The path joined a road that wound through pasture lands where cattle, sheep, and horses grazed. Not far ahead, the road passed under the watch of an old hill fort. Its construction was primitive compared to Avonlea Castle, consisting of three concentric lines of earthworks and stoneworks that traced the contours of the hill. While the Infinite Forest had been known to swallow entire armies without a trace, trade caravans and bandits alike were tolerated by its enchantments, hence the need for fortifications to guard the known routes. This had not changed under the new regime, except that instead of taking Belle to a human lord, the local militia brought her before an animated wooden human-shaped puppet.

The Archon of Larsbridge. That was what they called the creature. The Dark Lord's magic had brought it to life to do his will. Belle looked up into the polished green marbles in its eyesockets, a frisson of disquiet running down her spine at the unnatural gaze. It was six feet tall with androgynous features and voice, crowned with a gold coronet on its bald wooden head. It wore rich maroon robes trimmed with black, with interlaced serpents embroidered in gold thread. The heraldic device of the Dark Lord is a golden ouroboros, Belle remembered.

This being held the authority of life and death in the region. It had the power to appoint officials and workers, to collect or spend public funds, to amend the local laws as it deemed fit. It was impervious to bribery, flattery, and appeals to the heart — it had none.

Larsbridge was the name of the market town two miles down the road from the hill fort on the banks of a small river. By the time Belle arrived, the town had already received upwards of a hundred other Avonlean refugees, but they had been sent on to Sweetport, the capital of the Maritime Kingdom at the mouth of the river by the sea. This was to be Belle's fate, also, once she was formally granted permission to enter the Dark Empire by the Archon.

For her part, she was to agree to abide by the laws of the empire. The simplified version was posted on the pillars of the town hall, and to her relief, it did not differ much from the common laws of the other kingdoms. Murder, theft, robbery, arson, rape, kidnapping, forgery, fraud, and so on were crimes here as elsewhere. More unexpected to her eye, slavery was banned. And the listed punishments made no distinctions of rank or property, nor gender or race, only between citizens and non-citizens. It didn't sound so bad in theory, but whether reality matched theory was another question. The unwritten laws could be far more dangerous than the written ones!

She spent the night on a bench in the waiting room at the town hall. She slept fitfully, everything aching no matter how she shifted her position. The next morning she was given a bowl of what the attendants called "pauper's porridge" — oatmeal with milk and a sprinkle of seeds, made in bulk at the town hall to serve to those in need. At first she was suspicious that it held some demonic taint of corruption, but a wary sip revealed nothing out of the ordinary besides its blandness.

What did you expect? she mocked herself silently. Evil monsters serving you evil breakfast? She scooped up the rest (slowed only by her shaky and stiff-jointed grip on the spoon) and ate it in better spirits. Whatever her life here would be in the future, at least she wouldn't start it in hunger!

Later, one of the town watch escorted her to the wharf, where she boarded a mail barge bound for Sweetport. It was a leisurely trip, with the barge making stops at towns and villages along the way. Except for the crew of the barge not being human, it could have been any river in Misthaven.

Belle couldn't help but gawp at first.

The pair looked like heavily-built men with shaggy hair and a grayish, rocky tint to their skin, their faces lined with elaborate scars. The tusks protruding from their lower jaws marked them as something other.

"What?" barked one of the two, the one not busy with the steering oar. "Never seen a troll before?"

In fact, she hadn't, not ones like these. The rock trolls she had briefly met in Arendelle were a different species altogether. As for the trolls native to this realm, she had only read of them in books, and that only in passing. She frowned, searching her memories. Trolls had a reputation for being violent and untrustworthy. "Trolls... the ones who live under bridges?"

The troll rolled his eyes. "Outlanders!" he huffed in irritation. "Don't knock it until you've tried it."

Belle blinked. "So why would you...?"

"Because..." he hissed. "Because in your human kingdoms trolls aren't allowed to own or rent property. Because a bridge outside the bounds is shelter when you're not welcome inside the town walls."

Belle flinched. Now that she thought about it, she remembered something Gaston had once said about making do with trolls — slaves, it went without saying — in the mines because there were no dwarves in the Marchlands. And the reason she had never seen a troll before was that they had been driven out of Avonlea long before her birth. She said quietly, "I'm sorry."

The troll shrugged. "Doesn't matter. Me and mine, we live here, does us well enough." He stamped a foot lightly, indicating the barge with its tiny central cabin. A small child peeked out from behind the curtain covering the door.

Belle smiled and ventured a wave. "Hello, I'm Belle."

The child waved back.

"That's Ch'chets. My daughter," said the troll.

"She's adorable," said Belle, sincerely. Violent and untrustworthy? Yet the Dark Lord entrusts them with the empire's mail., Was it because dark creatures tended to ally with each other? But looking at the child's innocent face, Belle couldn't think of her as a 'dark creature'. And the father, he was as proud and protective as any other parent. She recalled the listing of laws at the town hall, and how they had only ever said 'citizen', not 'man' or 'woman'. "And you? May I know your name?"

"It's no secret." He tapped a faded patch on his coat that might once have held a name. "I'm called Ktakt."

Belle nodded. "Pleased to meet you, Ktakt. Sorry for staring. I meant no offense."

"Yeah, whatever."

Ktakt never really warmed to her, and the other two turned out to be shy, quiet types, but they did answer her questions as they drifted down the river to the capital of the former Maritime Kingdom. Belle listened and mentally compared their answers to what she had read in her history books.

The Dark Lord, sometimes called the "Dark One", had risen to power three centuries ago on a tide of bloodshed. With every human hand raised against him, he had sought allies from the monstrous and demon races. With his empire cursed by Olympus, he had found other gods. The Avonlean Church condemned them as demons, but according to the trolls, they were ancient powers of the world: elemental spirits, little gods of roads and villages, local earth gods, sacred beasts and divine trees, and more. A hundred years ago, with the peasant uprising in Cockayne, the balance had shifted. With the rebels on the verge of extermination, the Dark Lord stepped in on the pretext of "stabilizing the border" and turned defeat into victory, victory into defeat. It solidified his evil reputation among the crowned heads of Misthaven, but won him popular support from the formerly oppressed peasantry of Cockayne. Belle's history books had framed it as a perversion against the natural order.

Just as it was unnatural for trolls to mingle with humans or live in houses.

Belle looked at the trolls in front of her and thought maybe nature was a load of tosh. At least, when it was used to bludgeon other people into submitting to injustice. Here they were, mingling! The clerics would be horrified, but Belle thought her mother would have approved. Colette had never held much stock in bloodlines. As she used to say, A cat may look at a king, and a dog may look at a bishop. Rank is a human delusion.

If birth rank meant nothing in the Dark Empire, then money ruled all. So thought Belle when she reached the shanty-town on the outskirts of Sweetport and saw the squalid living conditions of the Avonlean refugees. Unable to afford better housing, they had built temporary homes next to the caravan grounds. It was much larger than Belle had expected. People had been fleeing over the border for months ahead of the ogre advance, despite all of Gaston's reports claiming that everyone had fought valiantly to the death. Belle could guess why — to prevent a trickle from becoming a flood of desertions. Apparently the condemnation of the clerics had not stopped them (any more than it had stopped Belle) from seeking refuge in the Dark Empire.

Life was life, even if it meant taking on the dirtiest and lowest jobs — literally. The stench was staggering, as bad or worse than Belle's experience of being tossed into an ogre's midden heap. Belle found her fellow refugees hauling manure and night soil from the city to sell to the farms outside or collecting refuse to be dumped at the nearby pit, where those who lacked the strength for the heavy jobs picked through the trash for rags, bones, scraps of wood or metal, and anything else they could scavenge to be fixed, used, or sold. Some of the luckier ones found day jobs at the docks or construction sites. And then there were the sick, the injured, the crippled, the young, the elderly, and others who couldn't work and needed extra care. The pittance earned by the refugees had to be stretched to cover them all.

But it wasn't the hell it could have been, to Belle's relief. The refugees were allowed the use of the kitchens by the caravan grounds, and the city supplied a weekly allotment of fuel, grain, beans, and salt. Clean water flowed into the city through a system of raised stone aqueducts, dispensed through pipes into individual housing blocks and a series of public fountains, of which the caravan grounds contained two. So even though the refugees were at the bottom of the social heap at the moment, most hoped to save what they could and eventually seek out better opportunities.

Here, in this place, Belle was merely the newest addition to the lowest of the low: just as stinky as the next rag-and-bone-picker, and slower and clumsier than most. The pain in her joints never completely faded away, but she became used to it, adjusting her own motions to avoid the worst effects.

That was, until by chance she was hired by a rich dyer's family. Later she wondered if it had been due to the lucky acorn the innkeeper had given her.

It started when Belle picked out a sheet of paper from the trash, miraculously dry and legible. At first it was the writing that struck her eye: oddly regular and neat, it didn't seem to be by a human hand. Magic? She frowned at the content. It was a report of notable events here and abroad, including a short section on the fall of Avonlea.

"Oh yeah, that's called a 'news sheet'," one of her fellow scavengers told her, smiling at her bafflement. With Belle neck-deep in filth alongside everyone else, there was no "highness" or "princess" tripping from anyone's tongue anymore. "They have some kind of infernal machine that can print out papers faster than the fastest scribe. And they can change out the set pages quick as you please, so it's a new sheet each week."

"A machine? Not magic?" asked Belle.

The other shook her head. "No, though some say the Dark Lord found the design in a hell realm full of demons."

On careful examination, Belle noticed a string of tiny numbers printed on the bottom listed as the founding date of the news company. Four years ago. So it's still a new thing? She turned the idea around in her mind. What a marvelous invention! If they printed books the same way, then everyone could have books. So much knowledge could be shared, so many stories! The next day, she felt vindicated when she found a book in the rubbish (though it had suffered water damage and was only partly legible).

She took to saving the pages she plucked out of the trash and reading them out loud at the end of the work day while everyone was gathered by the kitchens for dinner. Most Avonlean peasants were illiterate or near-illiterate, so her reading was taken as a form of entertainment for them. It was during one such session that a cart driver who happened to be delivering supplies to the caravan grounds overheard her.

"Nice voice you have on you." The driver had squeezed himself in amongst the crowd. As she finished her reading, he pushed up in front to address her. "There's a lady, might be hiring, if you want a job. Looks like you could do with one." He cast a disdainful eye over the shantytown.

Belle folded the sheets and slid them into her sleeve. She cast a glance at her audience, catching a few envious looks and a few encouraging ones. She only hesitated for a moment. She wasn't really needed here, and this was the kind of opportunity they all hoped for. She nodded to the driver. "Yes, all right."

He led her to his cart and took her back with him through the city gates. It was her first time in the city proper. The citizens of the Dark Empire actually had more freedom to travel than the average peasant elsewhere. Belle, used to the advantages of her noble birth, had never thought about it until she had heard the other refugees talking. In Avonlea, it was only the devastation of the ogre war that had overturned the usual rules. But while there was no need for permits or letters from one's lord, the gate fees still had to be paid, and Belle hadn't wanted to squander the few pennies she had managed to collect. But this time was different: this was an investment.

And that wasn't the end of it. The cart driver shoved her at a bathhouse, another luxury she hadn't dared contemplate. "Wash off the stink, or they'll be turning you away no matter how prettily you squawk."

Belle sighed, but he was right. She touched the acorn in her pocket (Mistress Luck, don't abandon me now) before fishing out the last of her coin. Though if she did gain employment inside the city, this would become part of her routine. And they won't stare so much if I become a regular.

She emerged cleaner, even her aches and pains diminished after soaking in warm water. "Right, so, tell me about this lady who might be hiring?"

The driver related what he knew: she was supposedly a scion of one of the noble houses of the former kingdom, not that anyone had a title anymore. She had married into a family of dyers a few years before the conquest. Now her eyesight was going in her old age, and her daughter-in-law was looking for someone to keep her keep her company and read to her.

"You'll do," said the daughter-in-law after a short interview. Jette Dyer was a harried-looking woman with a baby in her arms and a toddler at her feet. "Let's hope you last longer than the last one."

Belle nodded. "Why, what happened to the last one?"

Jette pursed her lips and shook her head. "Never mind." She dismissed the cart driver after paying him a headhunter's fee, then found Belle an old, but clean and comfortable, set of clothing. The job came with room and board. Any coin was at the discretion of Jette's mother-in-law, Mistress Hertha.

The old woman was frail in body but her opinions had only gained strength the more her activity was constrained. With Belle at her side, the weak aiding the weak, Hertha took a few turns about the courtyard before retiring to her chamber. There Belle read to her from the news sheets or religious tracts and uplifting tales.

"You're a good girl. Well-born, I can hear it in your voice," Hertha informed her. No doubt that was why the cart driver had known she would be hired. "You're from Avonlea. Good, gods-fearing folk. Or so we always heard. Perhaps we were misinformed, considering. A shame what happened."

"A shame..." Belle echoed, wincing at the hint of schadenfreude in Hertha's tone.

"But in the end, no more than that," the old woman continued. "Well! So much for righteous defiance."

"Many good people lost their lives," Belle said quietly.

"Hmmph." Hertha turned her eyes on Belle, who wasn't sure how much she could actually see and tried to school her expression to display a calm respect. "They lost more than that. But I expect the Dark Lord will arrange something..."

Belle nodded. She had just read the article in this week's news sheet, that the ogres had called upon the Dark Lord to negotiate terms for the former lands of Avonlea to be absorbed into the empire in return for protection. Protection! At first it had seemed a bitter joke, but upon reflection, Belle remembered her family's history: the first king of Avonlea had carved out his kingdom by clearing the ogre threat from the wild frontier. All the history books hailed him as a great hero. It was no different in the other kingdoms: all over Misthaven, over the centuries, the monsters had been fought back and the land tamed for human settlement.

Clearing the ogre threat. Now a refugee herself, forced out of her home, the words rang differently in her head. But the ogres are vicious monsters that kill people!she argued to herself. So they were. And so were humans vicious killers. Back and forth, kill and be killed, where does it end? In the human kingdoms, the common wisdom was that there could be no peace until the ogres were gone. But the Dark Empire was a land ruled by a monster...

"You were here when the Dark Lord took the Maritime Kingdom," Belle ventured. "What was that like?"

Hertha scowled. "Like a storm washing away a rotten house. This was once a godly land, but that year the statues crumbled in the temples. A sign that Olympus had withdrawn its favor. Was it not so in Avonlea before it fell, child?"

"Our churches don't have statues," Belle said. "But the fairies refused to help us. The clerics said it meant we had been judged unworthy." Thinking about what Dove and Whippity Stourie had said about the ogre child, Belle wondered if there was some truth to it. Then again, the same clerics said that ogres were remnants of the Age of Monsters, brutes undeserving of mercy. "What do you mean, a rotten house?"

The old woman's eyes narrowed, seeing only memory. "Greed and corruption, a den of wolves turning on each other, they called down this doom on us all. Royal blood washed the palace steps."

"'They'?" Belle prodded.

"The old king died, leaving two sons to fight for the throne. Pirates on one side, merchants on the other," Hertha explained, her voice laced with disdain. "Partisans ambushed each other in the streets. Assassins lurked in every shadow. Even those of us with enough sense to stay out of it were dragged in willy-nilly."

"Sounds dreadful." Belle was grateful that the line of succession in Avonlea had never been seriously challenged. Well. Until it was cut off altogether. "What happened then?"

"The one who lost the fight, his last words to his brother were, 'Rather the Dark Lord take the throne than you!'"

"And the Dark Lord took him at his word, I suppose." This wasn't the story Belle had read in her history books, the one based on the account of the Avonlean ambassador, who had escaped the chaos just in time. The ambassador had painted it as a straightforward invasion by the dark empire. "Of course, as the loser, that prince had no right to trade away the kingdom."

"He was the elder and the heir, but the younger challenged him on a technicality. Lies upon lies. Greed upon greed." Hertha shook her head. "It was a punishment on us for our sins. If the gods had not deserted us, would that demon have dared set foot in this kingdom?"

"If it was a punishment, it doesn't seem so bad," Belle said in an attempt to comfort the old woman. "I came down the river to the capital, and everything looks peaceful and prosperous now."

It only roused Hertha to rage, "It's a disgrace! People have abandoned the old ways. Our children are made to attend the empire's schools and taught heresies!"

"Still, at least they are taught," offered Belle. She had been surprised (and secretly impressed) at the high rate of literacy in the capital, enough to support shops that specialized in books! Books produced cheaply and in bulk just as she had imagined. "Does it really matter who the ruler is, as long as the people are cared for?"

Hertha scoffed. "'The people'!? What people? The monsters the Dark Lord let into the kingdom? They walk our streets, bold as brass. People died, and monsters took their place! Trolls in the market, goblins in the tavern. Filthy thieving vermin mingling with good honest men and women..."

"It took me a while to get used to," Belle admitted. "But just because they're not human doesn't mean they aren't honest."

"Just you wait. You'll see."

"Mmm." Belle left it at that. As the days passed, the old woman became more strident in her opposition to the current regime. If wishful thinking and resentful muttering had any efficacy, the Dark Lord would be quaking in his boots, Belle thought wryly.

"Every day I pray the true gods will strike down the demon and his wooden minions." Hertha went on to complain about the complacency of the townsfolk who couldn't be bothered to rise up in revolt. "All they care about is their stomachs. As for the clergy... faint-hearted fools."

Some had fled, some had died, but many had found "enlightenment" in the Dark Empire's Way of Ouroboros and encouraged their flock to follow suit. Belle didn't know how many of the clerics from her homeland had survived. At any rate, she hadn't met any of them here.

"They will know regret when the light of Olympus shines on us again!" declared Hertha, and had Belle read one of her favorite rousing religious anthems. At least Hertha didn't make her sing after her first few out-of-tune attempts.

It only made Belle feel more distanced from the gods. Never mind the light of Olympus. There was the sun, shining on them freely. If Avonlea had fallen because they had wronged the ogres, they hardly needed a divine power to tell them the difference between good and evil. People should decide their own fates. That was what she had always believed.

At the moment, Hertha was the one paying her, so she was bound to do as ordered. But when it was her day off, it was Belle's own choice what to do with the coin she had earned. The temptation of the book shop overcame her initial intent to save her money for a rainy day.

There were just so many to choose from.

In the end, she bought one that no one in Avonlea would have credited: a book about the ogres of Misthaven, written by an ogre and a human together. It was an eye-opener. If only her mother had been able to read it, Belle thought. Maybe she could have brought the others around, and things could have been different. They could have understood.

It was our garden of plenty, but to them it was a wasteland. Humans and ogres shaped their land differently, in ways the other had trouble perceiving. Humans were more numerous and better armed, and had never recognized any claims ogres had on the land they lived on. Not until the Dark One, desperate for allies, had brought them into his empire. It was a betrayal of his human roots, yet eventually it had been the beginning of peace. The Dark Empire had only grown stronger.

With ogres as his shock troops, no kingdom in Misthaven could stand against his armies, Belle thought. She wondered why the Dark Empire hadn't swept across the realm. Then she made the mistake of revealing her curiosity in front of Hertha, which led in turn to her discovery of Belle's book.

Which she promptly threw into the nearest fire. "For shame! I thought better of you, girl. This is pure poison, poison of the mind!"

Having taken poison of the flesh already, Belle didn't think much of the analogy. She glared at Hertha. "It's called 'learning'. How else can we improve ourselves?"

Hertha gasped. "You... you...!" She sat up in her chair and pointed a wavering finger at Belle. "Enough of your insolence. I've put up with your sly impertinences too long. Out! Out! Out!" She grabbed the bell and rang furiously for the servants.

And with that, Belle's luck had run out and she was tossed out onto the street.

Author's note: Stupid OUAT and its random levels of technology. (I can't believe it took me until now to notice the anachronistic windows in "Skin Deep" in Moe's castle!) My head-canon for this AU is that Rumple imports things from realms with more advanced technology (including seeds and livestock). And I may be channeling a bit of the "Fables" Geppetto here for my AU. As for bridge trolls, we only ever see them that time with Snow and Charming (the original scene, then the time travel version). Not much to base my head-canon on, but there's also the negative evidence: they're not in any of the random crowd scenes, plus what the humans say about them, which implies they're not welcome, unlike dwarves, who are hanging out at the tavern with everyone else. (If I missed something, please let me know!)