[Standard Content Warning: This is an ABDL story blog, that means stories on this page contain diapers, diaper usage (like, lots of it), infantilism and the like! In addition, mental and physical manipulation, bondage and nonconsensual or dubiously consensual employment of all of the above themes and many others may also apply. Viewer discretion is advised.]
Various construction projects started back when you were preparing to be announced as First Chosen, but now they’re finally starting to bear out. Walls are going up, more rooms are being built and surrounding your home, more settlers are arriving and building homes of their own. The tower is expanding outwards into a proper keep and around and within it, a proper castle town.
You are growing too, the best you can.
“Come on, advance.”
You try to step forward. You swing and Barhom deflects it away and swings back.
“You’re standing still. Use your feet. Keep moving. Now, advance, close on me. Close on me. Yes, that’s good. Keep going. Now, parry and riposte! Now!”
He swings. You deflect it, you let out a roar and swing as hard as you can. You strike him in the shoulder and he actually stumbles back one step. You don’t know if you actually stung him or if he just did that for effect, but he has a smile on his face, nonetheless.
“Excellent, princess. Your strength and your technique are improving. But what do I keep telling you?” He asks, pointing at you.
“Use my feet.”
“Use your feet. I can see it in your eyes, you’re thinking so much about what you need to do with your hands that you’re forgetting to move your legs. I can’t imagine you were this stationary this often in all those years of burgling, my princess.”
“I didn’t get into many fights when I burgled,” you explain between breaths as you grab some water. “If people with swords ever noticed me, my technique was to run away.” He chuckles.
“As you say, my princess.” He looks up at the sun in the sky. “That’s enough for today. You have magic lessons.” And that makes you throw your sword on the ground.
“Yeah. Sure I do,” you grumble. Barhom picks up the sword.
“Not going well?” He asks.
“Going nowhere,” you mutter. “I can’t get it, the mana’s not….coming.” You flail your empty hands. “I’m starting to think it’s never going to happen.” Barhom is quiet for a moment.
“You have a check-up soon, do you not?” He asks.
“…yeah.” You nod. “To see how the diluted mana doses are doing.”
“I believe you’ll get good news,” he says. “These things often seem their darkest before a breakthrough. Perhaps you’re closer than you think.”
“Yeah, maybe,” you mutter and drink your water. “…thanks, Barhom.”
“Of course, my princess.” As he escorts you, you hope he’s right. You hope it’s good news.
—
“There’s been a complete reduction in all of the symptoms from before, the weakness, the aches, the exhaustion.” Thankfully, they don’t mention the bedwetting.
“And?” Your mother asks.
“Well, we’ve learned more about the process of combining two distinct strains of mana since last time,” one crafter says.
“And we believe we can speak in more educated terms about the timelines we would be dealing with.” You look between them. They don’t look like they’re about to give you good news.
“Well, what is it? How long is it going to take?” You ask. Somewhere in your stomach, you feel buzzing. From the way they keep looking around, you know you’re not going to like the answer. If this was about to be good news, they would’ve led with it.
“With the doses as diluted as they are and the princess’ mana as undeveloped as it is, we believe it could be….20 or 30 years before she experiences mana synthesis to a level that would allow her to truly harness the Queensblood mana.”
You fall back into your chair. You hear your mother let out a small groan. You just stare at the ground for a moment, unable to believe this. The words knock around the inside of your head like rocks.
20 or 30 years.
“Even with the pure doses she was taking before, it would likely have taken years,” one of the crafters says and your mother seems to at least take that as consolation.
“Then I suppose this is all we can do,” she murmurs, putting a hand on your shoulder. You look up.
“How many years?” You ask. Everybody looks at you.
“Rain…” Your mother starts to say.
“How long would I have to deal with the mana sickness, a year? Two?” She asks. “Come on, how many years!” One of the crafters gives a little shake of hear head.
“My princess, even if we gave you constant infusions, the pure mana would still take a great deal of time, maybe even as much as a decade, and the effects of the mana sickness would set in more severely than they did before within months. You would become frail and dependent on others for everything.”
“And stopping the infusions would not stop the effects, depending on how long you took them,” one of your spellnurses chips in. “Even after just half a year of infusions, it would take at least that much time for the mana sickness to wear off. And that gap would just get bigger and bigger the longer you took them.”
You remember what it felt like, waking up in your own bed, unable to move, unable to do anything but lay there and keep wetting yourself, like some kind of baby. The thought deeply frustrates you.
“Rain, you mustn’t lost heart,” your mother says, although she sounds about as broken up as you do about this ‘20 or 30 years’ business. “This is a new magical art, we’ll figure out something that can help. We just need to be patient.” And after hearing about patience and keeping the faith and eventually so many times, you just. Can’t take it anymore.
“I don’t want to be patient,” you hiss out through your teeth. Your hands ball up into fists and you ineffectually beat them on your own lap. “I don’t want to wait. I want — I want to have your mana, now!”
“Rain.” Your mother’s voice becomes more forceful. “It’s not becoming of someone in your station to desire power so openly,” she scolds. “This is natural, part of being a witch is learning how to wield power before you have it, not after.” On some level, you’re aware that you should calm down. You can’t just force the world to be what you want, you can’t force this situation to be what you want. But the fact that she thinks that’s what this is about burns you up so much, you can’t help but feel even more upset.
You stand up out of your chair, knocking it over.
“I don’t care about power! I don’t care about the mana making me a stronger witch or anything like that!” You exclaim. “I want the Queensblood so that I can be your daughter!”
“What are you saying?” Your mother asks. “You are my daughter!”
“Not as much as I could be!” You shout back.
Things go quiet. Your mother always feels like she’s two steps ahead of everybody else in the room, rarely looks surprised by anything, muchless anything you say. Right now, she looks shocked. For the first time since you’ve met her, she looks like she doesn’t know what to say.
Eventually, the crafters break the silence.
“We are working day and night to try and find a way to speed the process up. Without causing any harm to the princess’ health.”
Your mother takes in a breath.
“Thank you. Thank you, for everything you’re doing,” she says. She then takes you by the shoulder and guides you out of the room, Artemis following you both. You go all the way back to your chamber without saying a word. You just stare at the ground, letting out small, wavering breaths the entire time. A lot of frustration you’ve been feeling for a long time just boiled over, that much is obvious.
Once in your chamber, your mother sits you down on your bed. She sits next to you. Artemis watches your mother for instruction. Your mother nods. Artemis nods back and closes the chamber door, staying inside with the two of you. Then, she turns to you.
“Rain,” she says. You think she wants you to look at her. You can’t do it. She lightly puts a hand under your chin, but doesn’t force you to look. “You know that mana and magic and blood aren’t what made us family.” And you wish you could agree with her, but, well. Your full, unvarnished feelings have been dredged up and you can’t put them back down right now.
“It’s the same thing,” you say. “The tiara. Your mana. They’re not….” You shake your empty hands. You’re struck with the unfortunately familiar feeling of being unable to figure out how to say what you want. “They’re not different things to me!” You sputter out and you know that’s going to be useless.
“What do you mean, Rain?” Your mother asks. “The tiara is gone. You gave it to Giulia, remember?”
“….if I may interject, your grace.”
Artemis takes a step away from the door, hands folded behind her back. Your mother looks at her. You still can’t manage to pull your head up.
“It is my gathering that you two share a different perspective on Princess Rain’s progress. My Queen, you believe that the night she came to us and put on that tiara, Rain ended one journey and her becoming princess was the beginning of something new. One book closed, another opened. My Princess, I believe you feel the opposite. Your life before you came here, putting on the tiara, becoming princess and everything since is all part of one journey to you that you feel is still incomplete. You feel that while you have made progress towards it, you cannot consider yourself to be your truest self until you have the Queen’s blood.”
By the time she’s done, you feel tears forming in your eyes. You nod a few times.
“She’s right,” you say, barely above a whisper. Just bared out like that. You don’t know whether to kiss Artemis or hide under your bed.
“I see…” Your mother murmurs. For the second time tonight, she looks and sounds surprised. Her hand comes off your chin and lightly pulls your head towards her, resting it on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Rain. I didn’t understand.” You turn your head into her and let her pull you close.
“But, my Princess,” Artemis says as she approaches and kneels in front of your bed. “Even if you feel your journey is incomplete. You must not forget all the steps you have taken, all the progress you’ve made. You must not confuse your inability to complete your journey with an inability to keep taking it. You have made great strides and you will make many more before you feel you are truly finished. You can still do things, small things, every day to bring yourself closer to the Queen and bring yourself closer to your truest self. You just need to focus on what you are capable of controlling each day and be glad for what you have achieved.” She reaches a hand out and puts it on your knee. “Every day, I am glad that you came to us in search of that tiara, my Princess.”
“I am as well,” your mother says as she lightly strokes your hair. “I don’t know how many times I’ve thanked Giulia for sending you to me.”
And despite everything, you let out a little scoff.
“You know she didn’t even do it on purpose,” you murmur through your tears. Your mother chuckles fondly and kisses the top of your head.
“Nothing ever truly happens on purpose,” she says. “The best you can hope for is that occasionally, you find something better than what you were hoping for.”
You spend a bit more time with your mother and Artemis. Eventually, they leave. You imagine your mother is going back to her personal study and won’t sleep a wink tonight as she tries to untie the knot that is this mana problem. You eventually try to go to sleep yourself, but you’re too trapped with your own thoughts. Artemis’ words ring in your ears. She exposed your frustration to a depth that even you didn’t fully understand, but she also gave you words you know you should take to heart.
But try as you might, you just can’t shake it.
Eventually you get out of bed and you pull a small box out from under your bed. You open the box. There’s a single folded up piece of paper in it.
You didn’t just take the tiara from the vault. You also opened up that spellbook and flipped through it. You tore a page about mana transferring out and shoved it into your dress, knowing Madris wouldn’t check. You stare at the page for longer than you should.
Once you’ve stopped staring at it, you sneak out of your room.
—
The spellcrafter’s workshop is empty when you enter. You start looking around, opening drawers, checking crates and barrels, peeking into cauldrons. There’s something almost nostalgic about it. It’s almost like the first night you were in the tower, except you might be doing something even more ill-advised than that, this time. Doubt starts to creep in the longer it takes you to find it. If it’s not here, the only other place it could be is your mother’s study and you’ll never be able to sneak in there without her or the Queensguard noticing.
Then, you open a cupboard and you see it. A large ceramic pot filled to the brim with violet, swirling energy. Almost a liquid, almost a gas, almost a solid. Constantly moving and shifting.
This is your mother’s mana. The Queensblood mana. This is what you they’re using to give you the infusions and what they’re studying to try and find more efficient ways to do it. This is what you need.
You lift the pot and set it on the ground. You pull the page out of your dress and look it over once more. You grab a piece of chalk and start drawing the runes in the circle on the ground around you. You check the runes against the page once, twice, three times. Once you’re satisfied you return to the pot and scoop out a small bit of the energy into a vial. You very carefully carry the vial back into the circle with yourself. You draw one more rune on the ground in the center of the circle and then press your hand to it.
The circle lights up, glowing a light red color. So far, so good. You pour half of the contents of the vial onto the rune in the center. The glow changes from red to purple. The remaining energy in the vial turns to smoke and rises up out of the vial, circling around you in several wisps for a few seconds before it sinks into your hands.
You stop and wait for a few seconds. The runes go quiet. You look around. You reach over and grab a small wooden measuring tool from one of the tables and set it on the ground. You flex your hands in and out a couple times. And you try to do something you’ve been struggling to do for a long time now. You try to call on your mana.
A soft violet glow surrounds your left hand. And a purple hand appears in midair. Your eyes get big. You move your own hand downwards. The purple Magic Hand sinks downwards. You make a grabbing motion. The hand grabs the tool. You move your hand up and then open it. The hand moves up and drops the tool back on the table. A huge grin spreads over your face.
It’s not much. It’s just the most basic, rudimentary spell possible, but. It’s enough. It’s enough, for now. Control what you can. You’ve done what you can to control what you can and, you know what? You do feel a little bit closer to your mother right now.
Not that you’re planning to tell her about any of this any time soon.
In fact, you need to start getting rid of the evidence that you did this. You’ll start with cleaning out the vial and erasing the runes. You take a step forward - you wince as you feel a sudden pain in your stomach.
“Ow — aaaaah…!”
You then groan as you feel sudden, intense ache in your head. The two sources of pain are so distracting that you don’t realize you’re still walking….and one of your legs just gave out.
You stumble forward and fall. You see it before you hit it. The giant pot of your mother’s mana.
You try for all your might to lean away from it, to no avail. You smack into it on the way down to the ground, tipping it over and the raw energy immediately starts leaking out of the pot in liquid trails on the ground and wispy smoke through the air. You’re too busy thinking about how completely and totally screwed you are when this is discovered to notice something much much worse than having to explain all of this to your mother.
You don’t notice one of the liquid trails touching the spell circle you drew on the floor. The spell circle that, once you fell over, half of your body is still inside of. You don’t notice it until the runes light up bright purple again.
“Oh, no.”
It happens very quickly after that. All of the mana instantly erupts into swirls of smoke and waves of liquid that spiral through the air for a few seconds, before they all head back towards you. You open your mouth to - you’re not sure, what? Screaming the word ‘no’ repeatedly isn’t going to do much, but it was probably what you were going to go with. You don’t get a word out either way. The mana tendrils hit you like a tidal wave, sinking into your body one after another. Purple light fills your eyes and sparks fly out of your fingers.
For a brief moment, it’s the most powerful you’ve ever felt in your life. A very brief moment, because you fall unconscious almost immediately.
—-
You don’t know how long it’s been when you open your eyes again.
The first thing you see is your mother, who immediately looks relieved that you opened your eyes at all. Then, in real time, you see her expression shift to wanting to throttle you. Your eyes move around. You realize you’re in your bed chamber. You see the spellnurses, Artemis, Madris, your handmaiden. You try to sit up. Your body doesn’t move. You try to open your mouth. A weak noise comes out.
Wasting no time, your mother holds up the page you stole from the vault.
“Rain. Did you try to cast this spell?”
You nod your head. Doesn’t seem to be much point in lying, right now. The Queen closes her eyes briefly, the spellnurses groan and shake their heads.
“You tried to use a spell circle to infuse all of my mana in yourself at once,” your mother murmurs. You want to tell her that’s not what happened. You tried to infuse a small amount of her mana. The rest was by accident. You can’t get the words out. You kind of doubt the distinction matters that much, anyway.
“We need to start making preparations immediately. You two, come with me,” Artemis orders the two spellnurses and they leave the room. Your mother lets out a sigh.
“Rain, you gave yourself the equivalent of hundreds of direct mana infusions all at once,” she says, blunt and simple. Your eyes get big. You hadn’t intended this at all. You were just trying to do one. She has to understand, you just meant to do one. “If we can’t fix this, you’re going to be suffering from permanent mana sickness until your body adjusts.” She holds your hand in one hand and rubs your arm with the other, trying to do anything she can to calm you in a situation that is making you increasingly not calm. “I promise, I’ll do whatever I can to find a way to reverse this. We’ll use whatever medicine we have to mitigate its effects on you.” She squeezes your hand. “We’re going to do everything we can. Just try and stay calm and don’t exert yourself, for now.”
“Uhm, your grace?” Your handmaiden suddenly pipes up. “There is…that one matter.”
“Yes…yes.” The Queen nods. “We should do it now.” The Handmaiden nods and briefly walks away. You can only move your head so much to see where she’s going, but a couple moments later, she comes back holding a tray and a white stack of cloth. You’re not sure what’s going on until you see her starting to fold the cloth up a certain way. You let out a faint noise.
“Sh, shh…” Your mother rubs your head. “It’s okay, Rain. Here.” She hikes up your gown, revealing your bloomers. She slides those down your legs, followed by your underwear. You whimper as your mother lifts your legs up and your handmaiden slides the cloth underneath your bottom. Over your sad objecting noises, the thick bundle of cloth is pinned into place between your legs and around your waist. Then your mother gently places your legs back down on the bed. Madris helps get your clothes the rest of the way off. You lay limply in your mother’s grasp like a doll as she pulls one of your nightgowns over your shoulders and your handmaiden tugs your bloomers back into place over that bundle of cloth.
Over your diapers.
Your whimpering turns into full blown crying as it sinks in that you’ve really gotten yourself in over your head this time. Your mother holds you and whispers comforts to you.
Mercifully, it doesn’t take long for you to fall asleep.
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