Дмитрий Мансуров - Invasion

“Get out of here! Now!” Yaga ordered, but the fox didn’t even try to comply. Yaga couldn’t touch her in a cage, so it was much safer there than it would outside. Putting her muzzle on her front paws, the fox looked at Yaga plaintively and sighed.

“There is no happiness in life,” she muttered.

Yaga sighed, grabbed the cage, and carried it outside.

“Get out of my sight!” she said again and slammed the door to her hut shut. The dog had followed her orders and took the playful beast as intended. Why were there so many playful beasts anyway? Who was going to work? But her plan hadn’t progressed one bit. Which was very bad.

The fox looked at the hut incredulously. Yaga had just let her free? It was incredible! Or was this some kind of elaborate revenge?

“Dog?” the fox looked closer, checking whether the nasty four-legged creature that had been masking itself for a regular mongrel over the years was hiding nearby.

It didn’t seem like it.

Slowly, fearing a trick, the fox escaped from the cage and froze for a moment, waiting for the thunder from heavens, wild victory cries, or angry growls coming from the monsters who were lurking around, waiting to ambush her. But nothing happened, so the fox immediately broke into a run.

Exactly at eight in the morning, Kashchey walked over to the bedroom and began to wait next to the door. The princess had to wake up soon. The effects of the gas had ended a long time ago, but for some reason, she was still asleep, like some spherical cat that just had lunch. Kashchey listened to the silence and trusted his ears. Apart from the measured ticking of an ordinary cuckoo clock, there were no sounds. That didn’t seem like royal behavior. Any royal offspring was obliged to enter a stage of noisy awakening that would turn into violent craziness due to kidnapping. Especially if there were no gag and ropes involved. Kashchey had been planning to hear a lot of sophisticated threats, unspeakable insults, and poetic sobs, but this mean-spirited girl kept stubbornly silent! Was she so afraid that she didn’t want to remind him of her presence? And what if… No, it couldn’t be! No corpses in his house!

“Can you break the plates or something? I’ve left a hundred of them for a reason,” Kashchey muttered.

Yeah, the whole operation had gone wrong. He’d made a run across the country and fought the best guards of the kingdom, put to sleep all the royals at once, sliced through hundreds of swords and spades, made a bunch of impressive explosions, and for what? To nervously walk about his own castle and wait for one young person to open her mouth and speak the words that she would naively believe to be curses?

“I give up! If the mountain won’t come to Kashchey, Kashchey will explode this mountain! Princess, get up!”

Kashchey unlocked the inner lock with his key and pushed the door forward. He expected that the girl would throw something heavy at him, but the door didn’t budge and didn’t open. Well, the Princess was certainly alive and in full mind — otherwise, it would have never occurred to her to prop the door with something.

“Are you building barricades?” Kashchey asked. “It’s practical. But useless!”

He had nothing to be afraid of, considering that he was immortal, so Kashchey took a few steps back and crashed into the door, slamming it out of the hinges and making it fall to the floor. It touched the edge of the table, and hundreds of plates and dishes were catapulted straight in Kashchey’s direction. The tabletop itself fell on the top. The clatter of the dishes made Kashchey’s ears ring.

“Oops!” he exhaled. “At least they’re smashed now.”

Stepping out of the wreckage, Kashchey shook off the shards from his clothes and started looking around. He didn’t find the princess.

Strange.

“She’s gone?!” he exclaimed, puzzled. “She just left?! What kind of people are these princesses?! I didn’t give her permission to run away!”

This was a complication. Kashchey didn’t expect that the princess would be able to pick the lock on the door. And who could expect such a thing from a princess? Was she learning how to pick the locks between the dances? Did she have nothing better to do at home?

What was this world coming to? This was the end of everything! Oh, to hell with humanity. What was the princess coming to? And the most interesting thing was, where was she going now, and where did she get the lockpicks? No. The most interesting thing was how did she leave the room and then barricade the door?!

The princess couldn’t leave the castle. She would never be able to open the gate. She hadn’t passed by, or else Kashchey would have definitely noticed it. So, the princess went to wander around the castle, which no one had seen for a few thousand years. But why? Was she looking for a back door?

‘What childish play is this?’ he thought. ‘ Has she heard the tales of secret passages and thinks that palaces and castles are built based on the same model?’

There will be so much dust! The horror! Of course, she wouldn’t get lost. The footprints would stay on the thick layer of dust for millennia… unless some bore obsessed with cleaning made this place his home in the future. But this was unlikely because Kashchey didn’t plan to relocate.

He didn’t like to wander through an abandoned part of the castle. He didn’t want to get lost in the countless turns and mirroring corridors. He had no idea who built the castle. Nor did he know why all his memories began with him being all alone in the vast forests just before he appeared in the castle. As if he had materialized out of thin air, an addition to this abandoned building.

Kashchey spent several centuries on trying to find at least some traces of the castle’s previous owners or its builders, but he came to the strange conclusion that it had never been inhabited before. At the same time, many rooms were filled with objects whose purpose was even more mysterious than the existence of their mythical owners. Kashchey gradually fell into a depression because he couldn’t answer these vital questions.

Depression turned into anger, and anger eventually grew into a morbid sense of humor. He even tried to commit suicide but found himself coming back to life time and time again. Convinced that death wouldn’t accept him under any circumstances, Kashchey realized that he had to live and cope with boredom. Since then, he began to live life to the fullest, exploring the world and enjoying the diversity of his existence. Sometimes he arranged tours across the castle and found a lot of convenient gadgets. Capsules with sleeping gas, fireworks, flying boots… it all came from there. At some point, his life became quiet and measured. That is, until Kashchey heard about a partially-golden Maria.

He quickly found a dusty corridor with footprints leading to the escaped princess. Kashchey stopped and said loudly into the void, “Princess! I’m in no hurry. You, on the other hand, will be hungry soon. I know that princesses are scrupulous in this regard and prefer to lose weight to become more attractive, but you risk swelling up with famine if you go on like this! Does it sound like something you want? Maria! Hey!”

Nothing but silence answered him. Naturally. What else? His position was not to be envied. The princess wouldn’t return by herself. She’d keep wandering around the castle until her last breath in search of salvation. On the one hand, who cared? But on the other hand, how would he find the answers to his questions if the princess got lost completely in these webs with dead spiders and flies? And then the prince would ride up, kill Kashchey, and perish in the depths of the castle as well. The king wouldn’t get to see the youth again, so he’d discard the kingdom and storm Kashchey’s castle because he would have nothing else to lose. He would also kill Kashchey and he would also get lost in the castle along with his army. This place was really much bigger on the inside.