Something Equally Nonsensical

Lock

Prompt: Lock

Spoilers: None

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"I don't understand," the Princess sounded disheartened, "the prophecy speaks of Eilan. Eilan is a forest. How are we to find the Lock inside a forest?"

Luxani gritted her teeth, wondering if the Magnus would forgive her for chopping off the head of one of her daughters. It wasn't as if she didn't have replacements.

"That, princess, is why no one has claimed to have grasped the prophecy's meaning in the three millennia since those words were spoken."

"I'm not a Princess," the stubborn Princess said. "And I know that. I was just talking through our options."

"Magnus-filiae—"

"Don't call me that."

Why? Why hadn't she just turned down this job? Easy coin, Yun had said. You just need to take the princess out to see the woods and have her back before supper, Yun had said. She should have known Yun was a liar and she'd end up as caretaker to an ignorant mage-blooded spawn for longer than her patience would hold.

"I can feel your thoughts, Lux."

"Then you will, perhaps, feel my confusion over how to address you? If not Princess, and not Magnus-filiae? My Lady feels insufficient."

"Mae will do."

'Mae' would be the death of her. "Surely you must understand—"

"—There!" The Princess all but squealed in delight, jumping up and pointing... at an outcropping of rock? "The Lock! I can feel it, Lux."

Luxani — no one had ever dared call her Lux in her lifetime — tried to look at the rock with equanimity, but failed. It was a rock. Not a Lock, or an opening, or a door. A rock.

"Princess?"

"Ugh. Don't call me that." And she was off, traipsing through the woods in an unpractical — if undeniably attractive — flowing dress, because that was what one did, the attire one chose, before galivanting after forgotten prophecies and mythical dreams.

Having no choice but to follow, Luxani breathed in the late morning air through her nose and exhaled through her mouth. If she couldn't convince the Princess to stop this quest, they would sleep in Eilan one more day, and she didn't want to test how far Eilan's benevolence extended.

Said Princess was currently on her knees in front of the rock, doing strange, mage-blooded gestures, her arms wide open at first then progressively narrowing further and further, until the fingers of one hand were close enough to touch the other's.

"Done."

Luxani could scarcely believe her eyes. There, carved in the rock, a rudimentary drawing of a Lock had appeared. Just the drawing of it. Even if this was what the prophecy spoke of, there was no hole for a Key. Even if there were, they had no Key.

And then the princess started to sing.

Sing was too generous a term. She was doing something with her throat, and was emitting sound, but it bore little resemblance to song.

Luxani was going to disembowel Yun with his own sword. Slowly.

She didn't know how she'd managed to fool herself into thinking the princess would do anything other than what she had her heart set upon, even if that was singing to a rock, but the day was getting away from them with every low, disturbing note.

It was hours before the princess fell silent at last. The rock seemed to shudder and click, and, against all odds, an actual Lock showed up on top of the drawing. And the Princess lifted her dress — displaying, Luxani noticed against her will, a very enticing pair of legs — and... Produced... A mace that she'd strapped to her thigh? A medium-sized mace. As one did, when traipsing through the woods. If one was mage-blooded and unburdened by common sense.

"Princess—"

"—Don't call me that."

"Your Highness, Magnus-filiae-Primus, Bearer of the Sight, Heir to the Five Woods of Einnis, Maenyiam Qui Haemlin Zal Ghin, did you, perhaps, bring a mace under your dress?"

The Princess treated her to musical laughter. The kind that made Luxani want to hang Yun by the entrails she'd already promised herself she'd relieve him of.

"This isn't a dress, silly. It's a robe! And this isn't a mace — it's Lockbreaker."

And, before Luxani could get another word in edgewise, the princess swung the mace she wasn't supposed to be strong enough to yield or tall enough to carry, and shattered the three-millennia old, magical-rock Lock that had been prophesied since the reign of the first Magnus.

"Right then. That counts as opening the Lock. Now. Where do you suppose we might find the Scroll?"

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Length: 762 words

Time: Possibly 20 minutes? It was two slots of 15 minutes, and I fell asleep multiple times during each because it was 6am and I hadn't slept yet

Prompt: https://www.cameronmontaguetaylor.com/2021/01/19/morning-pages-lock/