"Once Upon a Wing "

Chapter 2

Lips stained red in her own blood are all she sees in the silver mirror the Sorceress Anne finds herself once again staring in.
In a dark tower of an evil throne room, she has kept company with only that magic mirror and her own torrid thoughts. On occasion, her "uncle", the wicked Wizard Dermail, would make an appearance in the gloomy hall.
His ominous footsteps would echo on the marble floors, leading up to his throne of carved dragon heads. The jeweled ruby red eyes atop the tall throne were staring evilly at anyone who dared to enter the Sorcerer's lair.
The jewels were as starkly ruby crimson red as Sorceress Anne's crimson lips on her blood-drained face. Her dull brown hair was done up in tight braided buns that gave her the rigid look even as black lace pointed veils hung from her adorned in black jewels headdress.
"What is you see in that magic mirror I bestowed upon you, Sorceress Anne?" Lord Dermail's weasily voice was always plotting its next wicked whim. Even as his evil-eyed gaze descends upon the woman staring intently in the lacquered black mirror held in her hands.
"Nothing, my lord. Nothing but the darkness that pleases you." Anne's eyes, shielded behind the tiny framed glass spectacles that only those of vast mystical powers could conjure, held the power to see straight down into a person's soul. For no secrets could be kept from her once those fearful, evil eyes intensified through the forged jewelled dragon scale glass spectacles, were revealed.
But secretly, deep inside her blackened soul, Anne was the one who feared the power of those dragon scaled glasses. The intense power of destruction and deceit they held frightened her. But moreover she feared what fed them, their evil power. It was channeled from her faded, empty eyes, from the desperate, despicable soul within her own being.
She had grown up to be this wicked person--to be the student of her infamous uncle's evil powers when her own parents passed away.
She was trained by him to leave behind the soul of the simple woman she was--to become the soulless sorceress she now is.
Then why is it you continue to trifle with fancies of the outside world, my young apprentice?
Dermail strokes his white beard as his wizened old eyes pick up intuitively even what his secretive niece was determined to hold back from him.
Burning jealousies reach into the beauty she had none of--body nor soul. The world that lay below the rocky, thundering peaks of Nogard Mountain was what her glass mirror was continually trained upon. It was the glorious white clouds of the crystal blue skies into the thriving and rich land of Aissur where the legendary Pegasus roamed freely...
"You will be there soon enough, my apprentice of evil. We will travel into the land of milk and honey, of flying pixies and white-winged pegasi. I share in your desire to conquer and weak and hold reign over them all--over all the lands of the unworthy below us! We will shut out every bit of their flaunted beauty and light and replace it with the darkness that comforts our souls, will we not, my warriors of evil?"
Lord Dermail's eyes turn from the dulled ones of his apprentice to the fiery ones surrounding him. His generals of darkness who would bring down the rest of this world that once spurned his ultimate powers as a wizard.
The world that would now see his might as a god-king, and they would bow at his feet. Once and for, they would be toppled from their lofty heights of grandeur by his pair of Chinese dragonmasters. Their aggressive dark eyes flash in agreement of power throughout the eerie dark throneroom.
"Yes, sire." Evil laced voices answer in ominous unison in this, the lair of the dragons...