Once Upon a Time
@rosemourn
This couldn’t be happening, this sort of thing didn’t happen in the real world. This was the sort of tale that would be spun in one of her twice-read books that she had borrowed from the lonely little shelf in town. Belle’s father had returned home wide eyed and terrified, speaking of a beast in the woods who lived in an enchanted castle. He spoke of magic within the very walls of the palace and a beautiful rose garden she could only dream to behold, one that had apparently been his undoing. She blamed herself, it was her own doing really.
She had asked for a single rose from the market he would be presenting his music box at, it was all she ever asked for. Other girls of her age would ask for jewelry or fine silks but Belle was a very simple girl, one who understood they could not afford such luxury. Besides, Belle loved roses. They reminded her of her late mother, mostly because her father kept a painting in their house of her mother holding her as a baby that contained a single red rose.
It was the only time she had ever seen her mother’s face, but she felt her near every time her father brought her home a rose. Each time the roses would begin to wilt she would pluck the petals and let them dry before pressing them into the pages of an empty notebook she kept in her room, one she never had the heart to write in for fear of running out of room for future flowers. So she kept it only for flower petals, and only for roses for that matter. And when he missed her mother the most or she was her most sad, she would look at them before bed. Before her father had left for the market she had asked him for just one thing to know about her mother, though she knew it pained him to speak of her.
‘Your mother was...fearless. Absolutely...fearless.’
She wanted to be just like her mother, beautiful and wild and fearless.
That was the thought she held onto when she fought with her father about who would return to the castle of the beast he claimed to have met in the woods. He told her that the monster had only freed him with the promise that either he would return to the castle as his prisoner or that Belle would return and take his place, though he hoped for the latter. And as she turned the stem of the rose he had been allowed to bring home over and over again in her hand while avoiding the thorns, she thought only of what her mother would do. Her mother would be absolutely fearless.
So, she agreed to spend one last night with her father, allowing him to believe that she would respect his wishes and stay in the village. If she did that she would be alone and have no choice but to marry Gaston in order to continue on living, he had only just told her what happened to girls like her when they lost their fathers, and she didn’t want to prove him right. So she let her father believe that he would return to the castle the next morning, making his favorite dinner for him and spending the evening together as a way of saying goodbye. It hurt to lie to him, but it would hurt more to send him back to whatever creature had done this to their family.
She had sent her father off to bed and had promised she would see him in the morning to send him off back to the woods, surprised that he hadn’t noticed she had hugged him extra tight before he went to sleep. She had gone to her room and found the only bag she owned tucked away under her bed, filling it with the book she filled with rose petals, the book she had been allowed to keep from the town collection only a few days before, a sketch book that had been a gift from her father and a few drawing pencils. She had very few things to her name, this was about all she had.
She took one last look at her childhood home before going outside to find her father’s horse, climbing on his back quietly and patting his neck. “Come on old friend...let’s go,” she said, taking a deep breath as the horse headed out of the town she had always known in order to head to a place she wasn’t altogether sure she was ready for. Her last look at the town left her feeling oddly empty, knowing she had never belonged there in the first place but highly doubting she would belong in her next home either. Belle highly doubted she belonged anywhere.
As her horse seemed to follow an invisible trail through the woods she found herself wondering what horrors lay before her. What sort of beast had done this to her family? What sort of creature was he? Why did he want so dearly to part her from her father in one way or another in the name of a simple flower? She feared the worst, an anger building up in her stomach towards whatever man or myth had done this to her and to her father. She held resentment in her heart after the almost endless journey finally came to a halt, her father’s horse slowing after entering the gates of what looked to be a forgotten palace. She didn’t know what would be a worse outcome, to find that her father was telling the truth and that a beast lived inside this castle or that her father had gone mad and none of it was real. But judging by the way her horse seemed to come to a full stop now that they were here, she feared the former more than the latter.
She patted Phillipe on the neck and kept still as he wandered towards a stable on the side of the castle, deciding it best to go inside now rather than wait until morning with Phillipe. What did this beast want with her? To lock her up like a play thing? To eat her? To kill her? She had no idea, but she promised herself that she would make her mother proud and walk into the unknown with a bravery such as she had never known before. Absolutely fearless.
She made her way back towards the front of the castle after getting Phillipe settled, holding her hood over her face to keep her skin protected from the chill in the air, slowly making her way up the steps to the front door, swallowing thickly as she got there. She didn’t bother to knock, simply pushing the door open and letting herself in, the inside looking even more so abandoned than the outside. What was she to say? Hello? She felt silly almost, this castle looked like no one had lived in it for centuries.
“Hello?” she called, feeling silly and like she was talking to no one, though she lowered her hood. Why hadn’t she found a weapon to bring so she might protect herself? Did she even know where one was back in the village in order to have brought it? “I came like you wanted...to offer myself in my father’s stead. If you can hear me...come out,” she said, trying to sound as firm as possible, though she couldn’t help the uneasiness within her.
