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No, the castle is not shrouded in darkness completely, though the mist still clings in the enchanted forest and my forced solitude has felt like darkness at times. There are parts of the castle that have fallen out of my mind, unvisited for years in a row. I have no knowledge of their state. There have been many days when it did not seem worth the effort of getting out of my bed and the castle may as well have been as dark as the stories say.
In this room, the darkness is real.
It is not a space meant to be seen by visitors, and so is not finely decorated, though the circular room contains carpets and a table and a chair that is well-enough built. On the table sits the glass cloche that contains the rose that bears the remnants of the curse, just as I do. Because of the nature of it, darkness crowds the room like a tapestry on the walls, translucent but not transparent, making the moonlight from the waning crescent seem dimmer and less potent.
I have grown used to the darkness over the years, and even become accustomed to the fact that the rose and its petals are here, a physical representation of what remains of my life.
Staring at the rose in its cloche feels different now.
I sit back in the chair with a sigh and let my eyes linger on the rose as if I have never seen it before. The stem has not changed in appearance since the day the witch cursed me, and the petals are as pink as if freshly bloomed. Its physical state has not changed much since the day I dragged myself back to the castle, beaten and bleeding, and brought myself to this tower to lie on the floor until I could summon the strength to pull myself upright and go down to my bed chambers. I know that must seem senseless, but at the time, in the haze of my wounds, I thought that proximity to the rose would help with the healing. To this day, I have no idea whether it made any difference at all. I only know that climbing the tower steps nearly killed me and when I arrived here, I thought the tower walls would be the last thing I saw before I died.
Clouds must cover the moon, because the light coming through the tower window dims further. The glass still shines, as there is much magic in the tower and the cloche and, of course, the rose itself. It is as if the moonlight is stored within the glass and twinkles whenever the moon itself is not strong enough to shine off it. It makes it difficult to look away from the rose and remember my sentence.
No magic will save me. That has been obvious for a long time. Magic can only extend the curse, in its way, since without magic I would have starved to death or bled to death many times over by now. I have been under this curse for twenty long years. I have been battling the beast for what feels like an eternity, unable to stray far from the castle, as the magic weakens with distance and cannot protect me as I need, even in the village.
The truth is that it is the isolation that blackens my soul far more than the curse. It turns me into a man I do not recognize, even accounting for the beast that steals half my waking hours and perhaps more. The loneliness has been like a noose around my neck, and now I feel I have slipped out of it. Yet there it hangs, for me to witness.
But now Elle is here, and the castle is no longer empty. I can feel her presence through the beast’s senses and the magic of the castle. Her bright spirit is undimmed by sleep, and she slumbers deeply in her bedroom, safe under the covers while I am up here with the rose.
As I watch, one of the petals trembles on the stem as if stirred by a breeze that only moves within the cloche. It is such a small movement that a man without the beast’s senses might think he had imagined it, but I know I have not. It may not be the first sign that another petal is about to fall, but it is the first one I have seen from this petal, and I know well enough what will happen in due course.
Many years ago, I used to believe that the act of looking is what hastened the petals in falling to the bottom of the cloche, but that was a superstitious thought and one that I eventually stopped having. If it were real, I could stave off the effects of the rose seemingly forever, simply by locking it in a room deep within the castle and never allowing it to see the light of day.
That is not how it works. Whether I look or not, time still passes. What I do in that time is irrelevant to the state of the clock ticking. The petals will still fall. Watching the rose for hours a day does not seem to make a difference. Ignoring the rose for weeks at a time makes no difference. Consideration alone does not affect the curse.
And yet, on nights like these, I find myself before it. I do not find the rose to be entrancing or alluring. At one time I may have looked at the rose the way a solider will look at a wound that cannot be healed but will not cause a mercifully quick death.
The petal quivers again in such a slight motion that I almost allow myself to hope it will not fall. When I was first cursed, it would have been a simple matter to convince myself that it had not moved at all and forbid myself from looking for a month, but now I cannot lie to myself. Elle has changed everything.
Despite my determination to be stoic, the sight of another quivering petal turns my stomach to knots.
I follow the line of the stem to the bottom of the cloche. I do not try to convince myself that the number of petals is unchanged, because every time I come to this room in the tower, the number of petals that have fallen is burned freshly into my memory. I cannot lie to myself about this, either. There are more petals on the bottom of the glass cloche than there were the last time I was here.
Try as I might, I cannot remember when that was. It was before I brought Elle to the castle, but how long before? When I search my memories, I cannot recall how the land looked outside the window or whether there was rain drumming on the roof. I cannot remember if it was dark out or daylight. I cannot remember if it was hot or cold. It makes me feel crazed.
I cannot even remember whether it was this year or last, or even the year before. There have been times in my life when the days blurred together with no way to tell them apart. The beast and I fought for control and space in my body, and the hours passed without notice as I struggled to force him into submission or retreated into my mind and let him run loose when I was too exhausted to keep up the fight.
Other times, though, the years were interminable, each day stretching out until I thought for sure a week had passed, only to find that the sun had not yet set. My mind remained clear during those days, and I dwelled in overwhelming anguish and pain and guilt thinking back to the day the witch came to the castle.
It was too late when she arrived. There was not time to build a wall and keep her out, or to gather any weaponry that could hope to overpower her. There had not been any warning signs, and her arrival was an ambush. All I could do was flee the castle with the people who dwelled there. I gathered as many as I could, every servant I could find, as the witch swept into the castle, and we ran through the forest to the village. The journey seemed never-ending. There was not room for all of us in the inn so we divided ourselves among the homes of the villagers who would take us in.
At first the villagers were welcoming, as they understood the fear of having to flee from a sudden attack. We had escaped with our lives, the most precious thing to defend, and for a short while it seemed as if that would be the worst of it. Perhaps the witch would pass on and we could go back to the comfort of the castle.
I should have known then that we had not run far enough and the witch would never give up the castle without being completely defeated. Black clouds darkened the sky. They were like nothing we had ever seen, swirling in vicious spirals above the village. They cracked open with brutal lightning that set trees on fire and split the earth. It was a warning of what was to come.
At the time I could not understand how it had happened. Dark witches are normally handled by their own kind. They keep each other in line, for their power is too great to be challenged by most others. I had not been prepared for such an attack and I did not have an enchantress at the castle. There was not even a wise woman in the village who could offer the slightest protection.
The storm raged above the village for three days and three nights, and I began to understand that it would not stop without my intervention. I resisted the idea because I did not want to face the witch in a place of power, but when yet another house was struck down by lightning and the inhabitants ran screaming from the flames, I knew I had to act. The people were mine to protect and my cowardice was the cause of their pain.
The townspeople did not have the means to fight the dark witch and her magic. Neither did I, but I was the only one among us valuable enough to speak with her. No one else had more power or standing than I did. Although I asked my closest allies if they would come with me, they wished to stay behind. I could not blame them. As I would learn, she had come for me.
There was no wall then, so I crossed through the trees on the way back to the castle. My home had been turned dark and forbidding by the witch’s magic. The clouds followed me through the forest and spiraled above the castle. My heart thundered. I could hardly breathe when I reached the entrance of the castle and went inside.
I found the witch in this very spot, the highest floor of the tower. From here you can see the slope of the forest toward the village and the smoke from the houses rising into the sky. You can see the green country beyond. The witch had taken my power over that country for herself and turned with a gleeful smile as I came into the tower. I could see from her twisted features that she was satisfied with the fear she was causing to my people.
“Well, little prince,” she said. “Have you come to bargain?”
I am not little now, and I was not little then, but I was the prince. I straightened my shoulders and my spine. “Yes.”
