Chapter Text
Once upon a time, in the coastal hills of northern Spain, a powerful Don lived with his two sons in a magnificent villa overlooking the ocean. The Don was a firm but fair man, caring for his tenants and all who lived in his territory, but his eldest son was harsh and cruel and when the Don died, he took over rule of the region. He taxed the people fiercely, driving many to poverty and destitution. The younger brother tried to intervene, but to no avail, until one balmy summer day when a young peasant woman appeared in the villa’s courtyard calling for the young Don’s attention. She begged the Don to show mercy to the people of her village, explaining that they could not pay his tax or they would starve.
The Don dismissed her pleas but she implored him again for compassion. He turned her away, calling the guards to remove her, but a crash of thunder stopped them. The summer afternoon was suddenly plunged into darkness, the only light a brilliant glow from the young woman. “You were given the opportunity to alter your actions and chose bitterness and greed. I place my curse upon you and and yours, that you will know no joy until the day someone shows you the mercy and compassion you refused to show others. Anyone who comes upon you or this place will see only a monster, unfeeling and alone. You will have two decades to find your heart and break the spell, be forever a monster. Deja que la cicatriz en tu rostro marque el dolor que has infligido a otros. hasta que alguien pueda ver el pasado, permanece maldito.” Another crash of thunder and the young woman was gone, as well as the guards and servants; only the Don and his brother remained. Where the pair had been handsome and charming, they looked at each other to find scarred faces and bodies. The magnificent vineyard that spilled over the hills around their home were shriveled and dry; the glittering river that ran from the mountain tops to the coast had dried to only a dust trough.
The elder brother blamed the younger for his plight and sent him away-banishing him far from the villa, far from any hope of breaking the curse upon them both. A decade passed and the younger brother traveled the world, serving any master who could look upon him and gaining more scars on his skin. While traveling in his homeland, he heard rumors of a monster in the north killed by villagers, a vicious beast found in the high ridges of Asturias; his heart sank. Asturias wasn’t known for wild animals; surely it was the monster his brother had become.
The younger brother returned to his family’s villa, now overgrown and abandoned, lost to time and his brother’s apathy. Surprisingly, a few servants remained in the villa, some of his father’s most loyal, and they relayed the tale of his brother’s descent to madness and how he’d tangled with hunters in woods before they’d killed him. They also told him of a seemingly magical book that had appeared the day the sorceress had placed the curse, a book which showed anything the reader asked.
Lost in grief at the final blow to his family, the youngest son, now the new Don, locked himself away in the villa. How do you break a curse that wasn’t meant for you?