It was a nightmare of the worst kind: a hallucination of peace.
Mal sat by a lake that didn't smell of sulfur or rot. The water was a clear, mocking blue, rushing over stones that hadn't been smoothed by chemical runoff. She was eating a strawberry real fruit, not the shriveled, mealy husks that fell off the supply ships. The air didn't burn her lungs; it was sweet, thin, and terrifyingly fresh.
"Where am I?" she whispered, her fingers trembling as she reached for a grape.
"You've been in Auradon for days," a voice replied.
She turned and felt a jolt of pure revulsion. Beside her sat a boy. He was the personification of the Kingdom of Light: golden hair that caught the sun, a symmetrical, pampered face, and a smile so earnest it made her stomach turn. He wore a blue shirt embroidered with the golden crest of the beast the mark of the jailer.
"Who are you?" she spat. "One of the King's lapdogs?"
"You know who I am," he said, his voice a soothing lie. "I'm your friend."
A cold, sharp relief washed over her. She bared her teeth in a jagged grin. "Then this is a dream. I don't have friends. I have competitors and victims."
Before the Golden Boy could speak, the sky fractured. The blue bled into a bruised purple, and the peaceful lake turned into a boiling cauldron of black ink. A voice, ancient and jagged with fury, tore through the atmosphere.
"FOOLS! IDIOTS! MORONS!"
Mal's eyes snapped open.
The "palatial" bedroom was a tomb of peeling wallpaper and damp velvet. Maleficent was on the balcony again, shrieking at the huddled masses below. Mal kicked off her purple satin sheets thin, frayed things that barely held out the chill.
She felt a lingering sickness. Auradon. The mere thought of that "Enchanted Lake" felt like a spiritual infection. What kind of psychic rot would conjure a prince to haunt her sleep?
She looked around her room, finding comfort in the gloom. The wrought-iron bed was guarded by stone gargoyles that seemed to sneer at her, and the velvet canopy sagged like a heavy lung. The floorboards groaned under her weight as she crossed to her armoire.
It was filled with the spoils of a scavenger: shards of cut glass she'd told herself were diamonds, metallic scarves stiff with salt, and empty perfume bottles that still held the faint, ghostly scent of a world that didn't hate them.
She pulled on her armor: a leather biker jacket the color of a fresh bruise and combat boots caked with the Isle's ubiquitous grey mud. She caught her reflection in a cracked shard of mirror. Pale, translucent skin; eyes like poisoned emeralds. She didn't just look like Maleficent; she looked like the threat of her.
The kitchen was a graveyard of "potions" glass jars filled with the pickled remains of things that shouldn't have died. There was no food. There never was.
Mal headed for the Slop Shop. The Isle didn't produce; it scavenged. Every scrap of bread, every bitter coffee bean, was a "gift" from Auradon the waste that the "Good People" found too beneath them to eat.
"The usual," Mal growled at the counter.
A goblin, a pathetic, stooped creature that had once been a soldier in the Great War, glared at her with milky eyes. These creatures still blamed Maleficent for their imprisonment, secretly petitioning King Beast for mercy by claiming they were "distantly related" to his precious Seven Dwarfs.
"Room for month-old milk, brat?" the goblin croaked.
"Do I look like I want a chemistry project? Black. Like my mother's soul."
She grabbed the cup scalding and smelling of burnt dirt and vanished into the street before the creature could demand payment. His shrieks of "Brat!" were the only music the morning offered.
On the corner, a massive billboard loomed. It was King Beast, his face frozen in a terrifyingly wide, toothy grin, his yellow crown shining.
BE GOOD! BECAUSE IT'S GOOD FOR YOU!
It was a psychological weapon, a constant reminder of the "benevolence" of the man who had built their cage. Mal felt the coffee hot, bitter, and gritty settle in her chest.
She pulled a spray-paint can from her bag. With practiced, violent strokes, she gave the King a demonic goatee and slashed a jagged 'X' over his smiling mouth. Beside him, she rendered the silhouette of the horns.
LONG LIVE EVIL.
The green paint hissed against the paper. It was a small rebellion, a drop of ink in a sea of grey, but as Mal watched the "slime-green" paint drip down the King's face, the image of the golden boy in her dream finally began to fade.
The Isle didn't need princes. It needed a monster.