The Chained Maiden: Bound by Fate Read online

  “Ooooo, that was amazing!” Dora sighed in bliss, sliding bonelessly into a thick, comfy chair. “I’ve never felt so relaxed and tension-free before!”

  “Glad you liked it,” Tilda said from beside her, the small vampire also slumped in a chair and acting like her bones had melted away. It was rather funny to see, Dora thought. A boneless and bloodless vampire? Hilarious! Then again, she supposed she also looked amusing, all sprawled out and limp.

  “So, where’s Evelyn?” Dora inquired, looking around as best she could without actually moving her head.

  “Around,” Tilda said with an aimless wave. “Probably in one of the sand baths. She likes those.”

  “Huh, haven’t tried that yet. Not sure I will, though. After living in the Cracked Land, you gain a very low tolerance for tiny, scratchy granules constantly pelting you,” Dora mumbled.

  “Is that so?” Tilda mused idly.

  “Hey, I’ve got a question: how did you get here, anyways? I’ve never heard of the Resort before, though dimensional travel is also new to me,” Dora inquired.

  “I know some guys who owed me favors. I cashed ‘em in for a nice vacation with my sister,” Tilda replied. “I’ve done some Planeswalking in my time, but I rarely venture too deeply into the Aether. It’s a wild and dangerous place if you don’t know where you’re going with perfect accuracy. I prefer to stick to the known settlements, rather than risk the wilderness. Ever been lost in the Elemental Plane of Ice before? Not fun at all.”

  “I’ve seen snow only, like, twice in my whole life. I can’t imagine a realm made of nothing but,” Dora murmured. “Hey, how much would it cost to come back here again?”

  “What, you mean pay actual gold for a trip to the Resort?” Tilda asked incredulously. “Well, you’d first have to find a way into the Aether. Then, find a place that’d let you book a stay at the Resort. Which is harder than it sounds – this place is exclusive and expensive.”

  “How expensive?”

  “A day at the Resort costs two hundred thousand gold coins,” the vampire replied, and Dora choked at the absurd number.

  “W-what? Two hundred thousand?! You could buy a castle with that kind of money! Hells, you could buy a castle, the town nearby, and everyone living inside of both with that much gold!” Dora spluttered.

  “It’d have to be a small castle, but yeah, pretty much,” Tilda agreed.

  “How is this place so expensive?” Dora wondered aloud.

  “Because it doesn’t just offer great services, it also heals its guests,” the blonde vampire child revealed. “Lady Dramhyda embodies the concept of Healing. As such, simply being in this place accelerates the body’s healing process, rapidly cures poisons and diseases, and can even reverse the aging process slightly. Some of the spa treatments make those effects even more noticeable.”

  “So, not only are you having a fun vacation, you’re also not dying?” Dora asked.

  “Basically,” Tilda shrugged. The half-orc bit her lip as a thought struck her.

  “Is, is Evelyn alright?”

  “She’s doing better, thanks to a few elixirs and this visit,” Tilda said passively, but her expression hardened and Dora could sense pain in her purple eyes.

  “Evelyn is almost eighty years old, Dora. She’s strong and fit, but still human. Age is catching up to her, and she doesn’t have a lot of time left. I’ve done what I can, though, to keep her death at bay. Rare medicines, exotic potions, expensive Healers and of course, this trip to the Resort.”

  “You won’t, um…” Dora trailed off, unsure of how to phrase the question, but Tilda beat her to it.

  “Bite her? Make her immortal like me? I’d never do that to her. It’s not a blessing, but a curse. Being Undead is not something I’d wish upon anyone. Except for maybe a few people, but only because then I could tie them to a stake outside and watch the sunlight burn their filthy flesh to ash,” the young-looking vampire said darkly.

  The half-orc gulped nervously. “You know, I am a Healer. I could take a look at her if you wanted. Maybe I could help?”

  Tilda sent Dora a sideways glance. “Thanks, but there’s only so much a Healer can do at this point. She’s not sick or injured, just worn out. Time is the enemy, here.”

  “Well, did any of those Healers know the legendary spell Restore? I think not,” Dora said, sticking her nose proudly into the air.

  “Hang on, you know that spell? I thought it was lost before the War of Fallen Gods!” Tilda exclaimed.

  “It was taught to me by Vord the Undying,” Dora revealed, and the vampire’s expression twisted.

  “I don’t know what to say to that,” Tilda admitted. “Seems strange that he’d know a spell that could harm him. Being Undead and all.”

  “Actually, it couldn’t. Not much, at least,” Dora revealed. “Sure, it uses the Light Element, but only as a starting catalyst. Restore is actually a Time-based spell.”

  “Time? Then, instead of healing things, the spell rewinds a target’s personal time?” Tilda gasped.

  “I don’t think I could completely undo someone’s aging process, or even restore more than a year or two, but that’d still be better than nothing,” Dora pointed out.

  “Why help me? Why even offer this? You barely know either of us!” Tilda demanded, eyeing the half-orc suspiciously.

  “Because I’m a Healer, Cynthia damn it! I’ve spent too many years wallowing in my own misery, but no more! I’m not going to be held back by my past any longer!” Dora declared. “Besides, I’m helping Evelyn, not you.”

  Tilda nodded slowly, processing Dora’s words. After a bit of thought she snorted. “Fine, I can accept that reasoning. Based on what I heard about your ‘adventures’ so far, I can understand the desire to do good to balance out the bad, believe me. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But it’s Evelyn’s decision, not mine. As much as I want her to live as long as she can, it’s still her choice.”

  Dora made a grunt of affirmation. Indeed, it was the patient’s choice in the end whether or not to get cured. She’d have said something more, but the chair she’d been sitting in had suddenly started vibrating, and she let out a moan as she sunk into blissful relaxation.

  Now this was a vacation!

  Chapter 3: Good deeds go rewarded

  After several hours of pampering, Dora and Tilda soon found their bellies growling. When Evelyn returned from her treatment, she smiled in amusement as she discovered her sister and her new friend sprawled limply in a pair of vibrating chairs, their stomachs gurgling gently in time with the buzzing of the massage capable furniture.

  “Shall we get some food?” the grey-haired woman suggested, and the duo nodded weakly. It took some work, but the vampire and the half-orc both managed to escape the clutches of the comfortable seats.

  “My legs feel like jelly,” Dora mumbled, wobbling slightly as she and the two older women headed towards the dining hall.

  “Heh, Jelly,” Tilda giggled to herself. When the Healer and her sister stared at her, she flushed before chuckling.

  “Ah, nothing, it’s just that I know a guy named Jelly,” the blonde vampire explained.

  “Isn’t he the one who gave you that elixir?” Evelyn inquired.

  “Yeah, he did,” Tilda nodded.

  “That was easily the most potent potion I’d ever drunk. Healed my arthritis, rheumatism, and my bad hip,” Evelyn recounted.

  “You know an alchemist named ‘Jelly?’ That’s just bizarre,” Dora said in disbelief.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Tilda muttered. The vampire refused to elaborate, and so they arrived at the dining hall without further conversation.

  “So, I’ve tried one type of food, any suggestions on any others?” Dora inquired.

  “Well, if you like spicy food, they have a dish made with rare Godsmoke chili peppers harvested from the Elemental Plane of Fire,” Tilda suggested. “Careful not to drink alcohol with it, though, Godsmoke peppers are so hot they make your breath
flammable!”

  “Yeah, no, something like that is liable to kill me,” Dora shot back. “I can barely stomach normal spicy food, so something that comes from a place filled with fire and heat isn’t going to play nice with my intestines.”

  “They have a delicious fruit salad,” Evelyn informed the Healer.

  “Hey, this is a vacation, Evelyn! Live a little! Hey, Dora, why not just order some cake for lunch?” the vampire offered, causing her older sister to shake her head.

  “You can’t eat cake for a meal, Tilda! There’s an order to things!”

  “But vacation!” Tilda whined, acting like her physical age rather than her mental one.

  “Maybe I’ll just get Surf and Turf in a different style,” Dora mused to herself, looking at the menu a crab had provided.

  Eventually they all decided, and while they waited, another guest approached them.

  “Excuse me, but is it true you know the Restore spell?”

  Dora blinked, befuddled by the sight before her. The person, if it could be called that, resembled a three foot tall blue sea anemone that had grown duck legs. Several of the tentacles sticking out of its body had tiny hands on the end, and it used those appendages to hoist itself up onto the bench next to the half-orc.

  “Err, yes, how did you know?”

  “Word gets around, my lady,” the tentacled individual claimed. Several tendrils leaned in towards her conspiratorially. “People do so love to gossip, and no one ever really notices the servants.”

  Dora’s mind drifted back to when she’d spoken about her spell, and though her memory of the conversation she’d had with Tilda was hazy due to the pleasure she’d later experienced thanks to the vibrating chair, she did recall a few of the Resort’s workers being nearby at the time.

  “Are you injured?” Dora asked, trying her best to keep a straight face as she spoke with the strange guest.

  “Not I, but my wife. She lost some limbs a few years back in an accident, and there are few magics capable of restoring lost appendages,” the mobile sea anemone explained.

  “I’d be willing to try,” the half-orc said, her Healer training kicking in. “Do you mind waiting for us to finish our meal first?”

  “Of course, of course!” the odd duck legged creature said, hopping off the bench. “My darling and I are going to be at the boating house for the next few hours, you can find us there. Just ask for Yugulp Gold-Squall. And thank you!”

  He waddled off, leaving the trio alone.

  “That was… interesting,” Dora said after a moment. “I take it there’s some sort of translation spell on the Resort that allowed me to understand what he was saying?”

  “Quite right. And I must say, it’s nice you offered to help,” Evelyn replied politely.

  “Too trusting,” Tilda sighed, shaking her head. “You’re too trusting. You just agreed without knowing more than the bare bones of the situation. And you didn’t even ask for money!”

  The mint green skinned Healer rolled her eyes towards the vampire’s comment. “I consider myself a fairly good judge of character, Tilda. I didn’t spend two years in the Dreadlands twiddling my thumbs. Scarrot – my, um, my father – taught me plenty about how to survive there, and part of that included learning how to read a person. Sure, he wasn’t humanoid, but I was always better with handling animals than people, and I could tell Mr. Gold-Squall was being truthful.”

  “I can’t tell if that’s speciesist or not,” Tilda muttered to herself. Evelyn just smiled.

  “Do what you feel is right, Dora. Little Tilly is just jaded.”

  “And you’re not?” the vampire scoffed at her sister, whose smile turned sharp as a blade.

  Dora gulped, and was reminded of the fact that despite their ages and appearances, Evelyn and Tilda were a swords master and vampire, respectively, so a fight would be a bad idea.

  “So! There’s a lot of interesting people around here,” the half-orc said loudly, distracting the two. “Can’t believe there are so many diverse races in the Aether!”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty stunning. You think Erafore has a lot of diversity? You should see this one planet where there are like five different breeds of elf, and at least a dozen anthropomorphic races based on animals. It’s like a zoo!” Tilda chuckled.

  While they enjoyed a good laugh, their food finally came, and the trio of women eagerly ate up. Evelyn enjoyed the fruit salad she had advertised earlier, and Tilda tore into a rare steak, greedily slurping up the meat juices. Dora didn’t eat as fast as the blonde vampire, but she did consume her pasta dish quicker than Evelyn. The Healer side of her was pushing her to finish up soon so she could help a patient.

  “That was nice,” the half-orc claimed, wiping her lips clean with a napkin. “Now, it’s time to heal someone!”

  “Should be fun to watch,” Tilda whispered to her sister, who nodded. “It’s not every day you get to watch a legendary spell being cast.”

  “Mr. Gold-Squall said something about a boat house?” Dora inquired, and Tilda bobbed her head.

  “Yup! The boating house is by the docks, it’s sort of a fusion between a yacht club and a naval museum that has examples of sailing vessels from across the Aether and the mundane Multiverses.”

  “Okay, got it,” Dora said. She let the young vampire take the lead, as Tilda clearly knew the Resort better than she did.

  The boating house resembled an upside-down ship, with an entrance built into the hull. The interior was wooden, just like the surroundings, but was far vaster in scope, obviously the work of powerful spatial magic creating more room than was natural.

  Just as Tilda had said, there were countless copies of ships and boats within, many of them built to scale. Tourists and vacationers moved among the exhibits, chatting and sipping at glasses of alcohol brought to them by servers. It did not take long to locate the sea anemone who had approached her earlier.

  Yugulp Gold-Squall was hard to miss, despite only coming up to her waist. The waving tentacles atop his head were quite distinctive. Next to him, calmly examining a ship made of ivory and resin, was another duck-footed sea anemone, only it was sea foam green and had far fewer tendrils, several of which looked scarred and were little more than stumps.

  “Mr. Gold-Squall?”

  “Yes?” he inquired, a few of his tendrils twisting towards Dora when she spoke up. They stiffened when they spotted her and he turned fully to face her.

  “Ah, are you done, Miss Halfmoon?”

  “Yes. This is your wife?” Dora inquired, and the sea anemone nodded.

  “Miss Halfmoon, may I introduce you to my darling wife, Shally Gold-Squall. Shally, this is Miss Halfmoon, a Healer who can use the Restore spell!”

  “Is that so?” Shally mused. She did not sound as thrilled as her husband, in fact Dora detected a hint of suspicion in her tone. Dora couldn’t blame the woman, though. After all, if a person claimed to be able to heal what others hadn’t, they’d naturally feel cautious.

  “Yes! So, what do you need?” Yugulp inquired eagerly.

  “A diamond and an opal, the purer the better,” Dora said. “And how long ago did you get hurt, if I may ask Mrs. Gold-Squall?”

  “Twenty turns of the Great Moon,” Shally replied, and Dora hid a frown.

  “Um, hmm, how long is that in days?”

  “One turn of the Great Moon is equal to ten days here at the Resort,” Yugulp helpfully supplied, and Dora did quick calculations in her head and on her fingers.

  “Okay, that’s a whole year and a bit using Erafore as a base,” she muttered. “I can handle that.”

  “Can you really do so with only a diamond and an opal?” Yugulp asked hesitantly.

  “I managed to restore the leg of someone who’d lost it a decade ago with half a dozen small, low quality diamonds acting as a catalyst. For wounds sustained a year ago? That’ll be plenty,” Dora assured him, and he let out a honking sound she assumed was equivalent to joy in his native tongue as he rushed out of the boati
ng house to find what she needed.

  “Did you really heal a leg lost over two hundred turns ago?” Shally asked softly once her husband had vanished.

  “Yeah. Honestly, I probably don’t even need the gems, but better to be safer than sorry,” Dora stated. “I needed to use them because Scarrot – the one who’d lost his leg – was trapped inside of a time negation barrier that made it nigh impossible to change anything within it.”

  “Oh my,” Shally said, fanning herself with a few on her tentacles. “Sounds like quite the story!”

  “It’s not exactly one for polite company,” the half-orc said sadly. Shally hummed at that, before twitching her tentacles.

  “Perhaps then we should find some place else to heal me? As much as I love museums, having a medical procedure done in one sounds less than appealing. Might ruin the experience for me forever,” she tittered, and Dora nodded in agreement, and the ladies exited the boating house, with a number of eyes glued to them as they left.

  They found a quiet spot on the beach, still close to the docks but a fair distance from the majority of swimmers and sunbathers, and dispatched a messenger shrimp to inform Yugulp they’d moved to a less crowded area for the healing. By now, the green-tinted sun had risen fully, banishing the dawn and bringing about the day. The level of light was perfect, and allowed the half-orc to examine Mrs. Gold-Squall properly.

  Dora did some preliminary work, carefully examining her patient’s body with magic, checking to make sure she wasn’t carrying any other problems that might complicate the spell.

  “You have a fascinating body, Mrs. Gold-Squall,” Dora complimented, completely mesmerized by the alien composition of her species. Shally honked out a laugh.