could hear their voices that sounded like angels, the cascade of emotion that would rain down upon them as they sang of ancestors who had dug deep into the earth and found treasures of legend.
“You’ve returned.” The voice fluttered through the blue halls and sent a shiver down his spine. “You’re late.”
He didn’t want to respond. Gods, what he would give if he could just go back to his room with its comfortable pile of furs and hide from what he had to do.
But he couldn’t. The curse made certain of that.
Donnacha padded through the halls, avoiding snow drifts as he made his way toward the one room that he hated more than anything else. At the farthest western point of the castle, a door opened for him.
This was the only door not made of glimmering ice. All the others revealed the insides of the rooms, wavering lines of what was beyond, not quite enough to make out who or what was hiding within the castle, but enough to see something moving when he passed. There was never anything moving.
Instead, this door was made of black stone. The obsidian reflected his own image as he approached the smooth surface. It swung open silently.
He knew what this meant, why that gravel-toned voice was calling for him. The queen wanted to know whether or not he was successful. Lip curling in anger and defeat, he stepped into the shadowy room beyond.
There was nothing but a single mirror in the room. Tall as three men, it was an impressive sight to most. The ornate frame was made of more black stone. The carved swirls had been made by the most talented of dwarven hands.
She thought it entertaining to visit him in something his own ancestors had created.
The smooth mirror surface swirled with magic, sickly green light pouring out until it stilled into something that looked more like a window. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see the creature who awaited him.
Donnacha remembered her appearance as though he had seen her just yesterday. He didn’t need to gaze upon her monstrous form again. The curse tightened around his throat, making him stare up at the mirror.
The Troll Queen stood before him. Her skin was a disgusting blueish gray, the same as the slate he’d mined when he was just a child learning how to use a pickaxe. Her eyes were too large for her face and entirely black. Her flattened nose made her look more animal-like than the others. Her overly large mouth curved into a smile, revealing sharpened teeth he knew she had filed long ago. Her ears were pressed flat against her skull, set too
