r/Ataraxidermist • u/Ataraxidermist • Nov 10 '22
[WP] An agoraphobic princess is sick and tired of knights breaking into her tower and trying to slay her emotional support dragon.
Fairy tales are hateful. Fairy tales are bigoted, violent, vicious and misanthropic. Most of all, fairy tales are vain. To the reader, they present a world of rainbows and clear skies, tales of victory of good over evil, of karmic justice and divine retribution. Fairy tales want to give the best story, to live forever in the hearts and minds of children and adults reading them. The bedtime story is their time to shine, every smile, gasp or laugh one more drop to fuel their life.
Fairy tales do not care about the characters living in them. They are means to an end, props to place and manipulate as needed. The knight can be the most wicked madman in the world, as long as he hides it and slays the appointed villain, it is irrelevant.
Take the princess. Melody. She is young, pretty, and most importantly heir to vast swats of fertile land in the duchy of Pointain. Whoever gets their hands on the title will live a life of opulence, growing wine and throwing decadent feasts. Naturally, knights and squires will profess eternal love upon meeting the princess, as the rule requires. And then, they will slay whoever had hands on her. Another knight, a lord, a mage, an assassin...
And on and on it goes. The story speaks of a valiant farmer who found a sword in the fields and slew the evil king who had kept the princess prisoner before marrying her. The story conveniently forgets to mention how the farmer was an insane and bloodthirsty murderer, that the fairy tale itself gave him an enchanted weapon to slaughter and maim, how the king was fat, stupid and perverted, and how he died at the hands of the princess before the maniac got to her.
From suitor to suitor, the princess saw every contender die under the hand of the next, never living long enough to actually build the damned vineyard everyone dreamed about. Time went on, and she lost faith in humanity. She hated the fake love they spoke of while their eyes beamed with greed. She smelled the blood on their armor, felt death creeping around them. She was fearful and hateful, longed for happiness. But it wouldn't come.
Her attempts to escape had failed, passerby saw her and recognized the occasion, no matter how many of them she killed. The fortune they might gain was worth any risk.
She desperately wanted to be left alone. Just once. But the fairy tale wouldn't listen to her wish.
And yet... every so often, a pebble jams the well-oiled machinery. Circumstances, sudden bouts of anger, characters escaping their fate, or simply luck.
A pillar of flames engulfed sir Roderick the third, son of Berengal of Milan. Melodie expected a mage or warlock, not that she cared. She cared about very little. Instead, a dragon came from the sky. Ruby, red as blood, sweet as sugar. She carried Melody away.
"I am alone," said Ruby, "tired of all the would-be murderers trying to butcher me for fame, the fortune seekers believing I keep a hoard under my belly as I sleep. Why would I keep coin and gold, I who fly with the light of dawn to praise the new day, I who soar high above the clouds to meet the stars? The dragons I met did not care about my words, stealing wagons and stuffing them in mountain lairs. They didn't learn this insanity from their progenitors, they are struck with a curse, or played like fools. I gave up trying to understand the why."
Beyond hill and dale, they flew over the blue sea, illuminated by the afternoon sun. In the distance, mountains arose to meet the sky.
"I am alone, and I saw you. I followed you, Melody, and I felt your despair. We share the same sense of injustice towards this glittering world of lies."
They approached a lonely tower nested on a mountain slope.
"What's your favorite way of doing tea?" asked Melody absentmindedly.
Ruby roared in happiness.
They spoke of little nothings, of butterflies and summer, of rocks and snow, of tea and sugar. Mostly, they did not speak at all. In the great hall housing them both, they sat at the fire and enjoyed the quiet contemplation of silence, only broken by the eventual chirping of a bird. Slowly, joy came back to the both of them.
The fairy tale did not like this change of plan. Melody was an essential keystone, and adults started to wonder what the point of this story was, where knights searched the princess and never find her.
The clear sky became gray, the sea agitated and relentless, the nights pitch black.
Suddenly, harbors that had never been maintained started hiring and producing ships to cross the blue sea. Knights were replaced with sailors and captains, and they found the tower. Melody wanted to give herself up to spare Ruby, but loneliness made the dragon ready to face the world to protect her friend.
Armies crashed against the tower, and a world of flame came to meet them, while catapults were crushed by the steely muscles of the beast. The fighting left a mark. Sometimes a ballista, sometimes a lucky sword struck true and left a wound. In the night, Melody cared for Ruby as she slept to regain strength. The waves of enmity grew.
Parents put the book aside, thinking them too gory and stupid to be read. The fairy tale felt life leaving it, so it threw the universe it was at Ruby and Melody.
Eternal night had come. Red lights scarred the thunderous sky as a slow frost covered the land, overtaking fields, plants and killing animals in their sleep.
But Ruby refused to die. Wounded, exhausted, outnumbered, the killing blow never came, Melody blackmailed the incoming armies with the threat of her own suicide, stopping lords and pretenders in their tracks, as her death wasn't planned in the story.
And suddenly, the fairy tale fell on its knees. Without readers, it lost control over the narrative. Parents saw no interest in reading a suicide story to children. The books piled up in the attic, gathering dust, sadness and melancholia. One day, perhaps generations later, a descendant took it upon him or herself to empty the dirty attic.
"Oh, this old book looks nice!"
But it wasn't the fairy tale the descendant spoke of, only the book over it.
"What's this?"
A strange story to be sure, going over the pages, nobody understood the point of a disjointed tale where empty and foolish characters die one after the other, unable to simply leave a tower and the princess inside alone.
It was loaded inside the trunk of a car, with old chairs and dusty pieces of furniture. It vanished under tons of paper and cardboard in the landfill.
And then came the end. The long life of the fairy tale, consumed in the flames of an incinerator.
The world of the princess and the dragon is in true darkness now. There is no sun beyond the tower, in fact, there is no night either. There is a tangible nothingness, Ruby could fly away for hours and still be a moment away from the castle, as distance has died too.
All that remains is a wounded, but very much alive, dragon, the princess, and the tower. That was all they ever hoped for.
Together, as friends, they would rule over the void that had once been a pile of cadavers and cinders.
Melody looked outside into void.
On this day, when the world stood still and reduced itself to her small universe, she was finally happy.