Once Upon A Time
Once upon a time (for that is how all stories must start) there was a king and a queen. The king was handsome and rich, the queen beautiful and charismatic, and they ruled over their kingdom with dinner parties and balls and they sat on thrones made of glittering glass and they were content.
But they needed heirs, heirs to expand their fortune and rule their kingdom when they were gone; heirs to be proud of, heirs that those of other, lesser monarchs and nobility would envy.
And so the queen had a son, a prince who was brilliant and handsome. He would be king when his father was gone, and he would rule their kingdom with his white-gloved hands and carry a scepter made of silver and thread, healing and helping and holding the world together with his meticulous stitches.
He was destined for greatness, that prince. He was going places, becoming someone. The king and queen showcased him, paraded him in front of their court.
Look at our son, see how smart he is.
He wanted for nothing, led the perfect life, and they loved him, him and his mind and his hands, those hands that would grant them access to more riches, more lands, more subjects.
But the prince was lonely, achingly lonely. Being prince was a solitary job; surrounded by people at all times, he was forever alone.
And so they had a princess, a girl who would rule their subjects while the prince was busy attending to other matters. And the princess was beautiful, like her mother, and as brilliant as her brother.
But her brilliance couldn't be matched or contained or controlled; her mind was a raging river of light spilling over the banks and rushing over paper and pen and printed word, absorbing the knowledge caught between pressed pages.
The prince was content with his lot in life, happy to help and heal and work. The princess broke through the walls of rules and stretched to the sun, questioning and wondering and throwing off the shackles they tried to tie to her feet.
So the king and queen focused on their prince and left the princess on her shelf, pushed to the back of living memory and left to her own devices until a match could be made to spirit her far away.
But the prince loved the princess, and the princess loved the prince, and they were each other's family, the best of friends and the closest of siblings. Together, they were happy.
One read and studied and his hands became nimble and quick as he worked. The other sang and danced and her feet developed minds of their own as she whirled through her life.
One was a bird, the other a tree. Somber grays and crisp whites, brilliant shades of pink and yellow and blue. The sun and the moon, summer and winter, the ocean and the black.
They revolved around each other, flint hitting match and exploding in fireworks that painted the sky in a dazzling sunset that lit the clouds on fire and soaked the water of the lake.
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Once upon a time, the prince left the castle to seek his fortune in neighboring kingdoms, putting his skilled hands to work sewing and fixing and patching people up, smoothing down their clothes and adjusting their bandages and keeping them whole.
And the king and queen were happy, watched as he became known far and wide, and nodded to themselves in approval.
But the princess was sad, for without her brother her life was empty and colorless, and the music lost its beauty. She slept in his old bedroom, curled up in a bed that had long since lost his scent.
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Once upon a time there was a tower, a tower tall and white and gleaming, with a dragon wrapped around like ivy. And the princess saw the tower and fell in love, and the king and queen were all too willing to send her, all too willing to send her up in that tall white tower with the dragon wrapped around.
Only the prince wanted her to stay, but he was young and free to reach for his own destiny, far away from their castle, and she was just so tired of being alone.
So she went to the tower, that tall white gleaming tower, and the music swelled and the fireworks came back to the sky and she was so alive, so free, and she danced until her feet ached and her head was spinning and still she danced, and she danced with the precision of a scientist and the passion of an artist.
And she failed to realize that the dragon, oh that dragon, with it's icy blue skin and teeth of jagged metal and eyes the color of blood, she failed to realize that the dragon was not there to keep the world out, but her in.
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Once upon a time storm clouds covered the sky and the rain poured down in never-ending curtains and the thorns grew around the tower in an impenetrable forest.
And the dragon ripped at her with its teeth until she was nothing but an empty husk, robbed of her music, her brilliant mind shattered on the floor, the light polluted by ribbons of shadow that curled through her, poisoning all that was good.
And now she wore inky black and sterilized white and crimson blood stained her hands and her clothes and her soul.
There were no more fireworks, no more flying or dancing or singing. This time the shackles were not made of societal rules but cold iron that bit into her skin and left red sores when she struggled.
Summer vanished, leaving only a trace of a warm breeze to whisper around the mangled edges of her brain, and snow ten feet deep and colder than ice buried her under its frigid fingers, trailing patterns of blue over her skin and anchoring barbs of stainless steel beneath skin worn brittle from cold.
The ocean closed over her head and shoved her down and the black swallowed her whole and she floundered in a place where the laws of gravity were all too false and the laws of breathing all too real.
And she screamed with her last breath for her brother, and knew he would not hear.
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Once upon a time, once upon a time…
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She knows this story, although the players are all mixed up; once she was a princess, and the wicked dragon was jealous and turned her into a swan, cursed to wander the earth. But the prince found out and followed her, through boiling summer and frigid winter, across wild seas and through burning desert. He found her, but he couldn't help her (nobody could).
So he went to the witch, the witch of gleaming tiles and cold metal chairs, and he learned of the spell, and saw what the dragon had wrought, and his tears showered the earth and thistles grew.
And he gathered the thistles and spun them into a needle, a needle to end the spell. And although the spikes cut his hands and he could not eat, could not sleep, until it was complete, still he sewed on, even though his sister the swan was gone, and he had no promise of her return.
And then happiness came in the form of an engine grease-streaked girl, and promised to carry him away; away from the thistles and the pain and the sister that never returned. But still he sewed on, still he continued, and happiness left and the dragon closed in.
And then his sister returned, with the dragon close behind, and he rose and, although it was still unfinished, he gave her the medicine, injected by that needle he toiled over for years, and they fled together, until he found a cave.
And there he realized that his sister, while back, still had the wing of a swan instead of a right arm (for the needle had not been finished properly).
But regardless he loved her, and together they rejoined Happiness and her kingdom, and the prince became a king (although he was forever and always her prince).
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Once upon a time there was a princess with the body of a girl and the right wing of a swan.
The girl was happy and safe and home. And her brother the prince was even happier, and the princess saw that and all was right with her world.
The princess had been a swan for so long she had almost forgotten how to be a girl. She had only bits of memories scored on the tattered cloth that once was her life, bits that she had managed to save when the dragon started its Such Good Work.
She had clung to them under the claws and the snow and the ocean and the black. They were shredded and brittle and running in places from the water, stained in places from the black (but once she too was broken and smeared and stained, and so she had hope).
Most of the pieces spoke of dancing, spoke of music, spoke of light and laughter and beauty.
Dancing. She rolled the word around her mouth, let the soft velvet of its sound and the glow and warmth of its fire sink into her soul, let her hope that what she had lost could be reclaimed.
When she was a swan she had flown, and although she had been scared and shattered and in pain she still remembered the feeling of flying, of the air rippling through her feathers and the sight of the world laid out below her in a patchwork of dark spiky greens and shimmering blues and rugged gray stone and the golden flow of wheat.
Flying is a lot like dancing, she thought, and the hope she felt robbed her of her breath and left her staring out the window at the roses below with a smile on her face.
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Once upon a time, the princess began to dance once more, surrendering herself to the glittering silver and deep burgundy and luminous brown that made up the melody of the 'verse.
But the arm that was a wing hampered her, left her stranded between worlds; without her arms she could fly, without her wings she could dance, and with one of each she could do neither.
She struggled to dance, to fly, to do something, but oil and water slipped off each other time and time again until she was left floundering, struggling to keep her footing in two separate worlds as the ground shifted beneath her feet.
The music held no comfort now that she could not dance, the sky was empty and bleak above her head, and the birds flew through the air where she could not follow.
And the feathers on her arm spread, and she was spilt, half swan half princess all broken. And her brother saw the feathers coming, saw how she was struggling, shedding scraps of cloth and bloodied feathers and came running, doctor hands outstretched.
But he was too late, too slow, and his skilled hands hung at his sides as he watched her struggle, fighting the call of the music and the pull of the sky and the darkness that had hidden in the light and come crawling out in a stream of bitter acid.
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Once upon a time, there was a girl, and a scalpel, and a bloodstain. And that, boys and girls, is how the story must end.