Disclaimer: All characters belonging to The Phantom of the Opera are copyright Gaston Leroux. The storyline of Beauty and the Beast belongs to a score of different authors, and I have mixed ideas from quite a few. A few other details have been borrowed from C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces. I have merely compiled the stories and characters together in a fan work to combine some of my favorite stories. Charlotte-Christine is partially my own creation, but her characterization belongs largely to Gaston Leroux and Susan Kay.


Prologue

Charlotte-Christine; four syllables which do not fall lightly from my tongue. She was a child - a poor, lost, innocent, insecure and desperate child - and I preyed upon her in hopes of breaking the cruel, rusting bonds of enchantment. I was a deathly beast then, both in spirit and in appearance. She was like a cherub, sent from on high. She brought warmth and light into my cold and shadowed world. Her love personified me. Her kiss was my sanity, my salvation, and my redemption. But like Psyche's mortal suitors, I was destined not to have her for my own.

All good fairytales begin with, "Once upon a time." This story, however, is no fairytale. It is a tale of horror, cruelty, possession, desire, deception, fear, and terror and above all else, a love of the most exquisite kind. Exquisite love, exquisite pain - a beautiful disaster. She was loved by another, and I could not deny her the love to which she so desperately floundered to cling. I had already robbed her of so much more in my wholly selfish attempt to save myself. Yet in the end, she saved me still.

My story begins over two centuries ago. I was the young and handsome prince of a prosperous kingdom. The populace hailed me as a genius, a prodigy, and rightly so; I was inhumanly gifted in music, magic, thought and language, as well as art and architecture. I was naturally commanding and possessed an inherent magnetism which attracted others to me instantly and later, combined with my seductive voice, caused my will to become law. I was denied nothing in my childhood and was known (and feared!) for my sudden, violent eruption of tantrums. The servants and attendants nervously jested that I took after my father, who was an effective but harsh ruler.

I idolized my father as a child, which is why his sudden death irrevocably altered me. I festered in bitterness over the loss of my idol, and vowed that I would never love another human soul to spare myself the bitter pain of another inevitable separation. I barricaded my heart; I encased it in a coffin and sealed it in a stone cold tomb deep within the catacombs of my numbed emotion. I would never feel again.

The crown passed to me; my mother was too sick with grief over the dual loss of her beloved husband and son to rule in her husband's stead, as was the custom. I reigned as a tyrant, having no more feeling for the human race. I was high above the peasant imbeciles anyway; no man possessed a mind that compared with my own. I was endowed with the mind of the gods, and as such felt that I was a god among men. I bestowed mercy upon no one. In my regime, I became known as the Angel of Doom.

It was at the end of the first year of my reign when my life - or, life as I knew it - was stripped away from me. Drunk on my genius and absolute power, I felt that I was invincible until one evening when a haggard old woman hobbled through my palace's iron gates. How I curse my impetuous youth! She was a weary foreigner, she had said, in need of shelter. Insulted that she should mistake my sprawling, magnificent, architectural wonder of a palace as an over-run inn, I set my guards upon her to force her away. It was then that she revealed herself as the enchantress that she was. I uncharacteristically pleaded for forgiveness - for who wants to get on the bad side of an enchantress? - but she would hear none of it.

"Because you have shown no mercy to your people," she told me, "I shall grant no mercy to you. You shall pay for your crimes against the kingdom! Your subjects daily cry out in misery, yet you turn a deaf ear. In return for your cruelty, your handsome face shall match the distortion of your soul. You will remain imprisoned in your palace - the fortress which you erected for yourself - with no human contact, except that of your invisible attendants. Your whole land will be placed under an enchantment, your own people will forget your name, and the beauty of your grand palace will be lost to the eyes of outsiders. You will live in bondage here until the day you learn to love for love's sake alone, if you can find one who is willing to love you!" She disappeared with a violent flash and crash of thunder.

In a fit of sudden panic, I rushed to the nearest mirror to be greeted with a horrifying sight: It was not my own face that stared back at me, but the face of death. It was my face, yet with years of decay; a death's head. I had no nose, my eyes were sunken in to the point that I almost could not be sure if they were there, and the skin that covered my face was taut and pallid, twisted and puckered in a grotesque form. My fingers were long and cold and skeletal. I was in every fashion a living cadaver. I subsequently destroyed every mirror in the palace and fashioned myself a mask to hide my own evil from my eyes.

Two centuries. It took two centuries for a pure and noble girl - a child in nearly every respect - to stumble into my dark and dangerous underworld. Charlotte-Christine; four syllables emblazoned in my tortured memory.

Thus, the story begins.