So utterly few stories of ruinous maledictions existed. Impatient children clamour for peculiar adventures, of faraway lands and vast seas, with only imagination to keep their fascination alight. Those who grown into adulthood, could not whittle the yearning twisting within for happy-ever afters.
This is such tale of a curse cast, whose ill fame spreads beyond the castle's walls, spilling into the sleepless valley, into the quaint village.
The story is ever shifting, morphed by the many mouths of wandering minstrels, drunken story-weavers and misremembered ramblings.
But there are things not even time could change.
There is always a Prince. He is slenderly tall, but the hunt and chivalric pursuits hone his boyish form into a strapping warrior. Delicate gold twisted into a glistening circlet, crowning his russet mane. The frost-blue of his eyes is brilliantly mesmerizing. His gaze sweeps one into a passionate affair that so many wished to receive.
The price of immense beauty is the loss of empathy. Those are rules written before the first breath is drawn, after the last breath is released. Payments made are not necessarily binding. For there are many ways laws are bent or broken in the face of perseverance.
Once there is a beggar, or a hag, perhaps a scoundrel—all nasty names called and given—seeking sanctuary from bitter-tinted cold and storm-laden night. Her only possession is a lovely but simple red rose as trade, as gratitude for such kindness to be extended to her.
Pity to the Prince who is a boy without consideration, for he is accustomed to finer things, beautiful, distinguished things—be it people or possessions.
And so, to the astonishment of none, the Prince refuses the rose with foul countenance and harsh disgust. She is on her knees, heaping pleading words.
What is spoken between them is lost, for one bard suggests it is the words of a desperate elder woman surely to die at the hands of bleakest night.
The Prince calls for his guards to remove her, as her pleas is wasted on ignorant ears.
Surely you could have guessed next.
The aged vagrant is merely a disguise, worn by a curious Enchantress. She is emerald elegance in motion. Her hair is spun honey, sparkling in springtime finery. Some say her eyes are glowing yellow, a wolfen stare scrutinising them. Others swear by the colour of garnet, glimmering in the dark.
His apologies flow, a bursting dam that cannot take back his vulgar insults. Recognition arrives too late to the Prince who should know better.
The witch, Enchantress she is known to many, crafts her revenge. In her vengeful fury and haste, she lays her blight upon the Prince and all who served him. For the rose he vehemently declined is now the key to his salvation.
"You have been deceived by your own cold heart. A curse upon your house and all within it. Until you have found someone to love you as you are, you shall remain forever a beast."
Days of spring, summer, autumn and winter bleed into countless years. Memories, of an opulent Prince cursed and his dutifully servants shared his fate, fade into half-forgotten folk tales.
It cannot be surmised with certainty, that the Enchantress made it so, for the commonfolk to erase this calamity from their collective minds. Perchance, it is simply nature reinserting the shortlivedness of a mortal's existence in the face of a ludicrous hearsay.
Pretty petal by pretty petal, they fall. Wilting, withering within the glass bell-shaped urn.
The Beast—once a Prince—is drifting further into the ocean of despair and forlorn. His servants, not quite human, not entirely furniture-form, remain destitute as the forest-swallowed castle.
Down below, in the spectrally wooded valley, the curse is nothing but a fairy-tale only ushered to sleepy-eyed children and mead-stained breath drowning sorrows, seeking comfort in stories unlike their own.