The Princess' Dragon Lord by Mandy Rosko

were pacing around, screaming
and calling him names.”
    Recollection dawned in his rust colored eyes,
and he nodded. “I was speaking to his ghost.”
    “ Ghost ?”
    “Of course. How else would I be cursing a
dead man?”
    “Well, doesn't that make a whole lot
of sense.” she said dryly, digging her spoon into the soft, strange
looking fruit and taking a bite.
    It had the texture of kiwi and was
deliciously sweet. Strange considering the spiky outside.
    She couldn't help but look at Azoth with that
thought.
    He was ignoring his own fruit and staring at
her. “Do you not have ghosts in the place where you have lived all
this time?”
    “Well, yes, but no one actually talks to
them.”
    “Mortals do not speak to their dead?
Ever?”
    Diana squirmed, suddenly recalling the many
times when she had spoken, inwardly, or out loud, to her dead
parents, asking for guidance, or even just thinking back on
pleasant memories.
    It saddened her to know that most everything
she recalled in this life she'd been living, likely never happened
at all. Who were these people in her memories? Were they made up?
Part of the spell? What could she count on as being real?
    She looked back up at Azoth as he took a bite
out of his fruit. Her husband. That was real. She smiled a
little.
    “I guess we do, sometimes,” she added. “But
no one really expects them to answer back.”
    “In our world, sometimes they do. A ghost has
many powers, sometimes more than they had in life. It's not wise to
cross one.”
    “Or curse at one?” Diana asked with a catty
smile.
    Azoth suddenly found something interesting in
his dragon fruit to stare at. “A singular incident.”
    She laughed, then quickly grew serious. “I
don't think he had anything to do with...with what happened that
day.”
    “You said it was his voice—”
    “I know, I know, but he was always telling me
to run. And he was telling me to run right before the trees came to
life and started to chase me.” she said. “If he wanted to kill me,
why would he do that?”
    It was a fair question to ask, regardless of
whether or not Nyx ever confessed to anything, and Azoth knew it.
Hell, if someone tortured Diana enough, she'd swear up and down
that she was from Mars if that was what her captors wanted.
    “I know not. He could still find a better
method of returning your memories, if that is what he is indeed
doing, instead of inflicting tortures upon you.”
    “Maybe he has no choice. The mind is a
complex thing, maybe forcing memories out of it is supposed to be
painful, and if I'm under a spell to make me forget, and he's going
against that spell, wouldn't that hurt too?”
    She was on a roll now playing detective,
forgetting all about the fact that the guessing game she was
playing at involved her own life, and if she was wrong on all
counts, well...
    “Do you believe your uncle was involved, in
my poisoning and your murder?” Azoth asked. His eyes were narrowed
in thought as he too began to see things the way Diana was laying
them out for him. She'd already told him about her last set of
visions, the memories that were not her own this time, since she
was not even in the area when Azoth's father and Dagda were having
their strange conversation.
    She shrugged. “Maybe. I don't know anything
about him at all.” Except that he put on a friendly face in front
of her when she was still a princess, and then spoke in a
threatening manner to exalted guests, and frightened the servants
enough to make them run from him.
    “I never told you about the mirror I found,
did I?”
    “Mirror?”
    She made a shape with her hands, indicating
its size. “About this big, a dragon frame swirling around it with
rubies in its mouth and claws. No handle.”
    Azoth thought about it, then nodded. “Yes, I
recall that. You never found it, however. It was a wedding gift
from Nyx. You seemed most happy to have received it from him. To be
truthful, sakkra , I was jealous of your admiration for it.
Many