Sleeping Beauty (standard:fairy tales, 414 words)
Author: Lyssie Harris	Added: May 31 2003	Views/Reads: 4355/1	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
This is my version of Sleeping Beauty. It's nothing like the children's tale and is a little dark.

It is dark in this place. 

Indistinct shadows slither silently between knotted, gnarled and broken
branches; wretched fingers reaching skyward, clawing towards the stars 
that glow up above like the myriad eyes that glint in the obscurity of 
the undergrowth down below. 

Through the trees, a tower can be seen. In this nightmare it is the
closest to heaven. 

A single candle burns in the window like a beacon; tendrils of light
marking the route the prince must take to reach her. He does not know 
her name and could not describe her to you. He goes to her blindly 
because it is what must be done to maintain this place. 

In this land, everything is cyclical. Everything occurs because this
universe craves order, craves closure and craves magical patterns of 
three and seven like the rich King craves his treasures. 

He travels relentlessly along, drawn like a moth to the flame. He
struggles against the spiked vines that tear like a beggars hands 
beseechingly into his clothing. They are the evil that restrains him, 
but still the flame implores him to continue, and so he does, 
inexorably. One bare foot in front of the other. 

Barefoot. He first met her barefoot as she sang a sweetly lilting melody
in the morning mist. He had known her only as the peasant she appeared. 


Innocent. He was drawn her innocence, her virtue, the light she emitted,
that parody by... by It. The malevolent thing that had condemned them 
to this. Good and evil, darkness and light - were not the pure supposed 
to prevail? 

It bade him travel here, to go to as she lay, young and beautiful as you
might expect in a circular tower in a thicket thorns, thrown there at 
its base. He powerless to resist, weak in mind as the years in the 
thorns had made his flesh. 

Not the prince you would expect. He lost his boots in the slough
sometime, though if pressed he could not tell you when. 

Vines and paws and vicious claws strike out at him, painting grey flesh
red. The first warmth he feels on his skin in an unaccountable length 
of time radiates from his own blood. He is grateful for it, as here, 
the cold permeates everything. Still, the flame carries him onwards. 

In the tower, the candlelight illuminates the bed. Bones turned to dust
centuries ago, so that only her silver crown remains on the pillow. 

It is dark in this place. 


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