When Lilies Pierce Thorns

by Shiloh Grace

A Beauty and the Beast retelling. Count Raphael Lésagero of Bordeaux, France must marry a young woman for his beastly curse to be broken. After nearly a decade of being a monster, he's not even sure anymore if he wants to be human again. But when Miss Dalia O'Bruadair—a young woman from overseas—comes to stay in his castle, everything changes.

3. Chapter I

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Chapter I - Rafaello or Raphael?

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The sound tingled his ears. Crept up from the hallway where no one traveled and then to him. Small clips of noise eating away at him, and then pulling back again—nothing then.

He jerked his head around. Stained curtains overshadowed it, and it stood in the back corner, waiting.

And back again, taking nips out of his ears out of his eyes out of his flesh. It did not end. It does not end. Never will it end.

The ticks repeated, they kept on, crescendoing—soldiers marching and beating and banging against his tender eardrum. He saw them in the lines. Raphael thought of his father. Heard his father shouting over the lines, he the commander and all.

But the ticks decrescendoed. The clock behind the curtains toppled over on itself and fell back into its prior state: the tall, humble, revered oak of the wood.

All around, birds chirped and twittered, and the reverberations—gentle, mellifluous tunes—caressed his eardrums as a feather would. Rafaello felt the impression of his mother on his mind, he pictured her elegant state of dress, and he reveled in her dark curls that flowed as a river would in the pale moonlight; her curls washed over him, bathing him.

Rafaello slid out of bed, his frame gliding against the silk sheets, and then he pitter-pattered across the smooth marble floors. He fluttered to the altar where her painting hung above it, took a crouching position, and felt her impression on his mind. Her cold, sheer skin clung to his; her dark river ringlets enveloped him; her bird soprano voice chirped for him.

He did not dare look at the painting; he only continued to feel her impression on his mind. Kneeling there before her, and lost in the wood, lost in his head, lost in the world. Would she look any different if he caught a glimpse? Look any different from the impression he felt on his mind? Because if he looked, she was real. If he did not, she was not.

He could not let this impression she left on his mind be what it could become. For if he did—

Something banged into his head like a hammer.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

the earth tilted

Bang. Bang. Bang.

the tall oaks toppled over

Bang. Bang. Bang.

and turned into grandfather clocks