Chapter Text
Let me tell you a tale as old as time.
What makes a monster and what makes a man?
I honestly couldn't tell you.
I always thought curses and witches were the things of fairy tales. I had quite the rude awakening several years ago when a witch cursed me into a monster, turned my staff into enchanted objects, and gave me a sapphire rose as the heart of my curse. Did I deserve such a punishment? Most certainly not. Was everything the witch said about me true? Definitely so. Yet it seemed cruel to turn me into such a creature for merely denying an old beggar shelter and dragging my staff into it when they were not to blame. I was the only one at fault.
As soon as I start to feel even remotely human again, I relapse. I fall prey to the monster caged inside me. I'll start to feel normal, feel like my old self, genuinely laugh for once, and then the next thing I know I'm waking up covered in crimson. The monster likes to hunt, it likes to slaughter. The memories are always a blur of instinct and rage and I have to wonder how much of me is slipping away with each passing year.
According to the witch who did this to me, I was a monster when I was a man. My actions were indifferent, selfish, proud.
Now that I am a monster it's hard to tell what I am anymore.
Mostly agitated and despondent.
There was such bright hope for me in the beginning. I was certain I could break the curse. The witch said if I could learn to love and be loved in return before the last petal of the enchanted rose fell, the curse would be lifted. But as soon as that hope had blossomed, the monster crushed its petals into scarlet. I realized I wasn't just cursed to look like a monster, I was cursed to become a monster. How could anyone learn to love someone who would inevitably turn and try to kill them?
The curse is a mockery. The witch gave me a way to break it but not without chaining me down, preventing me from leaving this hell. I am constantly staring at the door to my freedom, only to be incapable of reaching it. There is no hope for me, and there never will be.
It's fitting that the enchanted rose is blue. It doesn't exist in nature and is instead made by changing the color of a white rose with dyes, much like how my own appearance was altered. A blue rose means "unattainable love," and I think that's fitting both for my love and the love I wish to receive. The rose is the color of my eyes, the last and only human trait I have left. It perfectly embodies the hopelessness of my curse, of how I will never be human again.
I think this will be my last winter.
A year from now the rose will be dead.
And I will be gone.