This is basically part 2 of chapter 12, and as you can probably tell (or will be able to tell soon), chapter 12 would indeed have been far too long combined. So yeah.

This is also the exciting chapter everyone's been waiting for- Imogene at last! Now that I've gotten you excited, I'll let you read.

Chapter 13: The Library

The winter months came on slowly, bringing first a slight chill into the air, then frost, and finally snowfall. It wasn't long before fierce winter winds whipped the castle windows and snow piled outdoors.

Cecelia was cold. Although each night she stoked up a mighty fire in the grate in her room, by morning it had died down and the room was cold as ice. Often her hands were too numb for her to start another fire. She spent her days wrapped in heavy velvet curtains she had pulled down in her room. She hadn't planned on staying so long, and so she was unprepared for winter. She wondered occasionally whether she shouldn't go home and take her heavy cloak and her boots and check on her father. His arthritis would bother him sorely, and alone in that house with no one to care for him- she didn't want to think about that. Surely Miranda and Freddy would take him in. When she was younger they had often stayed at the inn in the winter. Of course, once Cece could care for herself and her father on her own, they had remained at their own cottage. But surely her father would remember to go back to the inn?

Thinking this, Cece wandered the halls as she often did. She came quite suddenly upon the library one day near midwinter. The large door at the end of the wide hallway startled her. Never before had she seen it, not even in her dreams of the castle. The novelty of it inspired her to enter.

The room itself was huge, lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, and surprisingly clean. Cece was fairly sure she had never been in here before, and yet no small puffs of dust rose from the carpet under her steps, no spiderwebs hung in the corners, and dust was minimal, as though the room had been cleaned within the week. As she walked further in she noticed the large bookshelves between the windows, so high a ladder ran on a silver bar all around the room.

"Amazing," she breathed.

"It is, isn't it?" a voice said from behind her. She whirled to see the Beast lying beside the fireplace.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she said hastily. "I didn't realize you were here. I'll go."

"No need," the Beast said, uncharacteristically amiable. "I'm hardly doing anything private."

"But this is your- your place, isn't it?" Cece asked.

"My what?" He sounded confused.

"Your place. It sounds strange, I know, but it's a place where-" she faltered and stopped, trying to think where to begin. She took a deep breath and began again. "Back home, I mean, I had my own room and everything, but when I really wanted to go somewhere no one would disturb me, where I could just think and be alone, I would go somewhere else. Not far- just outside of town there was this hill. And that was my place."

The Beast looked at her strangely, then nodded. "Yes," he said. "This is my place, I suppose."

"So I'll leave you to it, then," Cece said, trying to slip out unobtrusively.

"To what?"

"Thinking."

"No, stay. I don't mind." Cece noticed a slight tone of desperate loneliness in his voice, and so decided to stay. She moved toward him and sat.

"How is this room so clean?" she asked. He shot her a look, and she shrugged. "I never said I'd be quiet. I want to know."

He let out a deep sigh. "I clean it myself. It's the only room I care for enough to."

"It's quite beautiful."

"It's nothing. A true library wouldn't have such windows. The windows would be bookshelves. All of this would be bookshelves. The king's castle has a library a dozen times the size of this. I never cared enough for books before, and therefore I have only this paltry collection. I can't even read them."

"You don't know how?" Cece was surprised. He struck her as educated.

"No. I lack the fine motor control involved in reading. If you had any idea how often I've wanted to read these books, just for something to do…" he trailed off.

"I wish I could help."

Now it was the Beast's turn to be surprised. "Surely you know how to read?"

"I've never learned. Until I came here, I was blind. I never thought to read."

"Blind? How?"

"Don't tell me you haven't noticed?"

"Unfortunately my sight is not quite as good as a- as it was before. I cannot tell whether you are blind or not."

"I was born blind. No, worse. I was born with glass eyes. I've been marked as a freak, as strange, all my life. There've been very few who treat me as though I'm normal."

"I'm very sorry."

Although the words "It's not your fault," were on her tongue, she couldn't force herself to say them. She knew it was indeed his fault. He had caused the curse that poisoned her mother and in turn Cece herself.

"I wish," she said instead, "I could tell you it wasn't your fault. But it was. My mother was trapped partially in your curse. She was pregnant with me at the time. Her hand turned to glass. And the rest of her followed suit. I was born only just in time to be human, but even then, as you can tell, I am not fully human."

"How did your mother come to be involved in my curse? I thought you were noble. None of the nobility ever came near my castle."

"Except the princess herself," Cece said quietly.

"Yes," the Beast all-but-whispered. "Except the princess."

No one spoke until finally the Beast said, "But how did your mother end up cursed?"

"She was just outside," Cece hedged, not really wanting to answer. "She had her hand on the gate when the curse broke over the castle. It was just her hand. Then it spread."

"That wasn't my question."

"That was my answer."

After a moment, Cece asked the Beast a question. "How did you come to be cursed? Surely it wasn't just for impregnating another noble, because otherwise there would be many more Beasts running rampant in the country."

"I can't," he said.

"What?"

"I can't run rampant. I can't leave the castle."

"How did you find that out?"

"Imogene." He refused to say more.

"That was the princess's name?" Cece asked cautiously.

"Yes," said the Beast, and he rose and went to the window to watch the swirling flurries outside.

"I'm leaving, damn it!" Imogene screamed. "I can't take this life. I can't stand being locked in this horrid castle with only you for company!"

"You can't! Imogene, no, don't leave!" the Beast cried desperately.

It was their first winter as monsters and the castle was torture. Imogene had sat listlessly for months after the curse, refusing to move, eating little, too numb to care. Then, with the heavy onslaught of fall, she had changed. She had become angry, angry at the Beast, angry at herself, angry at her father, angry at God himself. The Beast had woken, terrified, the night she had come back alive. A sudden roar had risen from the direction of her bedroom, along with the sounds of breaking china and ripping cloth. Wisely, he had remained in his chamber, although, unable to sleep, he paced anxiously. The next morning, when her rage had died down, he had gone in to her, and the first of many arguments had begun.

And it all comes down to this, he thought grimly. Imogene leaving me for the cold world outside. After everything.

"I'm going! I don't give a damn what you think might happen. Anything would be better than this!" Imogene continued to vent as she stormed toward the door. When it banged open, a cold blast of wind blew flurries onto the floor of the entrance hall. The Beast noticed this only idly as he raced out into the snow after Imogene.

"Imogene, stop! Wait!" he panted.

She whirled to face him. Perhaps the anguish in his voice had gotten to her. "What?" she asked. "What more could you possibly have to say to me?"

"You could be killed. An enormous beast roaming the countryside? Hunters will come after you. You could die."

"That would be so much better than this life. Anything would be better than this life."

"But it would kill me, Imogene."

"Oh, God. How can you even say that? How can you even expect me to believe that, now? After everything? You ruined me. You ruined yourself, you've ruined everyone in the castle, you've probably ruined our son. And you stand there and tell me it would kill you if I died? How can you say such a thing?"

She turned and ran through the gate into the outside world.

"What happened?" Cece asked him, tentatively laying a hand on his back.

"We fought. She left the castle in a rage. But the next morning she was back, and she was different."

"What do you mean?"

"She wouldn't eat. She was listless again, like she had been at first. At first I thought it was just the depression again, the depression she'd had for the first few months. But even then she ate. Now all she did was sleep. When she died, she was so thin…she weighed almost nothing. I knew it was the leaving that killed her."

"I'm so sorry," Cece said.

"It hardly matters. It's been so long, and that love was never meant to be."

"It still hurts, doesn't it?"

"Of course it does. Less, now, and less frequently, but I can't think of her without pain. I don't even know if it's pain because I loved her, or pain because my life was destroyed at the same time she was, or pain because we were-" He cut off suddenly.

"What? You were what?"

"Close," he said, and she sensed he wasn't about to say more.

"Very well," she said. "I'll leave you be."

And she turned and left him alone in the vast, quickly darkening library.

And there is chapter 13. Hopefully you are all feeling a huge sense of relief because you FINALLY know what happened. But what's going to happen now? We'll have to wait and see...But leave review to prompt me to write faster!!

!--Mazzie--!