Once upon a time there was a naïve prince. He wasn't even old enough to start thinking about marriage, and yet he had to rule his large kingdom all by himself when his parents passed away. When war started between his kingdom and another due to a misunderstanding, the prince had the power to clear it up and end the war. But the prince, too innocent to recognize his responsibility, preferred to stay in his own little world and let the war rage on.
Act 36: Return to Kinkan Town
(((The Beast Lets Belle Go)))
Rue ran a brush through her black hair while eyeing herself in the long mirror on the wall of the room she and Mytho were sharing.
Gachou had been very lucky to find a tavern had started business just outside of Cygnus, and the tavern's owner had no problem with hosting royalty and allowed them to stay as long as was necessary.
"Rue," Mytho spoke from his spot near the window, "are you…really all right?"
Rue looked at her prince's reflection in the mirror. "Why do you ask?"
"The ravens at the palace…even scared me," Mytho murmured, half to himself and half to her. "I can only imagine how scared you were to see them."
Rue turned to him, her scarlet eyes very serious. "It doesn't matter; I won't let my fear bring you down, ouji. Besides…to be scared of the ravens would be to be scared of who I was, and if that's not a fool's fear, I don't know what is."
Abruptly a knock sounded on the door, before Gachou peeked inside hesitantly.
"Many pardons, your Highnesses…your cardinal has just found us, and he had this tied to his leg."
The attendant held up a scroll of paper. Mytho immediately got up from the window-seat and took it from him.
"Fakir wrote back?" asked Rue, slightly scornful. "It's about time! I was starting to wonder if he'd ever answer."
Then she noticed Mytho looking oddly uneasy as he peered at the scroll of paper.
"This handwriting…it's not Fakir's."
"What?"
"It's not," recurred Mytho. "I know Fakir's handwriting. But who could've…?"
There was a short silence, before Mytho unrolled the letter and read it out loud.
Prince Siegfried and Princess Rue,
We have never met, but know I am a friend to Fakir-chan. Ahiru-chan is in danger and Fakir-chan is wallowing in despair because he feels responsible. Siegfried, I know of your friendship with Fakir-chan; you might be one of the few people that could help him right now. As for you, Rue, I know you were friends with Ahiru-chan and you never leave Siegfried's side, so I presume I shall see you in Kinkan as well.
Please come quickly.
Madame Ruza
"Madame Ruza?" Rue repeated, half worried and half suspicious. "Mytho…do you think she's telling the truth? That Ahiru's in danger?"
"I don't know, Rue," Mytho replied, "but if we don't go, the consequences likely will be far worse than if we do, so for now, we have to trust that she is."
He then turned to Gachou and added, "Prepare the carriage with swans; Rue and I must return to Kinkan Town as soon as possible."
Mytho looked down from his spot in the flying gold carriage he and Rue had last used departing from Kinkan Town, feeling an odd combination of happiness at returning to his old home and worry toward what may meet them.
"Should we check the Academy?" Rue asked Mytho.
Mytho shook his head. "If I know Fakir, he wouldn't want to be split between ballet and writing. Studying ballet would give him no time to write."
His grip tightened around the reins of the swans leading the gold carriage, and moved them in the direction of Charon's antique shop. As they began to descend, however, something outside the shop caught the prince's eye.
"Another carriage?" Mytho murmured.
The Cygnus carriage landed with a gentle thump on the ground beside the other white, horse-drawn carriage. Mytho disembarked, before offering Rue a hand out. Just as Rue stepped out, the other carriage door opened and two royal-garbed strangers stepped out.
The male of the two had semi-long light brown hair, gray eyes and a four-claw-marked scar on his left cheek, and was dressed in a crown with silver engravings etched on the gold, a puffy-sleeved dark blue tunic with a robin adorning the shoulder and brown pants and shoes.
The young woman accompanying the man had short chocolate brown hair, purple eyes and a serious burn across her neck and down her left shoulder, and was dressed in an amethyst-decked gold tiara, a purple gown with a wide skirt and shoulder-length puffy sleeves and gold slippers.
As if sensing their gaze, the two strangers turned to Mytho and Rue.
"Hello," the man said formally. "May I ask as to your business with Fakir-san?"
"You know Fakir?" inquired Rue.
"He has helped us so much we'll never be able to fully repay him," the young woman answered for him. "Are you friends of his?"
"Yes," replied Mytho. "Fakir has helped us as well, as has Tutu."
"Tutu?" the man repeated, confused, before his expression cleared. "Ah, you mean Ahiru-san! Yes, she has as well."
"Ahiru?" recurred Mytho, frowning. "No, I mean-"
"Ahiru was Tutu," Rue explained to him.
Mytho looked disbelieving. "She was?"
Rue nodded. Mytho's amber eyes widened.
"Why didn't she say anything?"
"Well, would you have in her situation?" scoffed Rue. "Ahiru was a duck, and a horrible dancer when human…and all you saw of her was Princess Tutu."
Mytho stared at Rue, before he nodded in understanding. "Perhaps it was better that way. If I'd known Ahiru was Tutu as a raven, I could've hurt her."
The strangers didn't understand what was going on, but still smiled at the two.
"I am Prince Helios," the man introduced himself, before gesturing to the young woman, "and this is my princess, Demi."
"I'm Prince Siegfried," Mytho replied, "but you may call me Mytho…and this is Rue, my princess."
"You're the prince from The Prince and the Raven," Helios realized, smiling. "Fakir-san spoke of you. It is an honor to make your acquaintance."
"You're here to help Fakir," Rue murmured. "Then do you know a 'Madame Ruza?'She's the one who wrote to us saying Ahiru and Fakir were in trouble."
"Madame Ruza is a friend of ours," Demi answered. "She wrote to us as well…did she say anything to you about what happened to Ahiru-chan?"
Rue shook her head. Worry came to both Demi and Helios's faces.
"Well then," Mytho stated determinedly as he moved to the door of Charon's shop, "we need to find Fakir and have him tell us what happened."
He knocked on the door firmly. After a moment, the door opened to reveal the light-brown-haired, dark-eyed, middle-aged man known as Charon.
"Mytho!" he recognized the young man he had adopted as his second son after Fakir had found him as a boy.
"It's good to see you again, Charon," Mytho said with a smile, before turning serious. "Is Fakir here?"
Charon looked somber. "Yes…he's been up in his room for hours. He went up to his room after breakfast, and then around late morning he ran outside as if he'd just finished his life's work…but when he returned…I don't know what happened…but Fakir's eyes were so empty. He stumbled in here like he was the living dead walking abroad. He didn't look at me, even when I tried asking him what was wrong…he went back up to his room and stayed there."
"Have you seen Ahiru?" asked Rue, trying to keep her voice steady.
"Ahiru?" recurred Charon, thinking. "Now that I think on it, not since she left for the lake this morning…and that's very strange. She's always with Fakir."
Mytho, Rue, Helios and Demi each brushed pass Charon into the shop and then upstairs toward Fakir's room.
Mytho was the first to get to the door and tried opening it, to find it locked.
"Fakir! Fakir, it's me, Mytho!"
There was a rustling noise from inside, but no vocal answer.
"Fakir-sama?" Demi called, knocking gently. "It's Demi! Please open the door!"
Still Fakir didn't answer.
"For crying out loud," snapped Rue, moving past Mytho and Demi to the door.
She brought her hand up to reveal a raven feather between her point and middle fingers. She moved the feather between the door and the doorway and forced it in a sharp downward movement so that it sliced the door's lock in half.
"Rue?" Mytho said in surprise.
Rue shrugged in dull dolor. "Being a raven teaches you a few tricks."
She sighed, before pushing the door open.
Fakir's room was completely trashed, as if the writer had been so angry with himself that he had decided to take it out on his innocent room. His bed covers were disheveled, scraps of paper and broken inkpots littered the floor and the curtains were drawn messily over the windows to block sunlight from entering.
As for the writer himself, he practically lay across his desk, his arm stretched out across it toward the quill at the end of the table as if he'd only just let go of it and his face lifeless as if he had gotten severely drunk.
Mytho went over to him and put his hands on his shoulders, shaking him lightly.
"Fakir? Fakir, are you all right?"
Fakir looked up at Mytho with a very dead expression.
"Mytho, what…what are you doing here?" he rasped.
"That's exactly the question I want to ask!" Mytho answered worriedly. "Fakir, what did you do to your room? Where's Tutu?"
Fakir's head shot up at him, his emerald eyes as wide and blank as they had been when Ahiru had said she knew he could write stories that came true.
"You…know?"
"Madame Ruza wrote to us and said Ahiru-chan was in trouble," explicated Demi, her voice also filled with worry.
"Damn that meddlesome Ruza," Fakir muttered, his eyes falling to the floor and narrowing, before sighing deeply and continuing. "Yes, it's my fault…it's my fault that she's gone, probably hurt or worse…"
"But why, Fakir-san?" Helios inquired. "What happened to Ahiru-san?"
"I…I was just trying to write about her," Fakir murmured, sounding like he was barely answering Helios's question and instead thinking out loud. "She gave us everything…both as Tutu and as a seemingly useless duck…and I'm such a baka that I decided to start her story from scratch!"
Both Demi and Mytho gasped in horror.
"You what?" Rue whispered, both disbelieving and furious.
"I put my desires first and forgot all about the consequences!" Fakir growled at himself in furious anguish, slamming his fist against his desk. "And now…and now I've lost her forever!"
There was a silence. Rue at first looked ready to murder Fakir, before she moved toward him, her face extremely white.
"Yes, you have."
"Rue!" Mytho reproved, surprised by her words.
"It's true," Rue stated, her red eyes vehement. "You have lost her, Fakir. You have lost her, because you're not bothering to help her!"
Fakir looked up at her, his eyes again dangerously blank. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that you're pathetic," Rue retorted, becoming angrier with every word. "Ahiru's in danger, and all you can do is feel sorry for yourself! Ahiru never sat by and decided she could do nothing when any of us were in danger! I thought you were determined to not be a useless knight, so get up, stop being useless and do something to help Ahiru!"
Fakir stared at Rue for a very long time.
"A dreamer cannot influence reality until he decides to move out of his fantasy."
The group turned to the violet-haired, brown-eyed witch called Madame Ruza as she stepped out of the doorway toward Fakir.
"So young writer, what will it be? Wake up to reality, or dream uselessly?"
Fakir peered at her sourly for a moment.
"I hate you," he muttered.
After a pause, however, he finished, "But…thanks."
"It's what I do," Madame Ruza replied, smiling. "Now write a path to her."
Fakir reached across his desk to grab his quill, nodding firmly, before dipping the quill in a new inkbottle and starting to write.
"'Once upon a time…there was a duck who was captured by an eagle. A writer…a friend of the duck…vowed to rescue her…and created a portal…so that he and his companions could follow the duck and her eagle captor.'"
"QUACK!" Ahiru cried when the woods and Fakir vanished as the portal closed.
She squirmed in the eagle's claws, quacking in both anger and beseeching.
'Let go of me, you weird eagle! Where are you taking me? Let me go!'
Ahiru looked down and suddenly wished she hadn't told the eagle to drop her; she was very high in the air indeed. As she looked down, though, she noticed the setting the eagle was flying over was nothing near Kinkan Town.
It was a lake that looked a bit like the one Ahiru often swam around while Fakir wrote stories. This lake, however, was covered in an ominous fog and was surrounded by thick trees creating a forest that seemed to meld into the never-ending darkness of the unknown.
'It…looks just like the lake in my dreams!' Ahiru thought. 'Have I…been here before?'
The eagle holding her cried out as if calling for someone and, to Ahiru's surprise, birds in trees around the lake made themselves known with their own calls.
'They sound…happy,' Ahiru thought, before suddenly panicking. 'Ah! What if they're happy with having duck for dinner?'
"Qua!" she cried fretfully. "Quack-qua quack!"
The surrounding birds rose from their places on tree branches and flew to rest on the lake's surface. Now that they were no longer hidden by the trees' shadows, Ahiru could see they were a blue jay, a blackbird, a snowy owl and a hawk.
The eagle flew down onto the lake with them, and Ahiru squirmed even more as her feet began to sink into the water, quacking loudly out of the fear that the eagle was trying to drown her. She stopped, however, when the eagle gave a reproachful cry in her direction as if to tell her to be quiet and as the eagle gave its cry, Ahiru found herself bathed in moonlight.
She looked up at the full moon that had just found its place above them, and then around at the birds that had closed their eyes as if praying.
Ahiru felt the eagle's claw release her. She would've run, but a strange feeling had washed over her when the moonlight touched her, and she suddenly felt the odd sensation of growing that she had felt in her dreams with Fakir.
As suddenly as the moonlight had focused an almost spotlight on Ahiru and the other birds, it had returned to simply glowing around the lake.
Ahiru peered at her reflection in the lake and gave a surprised "QUACK!"
She was human.
She wore the same light yellow, wide-skirted dress and white wing pendant she had in her more recent dreams and her hair was tied up in an elegant bun. All that was different in her human form were the two large, bright yellow wings blossoming from her back that made her look like a duck-winged angel.
'W-what?' Ahiru wondered, fingering the yellow feathers. 'Why do I have wings?'
"Finally!"
Ahiru was thrown off balance as someone practically pounced on her, shouting at the top of his lungs in unadulterated excitement.
"Gracias Dios, you found her! I knew you would do it! I knew she was alive! Didn't I tell you all? I knew chibi hime was all right somewhere!"
"Octahobka!" snapped another man. "Do you want to scare her half to death?"
The grip around Ahiru left, and the girl turned toward the sources of the voices, to see five men where the five birds had been on the surface of the lake.
Where the blue jay had sat now stood a teenage man with curly cobalt hair, sky blue eyes, a Spanish tan and blue-jay-like wings dressed in a puffy-sleeved white shirt under a blue vest, black pants, gray tap shoes and a black Flamenco hat.
Where the blackbird had sat now stood a male teenager with long black-brown hair, black eyes, an Arabian tan and blackbird-like wings dressed in a black shirt with loose see-through sleeves, black harem pants and gold pointed-toe slippers.
Where the owl had sat now stood an old yet healthful man with white hair and a beard, piercing yellow eyes under gold glasses and snowy owl wings dressed in a black-speckled white shirt, white velvet pants and white ballet shoes.
Where the hawk had sat now stood a young man with dark gray hair, thin-lidded orange eyes and hawkish wings dressed in an orange and brown patterned Chinese kimono, dark gold pants and matching toe shoes.
And when Ahiru turned to the eagle that had grabbed her, she instead found a man with blond hair, brown eyes and eagle wings dressed in a over-sized brown shirt, bronze pants tucked into brown boots and a furry Russian-styled hat.
"Who…who are you?" Ahiru stammered, looking at each of the strangers nervously. "Where am I? W-what's this all about?"
The young men all looked alarmed. The most alarmed, however, was the blue-haired Spanish man that had jumped on her earlier.
"Chibi hime, it's us!" he implored Ahiru desperately. "Don't you remember anything? Us…Cygnus…the ravens…don't you remember?"
Ahiru wasn't sure how to reply. The man who had been the eagle looked ready to grab her shoulders and shake her, but the old man held up a hand to stop him.
"No…I had thought this might happen. Escaping into the outside world and living as a duck for so long has caused her memories to corrode."
'Memories?' Ahiru repeated inwardly. 'Outside world? What's he talking about?'
The old man stepped toward the duck-turned-girl, his yellow eyes solemn.
"We'll have to help her memory reawaken…gentlemen, aid me your memories."
The men all raised a hand toward Ahiru, and before she knew what was happening, white light shot from each of their hands, blinding her.
I'm afraid that is all for today. Is a fun story awaiting us? A sad story? Or maybe…?
Translation Notes:
"Gracias Dios" - "Thank God" in Spanish
"Octahobka" - "Stop" in Russian
Music Notes:
"The Beast Lets Belle Go": starts when Rue opens the door to Fakir's room. Fakir's eyes widen at 0:22, before he whispers, "You…know?" Helios questions Fakir at 0:35, and Fakir finally bursts out that he started Ahiru's story again at the crescendo before 0:50, upon which Demi, Mytho and Rue react. Fakir shouts that he has lost Ahiru forever at 1:03. The group turns to Madame Ruza at 1:51 and Ruza starts her "so what will it be…?" phrase at 1:53. Fakir says, "I hate you," right before 2:5, and the piece ends as Fakir sits down to write a path to Ahiru.
"Coda": starts as Ahiru's quacking at the eagle to "let her go" ends. The birds in the trees call at 0:14, and the piece ends at 0:25.
The piece "The Beast Lets Belle Go" is from the "Beauty and the Beast" original motion picture soundtrack.
The piece "Coda" is by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and featured in his ballet "The Nutcracker."