Beauty as the Beast
As she cried, her tears fell into the soft fur of the beast’s muscular chest. In so much as she wished that he would come back from death’s embrace to enfold her in his own- he did not. This caused her to weep all the more and she buried her face into the velvet mane around his thick neck.
She shook him with all her might, his massive body barely moving with the greatest of her force, while her pleas for his return echoed across the cavernous expanse of the castle. Her sorrow filled wails caused flocks of flamingos to take flight from the surface of the moat. As her moans died to whimpers the silence of the castle became cumbersome, weighing down the solitude, as if the very stones were in mourning.
Nightfall found Belle in restless slumber, her hands grasping fistfuls of soft fur, eyes rolling rapidly back and forth behind fluttering eyelids, her wails turned to murmurs of dream soaked sadness escaping her lips in unintelligible whimpers. So exhausted in her loss she did not awake to the sound of the soft leather soled boots as they paced slowly in circles around her and the fallen beast of lore.
As he looked down upon the beauty curled in fetal form beside the creature, the alchemist rolled the small red vial back and forth across the palm of his hand.
“Wake child,” said the man as he tapped Belle with the toe of his silver tipped boot.
Through sleep impaired blur and crust of dry tears, Belle woke to the strange man standing above her. His beady eyes and furrowed brow left no doubt in her mind that this man was a master of the citadel. His sharply pointed beard and long flowing white hair were enough to attest to this without the obvious symbols of the guild of alchemists’ adorning the breast of his cloak.
Popping the waxed-in cork from the vile, the master held the vial down to Belle. “Smell it child? It is the fragrance of the very rose that your father picked from my garden!”
“This is your garden?” Belle exclaimed in confusion. “The rose garden belonged to the beast! It is from him that my father took the rose. It, it is why I came here! I came here to repay my father’s debt.” Holding the looking glass out in front of her, Belle showed it to the master. “You see, the mirror tells al-al-al…”
The mirror fell from Belle’s hands broken and useless before it even hit the ground. Her fear was choked off by a tiny shock in her right finger. Grasping at the ring that the beast had given her, the band shimmered, faded, crumbled, and fell in dust in her lap.
“You see Belle, not everything is a fairy tale!” As he spoke, he turned the vial above her head, allowing the contents to spill forth and dribble into Belle’s hair. “The beast was my guardian. He protected my castle; he tended my rose garden, the key to all of my glorious potions and elixirs. You see Belle; this beast let me down! He lost one of my prize roses! He allowed YOU into my house, in to his heart! He betrayed all that I created him to be. Now you shall take his place!”
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