When they returned to the cottage they found the old woman, lips pulled back in vicious triumph, eyes glowing shallowly with blind malice, crooked figure stooped gloatingly over the prone girl. In their fury they chased the witch through the ancient forest and pelted her shrieking form with stones until she slipped and fell down a hidden precipice. Satisfied by the scarlet ribbons that leaked from her crushed body they returned home once more, only to find the girl still and pale; raven hair, ruby lips, and a crimson apple, garish against her luminescent cheeks.
Sorrowfully they built a glass coffin and carried her to a glade filled with rusty leaves and flickering candles. She lay, preserved in her glass chrysalis, inert spectacle of near death, as if displayed in a gallery. She remained, encased in this liquid cocoon for many years, and her keepers grew old and stooped, but she lay untouched by time and elements until a prince passed through the clearing and fell in love with the immobile form. He tried to steal the body away from her faithful guardians but in the fight the glass case crashed to the ground, shattering into a thousand glittering slivers. Her white eyes flew open in fearful amazement; mouth wide in a silent scream as the air attacked her.
Her skin became chalky and drew back into her skull; bones protruding as withered flesh fell away. Blind eyes melted into nothing and black hollows glared terribly from her ruined face. Lips shrank back, her teeth protruding in a parody of death: time avenging what it had lost. Her throat quivered, and an apple pip, stuck fast in her trachea, rumbled to life, issuing forth inquisitive tendrils. They poked through the empty eye sockets, probing the air with greedy growth and surging from between her teeth in a visible scream. Blood poured from her mouth in great rivets, running into the earth with deliberate gravity and soaking her skeletal corpse.
The prince ran screaming from the half-life apparition and the dwarves fell back in horror as a great apple tree erupted from her oral cavity, its roots tearing through the skin between her ribs. The tree-corpse rooted itself into the blood soaked dirt in the centre if the chapel-like clearing, the twisted trunk enveloping her body in comforting brown darkness. Now the huge tree dominates the glade, flowering with blossoms of purest white that glow against the mahogany branches. The tree is always in bloom and fruits huge crimson apples. The dwarves go to the clearing and pick the livid fruits, crunching into their soft white flesh.
A/N This was so much fun to write, and because it's so short the challenge was to cram as much descriptive prose in as was decent so if you think it's a little baroque then THANK YOU that was the aim! I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing!
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