Once upon a time there was a beautiful and brilliant Princess. She was the pride of her mother and the joy of her father. A prodigy with a big heart and lovely brown eyes, she was the delight of the entire kingdom, the envy of every parent and the beloved of many a hopeful prince. She spent most of her time, however, alone with her thoughts and a friend no one else could see.
Many years had passed since the day her mother, the Queen, had found her wrapped in black blankets and whimpering outside of the palace gate. Attached to her basket was a hastily written note from the babe's mother. The letter explained that the poor child had been born to such ravaging poverty that any hope for her future would lie in the kindness of the royal family. The barren Queen had secretly prayed for a daughter to love and to raise. As she swept the baby into the castle, a tear rolled down her cheek and landed on the rosebud lips of her newborn charge.
The King was also ecstatic at the foundling's arrival, and he made sure to celebrate the royal family's new addition in a fittingly grand way. Musicians were called from the furthest reaches of the kingdom. Jesters and jugglers and acrobats performed, tirelessly, for hours in front of the assemblage of courtesans and peasantry. A wave of happiness spread throughout the realm. And the Princess, even in her tiny and infantile stature, was somehow aware of what was transpiring. Even as a little baby, it somehow made her very sad.
This preternatural child, with slender brown eyes and a wisp of curled black hair peeking from
under her bonnet, watched as her family and their attendants prattled on into the night, boundless in energy and drunk on joy. This preternatural child watched all the revelry and song and could not help but think of its end. She could not help but realize that at some point the celebration would dwindle, and in its wake would be disappointment and sorrow and heartbreak. This tiny baby, cuddled in her soft black blankets, somehow knew that all happiness was eventually rendered obsolete by the introduction of sadness. And she knew that history was nothing but the expanse from tragedy to tragedy. So as the congregated mass around her danced and laughed and gave way to all their mirthful abandon, the adopted Princess, too aware for her own benefit, softly wept.
As she grew, those who attended to her realized that the girl was gifted. Even before the Princess could speak, the aged and wise could see a sort of kindred spark in those dark eyes of hers. She seemed endowed with monumental intellect. She seemed to be cognizant of the minute workings of her universe, and could, as if by instinct, see how the tiniest pieces of her world fit together. And she was compelled to paint and to draw as soon as her miniature fingers could grip a pencil and brush. So she was an artist first, and when words began escaping her lips, she uttered nothing but poetry: ballads and songs so dense with meaning that most of her caretakers had only a notion of her brilliance without really understanding a word of what she said. She would walk the corridors of the castle, humming her own symphonies and daydreaming about the end of the world.
And though she was unfailingly polite and generous, and though she was sweet tempered and genteel, her parents fretted over her. They worried at the lack of smile on her lips, the lack of laughter from her throat and the expressions of concern that the beautiful child so often wore. The Princess, their beautiful gift, always seemed so burdened, especially for one so small. And the Princess knew of her parents' worries, and she did her best to alleviate them. When smiled at, she would smile in return. And when surrounded by laughter, the child would also laugh. When in the company of her family or her army of nannies and wardens she would contort her face into an uncomfortable simulation of peace and ease. Only in the solitary confines of her bedroom did she allow her lips to rest in their natural frown.
So as the Princess came of age, she was paraded amongst her peers, displayed for various suitors, all of whom were quickly enamored of her startling beauty and enchanted by her demeanor. They would fall into raptured spells as she spoke, her mellifluous voice florid with natural wonder and shimmering fantasy. She would speak, and they would listen and watch her with expanding eyes and racing hearts. But though she would never dare let on to them, these princes were, to one as bright and as old a soul as she, nothing but dullards. At the end of her brief engagements, she would return to her bedroom to drift into the seas of her saddened mind. She would lay in her bed and sleep and she would dream.
And all this isolation may have sparked a minor sort of madness, or perhaps her imagination was powerful enough to bend a small bit of reality to her will. Whatever the cause, one day the Princess woke to find she was not alone in her bedroom. There, at a tiny table where she had stationed a silver toy tea service was a guest. The Princess, without the provocation of placating the fears of her family, smiled. And her guest smiled in return. She noted the strings of blood that plied between the spiny, splintered teeth in its grin. And she realized it probably should have frightened her. It didn't. The Princess was not afraid of anything.
She sat across from him, the tea set in between, and she stared. The thing stared back with eyes that seemed to flicker from inside. They sputtered from gray to blue to green, and then would die to black before sparking away again. It had great claws, yellowed ivory talons that clattered away on each other, and clinked against the silver cup it took in its hand. It sipped at imaginary tea. This monster was playing with her.
The rest of the creature was something she would scarcely, if pressed, be able to describe. It was slick, like oil, but misty, like smoke. It had no shape, just a vague Shadowy outline that, for the most part, was nearly paper thin. It hardly looked like it took up any space at all aside from its grinning gnash of fangs and it's decayed, marbled claws. It took another fake sip from the silver cup.
The Princess, quite aware of the horrible countenance of her guest, was nonetheless pleased with its appearance in her room. She had felt so very lonely, stranded amongst a wasteland of friendly but alien beings who seemed not even of her species. Despite its fearsome form, she saw in the strangely flitting eyes of the thing a sort of understanding. Whoever this was, now, pretending to drink from a toy cup, was someone, some thing, the Princess felt was an equal. Her smile did not fade as she took one of the taloned paws into her hand. Her guest's grin quite widened.
So for days on end, the Princess would quickly attend to matters outside of her bedroom, and hurry back to her newfound friend. She imagined that she must have seemed unusually buoyant and light to those around her. But that was not the impression she gave. Instead, what her nannies and wardens saw was a very stark grimness overtake their lovely charge. It was as if a specter of gloom constantly clung to her, a vampiric force sucking away at her life. Her flesh grew pale. Her eyes drowned under a heavy weight of sleeplessness. Her posture slumped. Her walk became slow and defeated. But in her heart, she was aloft. What appeared to her companions as a practical crawl to her bedroom after lessons or after dinner or after a social engagement felt like flight to her. She beamed as she rushed to the side of her new companion, wanting nothing more than to just hold its hand.
The days stretched into weeks and months, and her contingent of caretakers grew more concerned as outwardly, their vibrant, if odd, child descended into a very murky depth. The Queen took occasion to speak with her daughter, and the Princess tried as best she could to convey her disinterest in the dealings of the kingdom as well as her elation over the world in the monster's fluttery eyes. She tried to convey how, within the terrifying visage of some imaginary beast, she had somehow found a sense of wonder and peace that seemed to be completely non-existent anywhere else. She pleaded for her mother to understand that a life demarcated by benchmarks of conformal behavior and personal loss held no interest for her. She begged to be released into the custody of her new guardian, that Shadowy figure that without any spoken word promised so much more within its authority. But, of course, the pleas fell on deaf ears. The Queen was horrified and flustered. The King tried desperately to wedge in some wise words to aid his wife and alleviate his daughter. He, of course, failed.
The Princess' Shadow company was a powerful bit of witchcraft. It welled up from somewhere inside the girl herself. A reflection, distorted and magnified and then breathing. The monstrosity that sat across from her at tea was more than just an imaginary friend, then. It was the avenue for an escape from a life of good natured and well meaning tedium. And so the Princess found it beautiful. The Queen, terrified at the madness her daughter seemed to be overtaken with saw it too. But she saw no beauty in the thing. Just an ugly, scary, fang riddled horror. The Queen demanded the Princess stay away from the Shadow. She stood between her precious daughter and the monster, praying for some end to the magic it had ensorcelled the Princess in. The creature, fearing an end to its newly discovered friendship begged the Princess to leave the palace together. And the Princess, torn between the understanding of her friend that only she seemed capable of, and the knowledge of what her abandonment would do to her already grieving parents stood paralyzed in her bedroom, guilt ridden and miserable.
Finally, she kissed her mother's cheek and grasped onto the talon hooked hand of the beast. The Queen, so overcome, fell to her knees, wept and realized what her daughter had known all along.
History is merely the expanse from tragedy to tragedy.
(c) 2009 Jason "Danger" Block
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