<strong>Aurora</strong><br/><br/>Standing before the door that seemed to have no handle or keyhole, no way of opening it, Aurora became aware of the chill of the stone walls that surrounded them.  The chill of the grave, perhaps?  They had gone deep enough, she reckoned, to have passed the living spaces and cellars of the castle, to the tombs beneath, where the bones of ancestors lay.<br/><br/>No, she thought.  No, the chill she felt was no earthly cold, nothing that could be explained in terms of temperature.  There was something else, something unholy stealing the warmth from her skin, even making the torch that carried their light seem feeble and cold, like cold and uncaring starlight.  But even more than the cold, as Aurora beheld that door, there was another feeling stirring in her breast.  Some distant cousin of triumph, she thought.  She was taking a step further to seizing her destiny.<br/><br/>True, she did not know precisely what she would find; the Black Chamber was a place of legend, where, depending on the teller, one could find anything from Deschain's sword Chillthorn to the last dragon eggs to the Black Altar of the Eclipse itself.  But Aurora was certain that that there would be something in there that she could put to her purposes, some form of power that she needn't rely upon her grandsire for.<br/><br/>Raising a hand, as if she had known, all her life, Aurora, heir to Deschain, of the same blood of Balthazar the Black, who had last come along this passage, willed the doors to open.<br/><br/><strong>Sophie</strong><br/><br/>In the princess's room, the girl sleeping in the chair near the hearth whimpered, throwing her head about as if trying to rouse herself from this nightmare.  She would have succeeded, too, had it not been for the herbs she'd been given, and all that happened was her dream presence flickered before Balthazar's eyes as the pair made their way through the prison hallways, where each jeer, each pair of eyes upon her nakedness make her flesh crawl, made her shame rise up like bile in her throat.<br/><br/>She longed to cover herself, but she was far, far too frightened of the King, her Master, to dare disobey him, even in that small thing, lest he recall the headsman.  And so she walked in shame, tears spilling freely on her cheeks for she dared not wipe them away.<br/><br/>The Black Chamber, place of terror.  Like a blight on the rose of the Imperial Palace, everyone knew, or thought they did, to those unfortunates that went there.  And now she had come, punishment for her crimes, as she had been dreamed to think, to serve as the King's plaything.<br/><br/>Kneeling down, Sophie found herself, of all the absurd things, worried that she would stain her knees with dirt.  It made her laugh, nervously, shrilly, bordering on hysteria, especially as the weeks since her last bath had been many, and her feet were already black with dirt from the prison floors and the walk from the dungeons.<br/><br/>She crawled, her generous ass swaying back and forth as her hips moved, the lips of her sex opened to his view, and the secrets of its inner folds revealed, into the Black Chamber.