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Chapter 1 - The Beginning
By Setcheti Posted in Story on 23 August 2021 5137 words
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In the Land of Stories Old

Chapter 1—The Beginning


I would expect, Dear Reader, that you are well acquainted with the telling of fairy tales. There are sad tragedies and dramatic encounters, and great displays of bravery and cleverness abound as well as terrible acts of wickedness, foolishness, and cowardice. Magic, so rare in the waking world, is as commonplace as a flower blooming in the sun, and wandering royalty happily rubs shoulders with fairies and witches and practitioners of ancient trades ‘most every day of the year.  

It is a wondrous place, the Land of Fairy Tales, but most often an entirely predictable one. Those who are filled with cruelty and greed will nearly always receive their comeuppance, those who seek their fortune shall find it, and those who go about their days with a kind and loving heart will always be rewarded in the end. The tellers of such tales employ a rich and fantastical language not much at all like that with which we speak to each other in our everyday lives, and the naming of people, places and creatures both good and evil are often chosen with care to express meanings far beyond simple identification. The characters are all types: virtuous woodcutters, clever princes, wise magicians and pure-hearted maidens.

This story is no different, at least not at first, so we shall begin at the beginning and get the part you are already expecting out of the way.

~

Once upon a time there were seven brave princes who wandered through the countryside fighting evil, and they were called the Fearless Seven. They were all near to the same age, all very handsome, and all quite clever in their own ways as well. They also all had oddly recognizable names, if one is even the least little bit familiar with fairy tales, but this is not our problem and we are not going to make it such.

Now as handsome, brave, talented princes went, these were all fine young men, kind and honorable and fair-minded. But even fine young men can become full of themselves, and after a time of being the talk of every kingdom they went through these princes had definitely reached that point. Which is in part what led to The Mistake.

You see, it is somewhat traditional in fairy tales that evil should leave its mark via hideousness or cruelty, and although that is not always the case it holds true often enough that if one is not careful it might seem that evil will always be ugly and good shall always be beautiful. And so when the Seven came upon a middling-sized dragon attempting to abscond with a golden-haired princess, they at once fought and slew the beast to rescue her. But when their leader Merlin, a rather powerful young magician, picked himself up off the ground, he found himself face-to-face with a golden-haired, satin-gowned lady who was green as a fresh frog and definitely not beautiful to his way of thinking. And in that moment of shock, as he had never seen a woman who looked so that was not a witch bent on someone’s destruction, he decided that the Seven had made a mistake and perhaps even fallen into a witch-created trap meant to take them out of commission. Another fight ensued, and after thoroughly trouncing the supposed witch the seven of them gathered themselves up and made to leave as they had other things they wanted to do, namely going home and having a hot meal and perhaps a bath.

Which was why none of them saw the fluttering fairy wings which emerged from the ‘witch’s’ back, or the anger which crossed her rather blunt green features as she stretched out one hand in their direction and released a wave of magic meant to teach a lesson about judging by appearances. And so the Seven young men abruptly shrank to become seven short, squat dwarfs, somewhat recognizable but also as blunt-featured and green-skinned as the fairy princess they had just misjudged. “Only a kiss from the most beautiful woman in the world shall free you!” she announced, and then flitted away to sulk mightily somewhere with a nice glass of wine, because it is quite insulting to be mistaken for an evil witch by seven handsome young men who have just rescued you from a dragon.

Now, the Seven were, of course, mortified by this turn of events, as they had all been quite proud of their looks and of their reputation as well. They retreated to the distant palace where they had made their home and hid themselves there, disappearing from the world without a trace. It was small consolation that when they were alone or at least unseen they each reverted back to their original forms, or that they still retained their skills if not their strength. But even still, there was no way seven two-foot high green dwarf-trolls could take on the sort of challenges the Seven were usually called on to vanquish, not to mention that when anyone did see them nobody either recognized them or took them seriously.

A year passed. And as people are inclined to focus only on the most recent shiny or disturbing thing to catch their attention, after a year had passed the Fearless Seven had gone from nearly legendary to nearly just legends. But their tales were still being told, and it is that part which is important to our story.

 

In a kingdom which wasn’t all that far away, because all of them were really quite close to each other due to a quirk of their current geography, there stood a cluster of dark mountains from which sprouted a tall stone castle wrapped rather menacingly in thick, writhing roots, and within that castle lived an evil witch whose appearance was definitely beginning to err towards the traditional. The witch lived all alone in the castle save for three little wooden bears who were her servants, and most of her time was spent on plotting or speaking to her evil mirror or going to check on the enchanted tree which was growing in the middle of what had once been the king’s private office. It was a beautiful white tree with twisted branches and tiny little trembling leaves, and from one branch there hung a brilliantly red apple. Usually the witch just went in and looked at the apple, judging its ripeness, and occasionally it turned into a pair of tiny red shoes which she would pluck and place upon her feet. Even more occasionally this would cause the haggard, aging witch to grow young and beautiful for a short time, but the effect never lasted even long enough for her to take a single step.

Needless to say, this was frustrating the witch mightily. Her future plans required her to first re-obtain her youthful beauty before they could be enacted, and as she had always been a terribly vain woman in the first place nothing would do but that she must become even more fair than any other woman alive and remain that way for as long as possible—or even forever, should she be able to manage it.

Now, you might be wondering why this castle was empty, and the answer is that no one knew. Once there had been a king in residence, King Winter White, and his only daughter Princess Snow White, and all in a manner of guards and servants and courtiers besides. It had been a very typically normal fairy tale castle until the day of the princess’s nineteenth birthday, which was the very same day a mysterious woman had appeared at the castle and ensnared the king with her beauty.

Older readers will understand what this euphemism actually refers to all too well. For the younger: The woman was very pretty, and that made the king want to take her for a wife immediately. And so he did.

And shortly after that, people started to disappear. It wasn’t entirely noticeable at first, because servants do tend to come and go and generally speaking the royals in a large royal household aren’t all that sure how many they had in the first place. And as King White was…distracted by his new wife, who luckily had only been named queen consort because his daughter was already of age, he did not at first notice this and later was in no fit mental state to pay attention even when the matter was brought up with him. Not that he didn’t realize something strange was going on, because he would have had to be completely blind and deaf not to, he simply didn’t assign any importance to it as his pretty new wife had told him he shouldn’t. It was in his mind somewhere, however, and this is what would cause him to eventually send his daughter away for her own safety.

Perhaps we should speak of the Princess Snow here for a moment, as she was rather unlike what is generally pictured when the word ‘princess’ starts being bandied about. She was pretty, make no mistake about that. And she was graceful and kind and thoughtful and responsible to a fault. But she was also not exactly dainty. This did not bother the princess at all, as she was happy with her strong, sturdy, comfortable body and all of the things it could do. And she was happy that she took after her father in looks, as she loved him dearly but had never known her mother, who it must be said had died in childbed at least partly due to being the sort of delicate, overbred slip of a woman who often does just that. In all honesty, King White had been quite relieved when his precious daughter did not take after her mother in that respect, even though his daughter’s appearance sometimes caused…other problems.

Because princesses are not supposed to be merely pretty, and the sort of people who become courtiers around a castle tend to be rather shallow when it comes to aesthetics, as do the people who come to visit a king on royal business. That the princess was graceful was overlooked because she was not also dainty; her lovely complexion and pretty manner meant little beside the fact that her gowns did not drape elegantly around a slender frame and her shoes were not of a small enough size. And of course, her hair just had to be brown, as were her eyes, and that was just not princess-like at all. There had been suitors here and there since the princess had turned sixteen, as nothing draws a wandering prince like the rumor of a princess who might have a throne to share with him, but none of them had stayed long after meeting her and not a one had offered for her hand.

The potential suitors had not left without making a proposal due to Princess Snow’s appearance, however, no matter what the whispering peacocks of the court had to say about it; no, they had left upon discovering that there was actually no throne to share. Because Princess Snow White had had the great good fortune to be born into a royal family where a queen could hold the throne in her own right, and her chosen husband would become her prince consort rather than a king. The hopeful princes would have happily extolled Princess Snow’s many virtues if their payment for doing so had been a crown of ultimate royal power, but the circlet of royal companion and bed-warmer to the queen had not been what any of them were looking for. A few advisors had even counseled the king that if he wanted a successor he might want to start by changing the marriage law to something more enticing to prospective suitors, but luckily King White, although not a very strong or wise ruler in many respects, did have enough sense to refuse to make such a change. He told his advisors that he had no interest in changing one of the oldest laws of his kingdom, but in truth he feared how badly such a thing could turn out for his beloved daughter once her bridegroom had the crown and no longer felt the need to please her. The advisors no doubt knew of this possibility themselves, of course, they simply had not cared.

Princess Snow was not told of this conversation, but as she grew older she came to realize it must have happened and may have even happened more than once. And then her father took his lovely new wife, who was sneeringly contemptuous of her new stepdaughter, and he ceased listening to anyone except her…until one night when too much wine unlocked the fears which had been buried within him and sent him stumbling to his daughter, bidding her to go quietly and at once and without letting anyone know: Little did he realize there was no one left who would notice her absence save himself and her stepmother. And so the princess went out of her own country and into another, where with her good nature and willingness to work she quickly found a place where she could earn her keep, and always she kept one ear open for news of her own kingdom and her father. But as days slipped into months and one year crept toward two, no news came. And so finally the princess made up her mind to return to the land of her birth and try to see her father, at the very least to try to find out from someone that he was all right.

Alas, what she learned once she arrived back at the town which had once served the castle and vice-versa was that no one had seen or heard aught of the king in well over a year, and the castle was thought to be empty. The queen consort had not been seen since either, and there were rumors that an old witch may have taken up residence in the castle who did not take kindly to visitors, as none who had ventured there since her appearance had ever returned. And that save for that last part, the people of the town were strangely apathetic about the whole thing.

This did not stop Princess Snow. She went up to the castle by a little-known way, and then using a rope scaled the wall and let herself in through a window in her father’s office. The dust there was thick, and a strange white tree had been planted in the center of the room, but she at first ignored that. She quickly went through her father’s papers, hiding beneath the desk when some sort of guard entered in response to a noise she had made, and it was underneath the desk that she found her father’s journal tucked away in a hidden compartment. It told her little except that he had begun—finally—to suspect his new wife of being a witch, and nothing after that. The princess emerged from her hiding place intending to make her way out of the castle the same way she’d gotten in…and that was when she saw the apple.

Sunlight from the high windows was streaming over the white tree, and in its golden light the apple shone like a ruby and her feet took her to it almost without conscious thought. She raised her hand to the beautiful fruit, and was startled when it became a pair of shining red shoes which all but dropped into her palm. She felt compelled to put them on, and did so, marveling at how well they fit her feet…and that was when the witch appeared in a rage, the three little wooden bears who were her only servants flying behind her on tiny wooden brooms. A chase began, a chase in which Princess Snow lost the journal but managed to grab one of the brooms and use it to escape the palace and the witch she now knew to be the self-same woman her father had married only a few years before. A woman who, quite luckily, had not seemed to recognize her any more than the people of the town had.

As she now knew for certain that her father was missing, as was everyone else she had ever known, Princess Snow made a hasty and not entirely well thought-out plan: She would find the missing Fearless Seven, and beg them to come defeat the witch and find out what had become of her father. Instead of the Seven, however, what she stumbled across were seven adorable little green dwarf-trolls who just happened to have the exact same names as the Seven, which was as far as her recognition of them went because curses tend to protect themselves in this maddening fashion. And she also found that the red shoes she had taken from the tree and put on her own feet had changed her into a much more…traditional form for her station. Many other women would have been delighted by this, of course, because losing weight is hard and being beautiful beyond imagining is the dream of many, but it just made Snow—now known as Red Shoes because she feared giving her real name to the dwarfs and hadn’t been able to think of anything else—sad. People listened to her now and fell all over themselves to please her, but deep in her heart she knew it was not her they were treating with such consideration and kindness.

And that was how Princess Snow White became the very first woman in the history of that very terrible sacrificial magic to be able to take the red shoes off whenever she wanted to. Because you see, for all that the shoes were beautiful and made their wearer the same, the magic in them was born of great evil and they were in truth far more curse than blessing. But Red Shoes did not know this. All she knew was that the shoes allowed her to search for her father far more effectively, because she now looked like the most beautiful princess in the world.

Experienced readers of fairy tales will see where this is going. The dwarfs, who on the inside were healthy young princes desperate to end their curse, fell all over themselves to curry favor with Red Shoes: perfectly coiffed blond Jack offered her beautiful jewelry, curly auburn-haired Hans baked delicious treats to tempt her with, the red-headed triplets Pino, Noki and Kio amused her with their machines and their antics, and dark-haired Merlin and Arthur were actually fighting with each other for her attention. Red Shoes thought this was sweet, which of course wasn’t frustrating at all to a faux castle full of healthy, handsome young princes trapped in the bodies of cute little green dwarf-trolls who no one took seriously. (That was sarcasm, for those readers who have trouble recognizing it.) But aside from that they also did what they could to help her, and let her stay with them, and if Merlin especially kept trying to get her to kiss him she just thought it was funny although the other dwarfs did not. Especially not Arthur, and most especially not Arthur after he realized that Red Shoes could draw his sword, the one and only Excalibur, from the stone which had been imprisoning it for several generations even though he himself hadn’t been able to budge it even before he’d been turned into a dwarf.

We should take a moment here, dear reader, to ask that you not think too badly of our cursed princes in this situation, as for more than a year they had been cut off from family and friends alike, from the noble occupation they had once committed themselves to, and indeed from the rest of humanity. Rare is the person would not grow desperate in such a situation, and if our little dwarfs were somewhat overly effusive in their regard for Red Shoes it was obvious even to them that she would never look at them with any sort of romantic interest. Well, obvious to all of them except Merlin, whose desperation was rather greater than that of his friends for reasons which he had not and would not discuss with them.

Even with all this, however, our seven cursed princes had not forgotten that they were indeed brave and kind and talented—they had simply been stymied by being trapped in small bodies with only a fraction of their strength, and in Merlin’s case only a fraction of a fraction of his magical power. And so they did their best to help Red Shoes search for her father, and to protect her once the witch sent brutes and even a smarmy prince out looking for the shoes and the girl who was wearing them. Their trying to protect her only served to reinforce the fact that a two-foot high dwarf with an equally short blade is nowhere near as effective in a fight as a six-foot tall sword-wielding man whose muscles strain the seams of his shirts—Arthur especially had every reason to be upset about his transformation, is what we are saying here. That the dwarfs kept trying to protect Red Shoes even when the witch’s minions partially destroyed their home was definitely to their credit, as was the fact that the gigantic wooden rabbit the witch had hidden in the woods to capture Red Shoes ended up being kept by them as rather a pet instead of being destroyed, as they had realized there was no cruelty in the rabbit and it could at times be quite useful. Merlin was the one who had figured this out, in fact, and the rabbit had grown rather attached to him as a result. The rabbit, therefore, was the only person—that was a hint, readers—who knew that Merlin was having something of a crisis of conscience regarding Red Shoes. He was certain the only way he was going to get a kiss was to trick her into it—trick any woman into it, because what full-sized human woman wants a two-foot tall green dwarf-troll for a boyfriend?—but at the same time the man within him was definitely falling in love with her, and not just because of her beauty. The curse would not let him explain anything to her, however, so he was rather between a rock and a hard place. And once he realized that even tricking her into kissing him wouldn’t end his curse, Merlin made a Decision.

Dear readers, when a young man who is desperate and has fallen in love and has come to the conclusion that he is going to be cursed until he dies makes a capital-D Decision, things are about to happen that are guaranteed to leave everyone in tears. Merlin was no exception to this. He stopped just protecting Red Shoes and began defending her with his very life. He stood between her and monsters which would have daunted him even in his human form, and when he could convince her to close her eyes—damn that trick of the curse, anyway!—he showed the monsters that Decisions make a man more than a little ruthless. Even Merlin’s friends were beginning to notice that something was very wrong by this point, especially since he had nearly died once already, but the witch was giving them no quarter and at the point when someone probably would have sat him down and made him talk about his feelings over a nice cup of tea and some cake they were all instead racing to the dark, foreboding, vine-wrapped castle in an attempt to save Red Shoes from her exceptionally wicked witch of a stepmother. The triplets even smashed the Stone so that Arthur could have his sword, although a piece of the Stone stayed stuck to the blade as though to remind him that cheating doesn’t count and he was going to have to put Excalibur back where she belonged at some point.

Merlin, luckily for him, could be in his own form when only magical constructs were around, and had wreaked quite a bit of havoc at the castle before his friends finally caught up with him. He was wild-eyed and holding ribs that were most definitely broken, but his Decision was pushing him to keep going and Arthur finally saw this for what it was, much to his dismay as it was now too late to fix things. He and the others held off the vicious vines as Merlin made for the witch and her prisoner, and Merlin arrived in the missing king’s study just as the witch was trying to force Red Shoes to eat the apple she had plucked from the tree as the red shoes could not be removed even by her at this point. And this is when cruel irony comes into play; the witch easily captured Merlin with the strong vines under her control, because it would be rather ridiculous if she hadn’t been able to do that, and the threat of watching him be torn apart by them was what convinced Princess Snow in her guise of Red Shoes to surrender and bite into the apple. She began turning into a new tree almost immediately, her last steps having been in his direction and one hand reaching for him, but the witch threw the horrified dwarf out of the room before the transformation was complete, laughing about how once dawn’s light hit the new tree the transformation would be permanent and she could have her shoes back and be young and beautiful forever. Monologuing may be something of a trope for the wicked, but you cannot deny that it proves useful; in this case, it gave Merlin something he needed, which was a deadline.

Young men who have made capital-D Decisions always work best with a deadline.

The witch went outside to gloat in the faces of the victorious dwarfs, who were still trapped on the other side of a broken bridge that could only be crossed with the help of the vines, waiting for the sun to rise and secure her victory, and that was when Merlin crashed into her from behind—and in full view of his horrified friends, unfortunately—with around a hundred of the marked paper slips he normally used to focus his magic while fighting clutched in one small green fist. The impact pushed the witch off the edge of the broken parapet, he released the slips into the air as they fell…and then he called on every bit of magic he had in his smaller form to charge them all at once.

The resulting explosion shook the castle to its foundations as well as the mountain behind it and made everyone in the town below fear that fighting dragons or something even worse had taken up residence in the area. The vines shivered, and then disintegrated into dust. The wooden rabbit became a very confused king, and the three wooden bears turned back into children because there just really was no end to this particular witch’s depravity. A barefoot, frightened princess stumbled out of the castle and into her father’s arms, but when she looked around for the other person she had expected to be there all she saw were a handful of devastated dwarfs sobbing on the other side of a broken bridge. Snow barely heard her father say Merlin was gone. She threw herself to the edge of the parapet and screamed his name into the void even as her tears fell sparkling down after it, but there was no answer, no magic, nothing but dawn breaking above the mountains with horribly implacable cheerfulness, and she let herself be drawn back into her father’s embrace and sobbed with all the pain of a broken heart.

And then there came a whirring sound, and the triplets rose over the edge of the parapet on their reclaimed flying machine and set it down on the cracked stones. But they were in tears themselves, and bearing a fourth small green body with them, one which was singed and torn and looked rather dead, truth be told, even though his small chest was still rising and falling with faint, barely-there breaths. Merlin reacted to Snow calling his name, however, and his brown eyes opened, filled with pain but also with such joy to see her alive and so much love that it broke her heart all over again. And he took what even he knew was probably his last breath and gave her the one gift he had left—the one he felt he needed to give, to correct a misunderstanding he simply couldn’t bear to let her live with. “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” he whispered, willing her to see that he meant it, and then his eyes fell closed again and his breath stuttered in his chest.

And it was in that instant that Snow remembered every story she’d ever heard as a child about the magic of curses and transformations, and she knew. Sobbing, she pressed her lips to his in a desperate kiss, silently begging that storied old magic to save the man she loved. At first she thought it hadn’t worked, and she drew back from him feeling exhausted and empty…and then the magic rose up in a dense pink cloud, and when it dissipated there was a man about her own age lying there, a man with pale skin and familiar dark hair who blinked open equally familiar brown eyes that looked straight into hers. And Snow kissed him again, because this was really obviously a prince and he loved her and he was gorgeous and she was keeping him forever.

And that, dear readers, is where our story…well, perhaps would have ended, if this were a regular fairy tale. Perhaps we would have mentioned that the other princes broke their curses as well in improbably coincidental ways and there was a grand royal wedding with a contented king looking on as his only daughter danced with her prince. But you see, ‘perhaps’ does not account for the fact that we have some loose ends, as it were, to tie up. So we should probably get on with that, don’t you think?

 


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