by Walleye
The fairy flew down and gently stroked her blond hair. “Now the story really begins, my friend.”
First Meeting With The Beast
“Good morning, young master.” The oh-so familiar voice said, trying to be as pleasant and as gentle as it could without being irritating. In the Beast’s opinion it was failing very miserably.
Duke Johnathan Harkins, the Prince and heir to the Harkins throne and now a beast, awoke in his bedroom and winced as he could feel his head aching and throbbing.
He had gotten very drunk last night after the latest princess brought in to break the curse of the beast had turned out to be another abysmal failure. This one had fled the castle after declining to even have dinner with him.
Now after drinking to drown his disappointment, the last thing he wanted to hear was the overly cheery voice of Richards, his chamberlain. The man meant well but why did he have to so damn loud and cherry sounding?
“What’s good about it?” He growled so low that the chamberlain deliberately deigned to not take notice.
Once Richards would have answered his Prince with a cheerful reminder that it was a beautiful day with the birds singing outside in the trees. He didn’t dare as he remembered the reaction last time he’d done that.
The Beast who was ascendant when Prince Johnathan was angry had grabbed him by his foot and dangled him out the window over the no longer happily cheeping birds who had fled squawking in terrified flight.
The Beast had roared. “If you like them so much you can join them. It’s your choice, wake me up and join the birds or let me sleep and you can stay safely inside.”
Needless to say Richards on that day had rationally opted for sanity. “Inside, if you please, young master.”
“Good choice.” The Beast had growled as he had pulled him back inside and dropped him with a thud on the floor.
Today Richards just went tut, tut as he straightened up the debris of bottles and glasses from the young master’s drinking session last night. Let the young man have a few more moments of quiet before his duties as master of the castle pulled him back into the real world.
Seeing that the persistent man was not going to go away, Johnathan rubbed his eyes with his hairy paws as he sat up in the bed. He knew from bitter experience that his chamberlain would not let him idle the entire day away just because he’d gotten stinking drunk the night before.
The last time he’d tried to do that the man had called in the chaplain Father Williams to lead him in the scriptures as a way to save his soul. Heaven forbid. The chaplain meant well and Johnathan appreciated that the poor man still believed that he had a soul worth saving even after he had been turned into something that looked more like a devil than a man.
He tried to focus his eyes on the stout man standing in front of him. Richards if he resembled anything bore a strong resemblance to a black-haired turtle with his long neck and rounded chin.
Johnathan would have given anything to resemble a turtle or a turkey which was what his master of the wardrobe Phillips looked like as the man with his fading red hair hopped about opening up the wardrobe, instead of the Beast which was the Prince’s present form.
He had been cursed to be a beast for three years now and he knew what he would see if he dared to look in the mirror hung on one of the walls of his chamber. He would first behold a yellow lion’s mane where his head of normal curly brown hair had once proudly resided. His roman nose had become an abbreviated snout and his smile if he ever dared to show it would reveal upper and lower two-inch fangs.
His eyes were still bright blue but his lower jaw was enlarged to twice its original size. On the sides of his head two curly horns now stood out about six inches from the sides of his skull. His once manly chest now more resembled that of a hairy gorilla and so did his muscled arms and broad legs and his feet were big and shaped like the paws of a bear and each bore claws that a grizzly bear would have been proud of.
“All right. I’m up, Richards.” He forced himself to say it slowly so that he could be understood through his misshapen jaws and teeth.
Part of the first six months of his existence as a cursed monster had been a terrible struggle to learn to speak again as his mouth had been reshaped and he now had four fangs which tangled his tongue up quite badly.
If he spoke slowly, he was proud to say, he sounded almost normal. But let him get excited and then he sounded like the beast he looked like.
“What are you planning to do today, young master?” Richards asked. “Mister Phillips has a large selection of garments for you to choose from.”
Phillips grinned and bobbed his head like a turkey as he stepped back from the open doors of the wardrobe to display his lovingly cared for garments. He had everything from formal suits to simple shirts and trousers all refitted by the castle seamstress to fit Johnathan’s new body. He knew his previous laboriously acquired human wardrobe had been retired and stored in mothballs until he was returned to his human form
Phillips pulled a formal suit out. “Will we be entertaining the young lady at breakfast?” He asked hopefully, ignoring Richard’s warning gestures to not go there.
Johnathan growled in irritation. They had this discussion almost every morning since he’d changed. “She’s grr onnn.” He paused and spoke slower. “She’s gone. Didn’t even last a day. She ran away last evening even before we had dinner.”
“I’m sorry, master.” Phillips regretfully put the formal suit back. “Then what will you require this beautiful morning?”
Johnathan yawned, showing off his fangs. “For now I just need a bathrobe. I’m going swimming down at the river as I feel like I look, a mess.”
Fortunately for them neither man hastened to reassure him that he looked just fine. One thing Johnathan had learned to hate very early on was people telling him how good he looked. He knew how he looked right now and it wasn’t anywhere near being good.
He threw the sheets back and swung his hairy legs with their bear clawed feet out onto the wooden floor and came erect. At least he could still walk on his hind legs since his lower legs were curved like those of the mythical demigod, Pan.
Like Pan he knew that his whole body was covered with yellow hair which was about three-inches thick on his chest but on his upper and lower limbs it grew out to six inches. He had once been only five foot seven, average for a man of his physical age, but now he stood at six-foot-nine inches and weighed nearly a hundred pounds more than he had before the change and a lot of that extra weight was now in bone and muscle.
Phillips inspected the wardrobe carefully like he did every morning. “Which do you think, master? The red or the yellow robe?”
Johnathan wanted to roar at the man. ‘I don’t care!’, but he forced himself to answer. “The yellow, please.” The last word he ground out with great difficulty.
He accepted Phillips’ and Richards’ help in getting his robe on. The last time he’d done it alone he had torn the robe in two trying to force it over the new muscles in his back.
Later as he walked to the drawbridge, the Gate Keeper, a white-haired middle-aged man named Stanley who had been a soldier before being wounded asked. “Will you require an escort to the river pool today, Sire?”
“No.” The last time some crazy tentacle thing had tried to grab him, he had pounded it into instant sludge in five minutes. He grinned, remembering the three-minute slugfest. It had been the most fun he’d had since he’d been cursed. Maybe he’d get lucky and some idiot monster would volunteer to amuse him again.
Then there had been those crazy Will-o-Wisps. They’d quickly found that he could smash them a lot faster than they could eat him. They’d learned their lesson after he had crushed half of them and now they stayed away from him.
There were a few ogres and orcs stupid enough to give him some entertainment but lately even the dimwitted monsters seemed to be learning to stay as far away from him as they could get.
He strode down the cobblestone path to the swimming ho
le in the river, hardly noticing the very rapid retreat of every bird, dragon thing, rabbit, the occasional orc or troll and other creature who caught sight of him. After three years he was used to their fear.
What he would never get used to was that same fear in the maidens’ eyes who had been brought there to break the spell. Their looks on seeing him still hurt deep inside.
He had never known there were so many eligible unmarried women of high station in the fairytaleland kingdoms until his matchmaking mother, the Queen, had started shipping them here in droves to try and break the curse. After three years the woman had to be draining the dregs from the bottom of the peerage barrel.
How many had there been so far? Fifty or more princesses? Almost all of whom had recoiled in horror, screamed and run in fright at the first sight of him, yelling. “Beast.”
At first he’d been outraged that this was their reaction to him and had roared at them as they fled. This had got back to his Mother and earned him a severe scolding and the threat of a royal visit to box his ears if he did not behave like a proper prince even if he was now a beast.
As a result he’d curbed his temper and with the well-meaning chaplain Father William’s help he’d tried to see himself from the young woman’s point of view. If he acted like a monster, then they would treat him like one. As his Mother and the chaplain had sternly pointed out this was not the way to win a young lady’s heart
After that he had tried hard to be the gentleman and even had worn the formal red suit whose starched collar made his neck itch like tarnation when he was introduced to the young women. He had tried to be nice and had even smiled until Phillips had reminded him that his fangs were showing and giving absolutely the wrong impression that he wanted to have a snack.
Phillips had also pointed out that asking them to join him for bite to eat was not a good form of a first greeting as they got the wrong idea they were the main course.
He had tried so hard to follow these suggestions but it hadn’t made a jot of difference as most of the princesses had still screamed the first time they saw him. As this kept happening he found that his sense of outrage had been replaced with a deepening sense of inevitability and futility. He was doomed to remain a beast and there was nothing he could do about it.
As a last resort he had tried not letting the woman leave until the next morning so he could at least spend the evening wining and dining them. Maybe familiarity would breed sympathy instead of fear? Hah!
The woman last night had actually come to the dining room to eat dinner with him but as the main course had been served and he had struggled with the silverware she had thrown her napkin down and fled sobbing. “I can’t do this with a beast.”
“Then, get out!!” He’d roared after her and had smashed his fist into the table so hard that the thirty-foot table had jumped a foot in the air, sending dishes, glasses, silverware and food flying. The latter was gleefully accepted by his hunting dogs.
It was frustrating. He’d gotten so much further with her than any of the others that getting drunk afterwards out of frustration had seemed to be the appropriate response to this overwhelming rejection and lack of success.
Right now as he walked down the cobblestone path to the river he realized that he didn’t care anymore what any of the women thought. The next woman who showed up at his door and screamed ‘beast’ he just might grab her by her bustle and throw her in the moat with the snakes and the frogs. They wanted a beast? He’d be glad to give her one in spite of his Mother’s wishes.
Disappointed that no monster had jumped out to provide him with welcome entertainment he reached the pavilion that had been set up for him, shucked his bathrobe, tossed it on the floor of the tent, and walked down the stone steps which had been carved into the bank until he was on the edge of the river pool.
The pool was at least forty yards wide and almost five hundred yards long and quite deep at its center. Overhead leaves and branches of the nearly white sycamore trees were reflected in the slowly moving water and he could hear birds among which were really feathered dragonets singing their happy songs.
“Oh, shut up!” He growled at the birds as he tested the water with a toe. They of course ignored him like they did every day.
He allowed himself to slide down into the cool, clear, magic water. He reveled in the tingling feeling of magic coursing through his body, washing away his headache as if it had never been. At least there was one thing that the magic water was good for. He laid on his back floating in the water’s gentle embrace looking up at the early morning clouds floating by.
Here in the river was the one place he could relax and be himself. He was so calmed by the magic that he began to drift off to sleep. But that was when he first heard the singing.
He cocked his head and listened. It was certainly not those damned Will-o-Wisps who tried to lure you away so that they could dine on you. As he listened further he realized that the singer had to be a young woman. What was a young woman doing here?
The singing was coming from just around a bend in the river and to get closer he decided he had to get out of the water and to move along the bank as the brush there would provide cover and help him get closer before he was spotted which he would’ve been if he had tried to sneak up on her by wading in the river. As he moved stealthily through the brush towards the singer the song grew in strength.
She wasn’t a perfect singer by any means as he realized that he had heard at least two wrong notes but that made her voice more interesting than if she had been a trained singer. Her voice spoke of want and longing and drew him around the bend and then he saw the young woman through a gap in the bushes.
She was sitting on a rock at the entrance to the pool and running a comb through her luxuriant, long blond hair while she faced away from him. By God. She was almost naked as he could see her bare back. Who was she? Why was she here? And where were her chaperones or at least some attendants such as members of her family?
Well those mysteries could await solution later. He sat down on a log and listened as she continued to sing. It reminded him of the songs his mother had sung to him when he was little and she had been happy because his Father was still alive. Listening to this song filled him momentarily with a sense of peace.
She stopped combing her hair and her singing at the same time. As she bent over to put her comb into her carrying pouch, he couldn’t help his response. He rose, clapped his paws together and called out. “Bravo!”
The woman whirled her body around, balanced on her hands on the rock, and stared at him in stunned surprise. Even with the look of shock he saw there her face framed by her long blond hair was beautiful and then as his eyes were drawn down to her red-cloth-covered covered breasts he saw the rest of her which consisted of a green, scale-covered fishtail.
“You’re a siren!” He gasped out.
She shrieked. “A beast!” And dove into the water with a huge splash and vanished into the depths of the pool.
“No! Wait!” He cried as he plunged into the water after her. He saw her green tail once as he closed in on her, sending water spraying up on both sides of him as he ran on all fours through the water. But just as was about to grab her tail, she vanished into the depths of the pool.
He came to a stop and glared in the direction that she had gone. “Perfect.” He growled to himself. Even a female monster like a man-luring siren saw him for what he was, a beast. His rage demanded expression and he threw back his head and howled out his frustration and misery to the uncaring skies.
Even deep under the surface Maryellen could hear the enraged howls of the monster. She shivered as she listened to its frustrated howls. It sounded so angry. What would it have done to her if it had managed to catch a hold of her tail?
Finally the howls died away and after several minutes of quiet she decided to venture back to the surface of the river again. She moved slowly to the middle of the river and rose just as cautiously to the surface. She poked her head out and carefully loo
ked around. Good. There were no signs of the monster.
Instead there was her friend floating in the air, waiting for her with a very perplexed look on her face. “Why did you flee?” Thistledown asked her
Was the fairy blind? “Didn’t you see the monster after me? That’s why I fled.” Maryellen retorted.
Thistledown sighed. “Again, why did you flee when there was no reason to do so?” The mermaid stared at her in perplexity.
The fairy blew out a puff of air in exasperation. “You’ve been told that nothing evil can harm you while you’re in the river. Since you were on a rock in the river there was no reason for you to run away.”
The mermaid frowned as she considered this. Had she made a mistake? She protested trying to defend her actions. “It spoke to me. All the creatures who tried to trick me previously did it by speaking to me.”
“They did indeed speak to you.” Thistledown said as she tapped her wand into the palm of her free hand. You would’ve been fine those other times if you had not done what they wanted you to do which was to leave the river.”
“Besides.” The fairy continued. “Didn’t you notice that the Beast was unharmed by contact with the river water? That should tell you that he meant you no harm.”
“Sorry.” Maryellen said as she realized her friend was right. “I guess I panicked and I didn’t think.”
“It was partly my fault too as I wasn’t with you when you met the Beast.” Thistledown replied. “It’s my job to be your friend and advise you and I was off having breakfast.”
They regarded each other silently for a minute before the fairy asked out of curiosity. “What did the Beast look like to you?”
Maryellen told her. “It was very scary. It had horns and fangs. It was very tall and muscular and its body was covered with long yellow hair.”
“You said it spoke to you. What did it say?”
