“What do you mean I spend too much time pining over Hercules?” The beautiful princess of Laurasia cried out in her sleep. “This is not fair…No I don’t care if you are the God of War and I’m only a mortal; I’m a princess and I don’t need to take orders from your sorry butt!” She suddenly jumped up, out of her bed and began acting out the motions of her dream. She placed her slender hands on her silk-covered waist and continued yelling at the air, “You can’t do anything to me, now get out of my room before I call security! … No, I said…I said…” The princess began to stammer as her crystal-blue eyes fluttered open with confusion.
“Oh, by the gods it was only a dream…you see Ares? I told you you couldn’t do anything to me!” She shook her fist at the ceiling then let her arms drop to her side in triumph. “How dare he threaten me,” she muttered out loud. “I’m going to talk to Zeus,” she began mimicking as she walked over to the stone window overlooking the dark, sleeping village of Laurasia, “he’ll make you sorry for your actions, blah blah blah, Ares.” The princess whirled around and gracefully carried herself over to the mirror hanging on the wall, opposite the window. She sighed with satisfaction as she looked herself over, glad to see that even her disturbing nightmare hadn’t made her look any less beautiful or stressed. The sky-blue, silk robe she wore around her petite body glistened in the moonlight from behind her, and her long, wavy, strawberry/blonde colored hair looked as if it were combed only a minute ago. “Perfect,” she commented with a smile, and then walked up the three-step stool into her king-sized bed, snuggled under the feather blankets, and drifted off to sleep.
The morning sun was shining inside the rich, maroon-colored room and had reached the foot of the bed when the princess sprung out of bed in a sweat. Panic had filled her eyes and her small chest heaved with exhaustion. Immediately, the following nightmare had filled her mind and she tried shaking the vision out of her head, but it was all too real to forget. In this dream, she was on trial in front of all the gods, Ares as her prosecutor and Zeus as the judge.
“I propose that she be banished from the comfortable world she knows, and learn to live the way a mortal should be raised…in the wild!” Ares’ voice boomed from behind her low-hanging head. Nobody was in favor of her throughout the entire palace room, and without any objections, Zeus’ voice boomed her fate: “Guilty!”
“Princess Hermia? Are you awake?” called a guard from the other side of her double, bedroom doors.
“Yeah I’m up!” She half screamed in frustration, swung her dainty legs over the bed and jumped to the deeply carpeted floor.
“There is someone here to see you, princess…says that you know him.” Hermia was in no mood to see anybody and was about to say so when the guard continued, “I think it’ll be worth your while to see him.” The voice from the other side of the door sounded faintly familiar, she thought.
“All right, I’m coming!” she called back warily. With a quick check in the mirror, she threw open the double doors and sauntered out, robe flowing majestically behind her. The guard smiled deviously as he followed her through the unusually dark hallways and into the throne room. The princess suddenly stopped at the entrance, frozen in place as she realized the familiarity of the room.
Instead of the throne room, with the fireplace on one side and weapons of war all over the walls, the room was filled with glorious light. Windows reaching from the floor to the ceiling brought in pure white light. The throne itself was magnificent with gold and white textures. In the throne was a man with a golden crown sitting atop his proud, gray head. The guard behind her shoved her forward and she stumbled with surprise and confusion as her slippers tapped on the solid, white floor. The princess glared at the man who would dare shove her, but then grew with terror as the image of Ares was presented before her.
“I propose that she be banished from the comfortable world she knows, and learn to live the way a mortal should be raised…in the wild!” Ares’ voice boomed. Her mouth fell to her chest as she recognized the line. Then, one by one, the gods began filling the room on all sides. She looked at the man on the throne, hoping it would be her father: it was Zeus. Terrified, she hoped against hope that somebody would be standing as her defendant, but nobody was there. Without anything more said, Zeus’ voice boomed from behind her shaking figure: “Guilty!”
“Wait, this isn’t fair!” Hermia cried out, but it was too late. Suddenly everything around her turned blindingly white and the room vanished. Laughter was heard all around her, but she couldn’t see who it was, but recognized the sinister cackle of Ares. The floor vanished from beneath her and she fell. The thought of screaming formed after the state of shock she was in, yet before she could scream, she hit a floor of mud, stones and grass.
“This is so not funny, Ares.” She managed to say before spitting dirt out of her mouth. Pain shot through her whole body as she attempted to get up and look at her surroundings. All around her was mist and trees. The trees were taller than she had ever seen, causing the atmosphere around her to be quite moist and cold. A chill ran up and down her spine as she crossed her arms across her chest, but then noticed the horrific fact that she was utterly naked.
“Oh by the gods,” she cried out as she ran behind a bush. “Ares, I’ll kill you for this! Oh it’s cold in here,” she complained. The treetops were preventing the sunlight from even touching the ground, and they were dropping dewdrops onto her fair skin. “Hey! Ah, that’s cold!” she exclaimed as she grabbed a few gigantic leaves from the branch of a low-hanging tree.
“This won’t work,” she commented after she attempted to make clothes for herself from the leaves. She looked down at herself with the leaves tied awkwardly around her exposed, private areas. Suddenly, from behind her, there was a rustling in the bushes. Panic spread throughout her entire body as she froze in place.
“Oh Hercules, where are you when I need you?” Another rustle of the bush behind her sent her running in a wild, pathless panic; weaving in and out of the trees, jumping over fallen logs and dodging the low-hanging branches and leaves, her only purpose was to get away. Before she knew it, however, she began gasping for breath and stumbling on low vines.
“Wait a minute…I shouldn’t be running away…I’m a princess…” she concluded as she rested against a thick, moss-covered tree. “Come out you fiend…I’ll have you arrested for stalking me!” All around her was silence and perspiration began forming on her pale white face. “I-I’m warning you, I will order for your execution if you dare touch me.”
She waited for a response of some sort, but got nothing.
“Well, that’s much better,” she concluded triumphantly while trying to hide her fear of her unknown surroundings. “Okay Ares, the joke is over, you can bring me back to the real world now!” she hollered at the tree canopies covering the sky. Another rustle in a bush behind her made her jump in a one-eighty degree circle. “Ares, seriously…I want out of here…” her voice began to shake with fear and another rustle from behind sent her flying across the forest floor. “Hercules!!” she called out in panic as her delicate feet crushed branch after branch, sending pain up her legs and into her throat. Low branches began whipping her in the face and cobwebs grabbed for her arms. She tried looking over her shoulder as she ran, to see if anyone was running after her, when she ran straight into a deformed trees’ branch, tripping her into a summersault and fell with a clumsy thud on her back. The wind was knocked out of her and she lay on the forest floor, grasping her right knee and crying out in pain.
“Ah, Asclepius where are you?” Slowly her eyes looked up at her horribly bruised knee and with the power of the pain she was in, fainted in the middle of her new world.
“Okay Herc, so what you’re telling me is that we’re not traveling all this way to go to a party,” the great hero’s sidekick, Iolaus, concluded as they were making their way through a wooded path.
“Thaat’s right, Iolaus. Actually I’m making you come with me because I needed someone to help me out with something…and it’s a long walk and I kinda wanted someone to go with.”
The short, blonde, curly haired sidekick glared up at his handsome best friend. “But this was my weekend off…” he complained.
“I know…but I didn’t know this would come up.”
“Okay, now you should know by now that I’m going to ask you what’s going on…and why we’re traveling to the ends of the earth to do it.”
Hercules set his eyes to up to the clouds and sighed a hopeful sigh. “We’re going to a city called Laurasia. I’ve never been there before but I wish I would have visited this…friend…a long time ago. It’s been too long.”
“Uh-oh…here comes a long story…okay, spill it. Evidently we have a long way to go, so go ahead.” Hercules began searching the woods around him before he began.
“Okay, well when I was a kid, I met this beautiful girl. I guess I always thought that she’d be with me,” he paused for a moment, wondering if he should mention how they had met.
“Come on Herc, tell me where you two love birds met…I have to know the juicy parts.” Iolaus nudged his traveling partner with a mocking smile on his face.
“All right, all right, I’ll tell you everything, just give me a chance. I don’t think I’ll even remember half the stuff I’m about to tell you!” He stopped for a moment and tried to make sense of what he just said, then decided to forget about it and continue his reminiscing.
“Well, her name was Hermia. She had come to live with Mom, Celeste and I when I was only six or so. Her parents were killed right in front of her and, I’m not exactly sure how, but she had managed to escape and Mom found her wandering around the woods when she was returning from the market. I think she is either three of four years younger than I am…but I don’t remember. Anyway, we technically adopted her, but then she was claimed by these rich relatives of hers, and I think she somehow became princess of this place called Laurasia. We were both against Ares…in fact we were the only kids around who did despise him
