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“There was a time, when men were kind,” she whispered into the bitter wind. “And their voices were soft…” Her bloodied hands and cracked fingernails clung almost limply to the stone tower wall. Five meters above her cell floor, she stood in the wide frame of the window that had allowed only air and no light into the dank room below. Belle’s quivering body was half of what it once had been, stripped down to a torn and blood-soaked chemise, while remnants of once full, wavy locks clung to her scalp in half-balding bits. The rest had been cruelly shaved and plucked in globs from her head, the wounded parts still stinging and bleeding.
“And the world was a song.”
A desolate mountain chain, capped in snow and surrounding her on every side just as sure and trapping as the walls about her now, was the first sight she’d seen in months besides the dirty brown walls and floors of her imprisonment. Frigid wind and cruel, snowy gales dragged like claws over Belle’s sallow and sensitive skin, though the worst of the burns adorning her back, neck, and thighs were at least numbed by the cold air. A particularly harsh gust nearly blew her from her perch, but she grappled feebly at stone walls, barely hanging on. She shook from head to toe, from fatigue and the hostile ice, but her will drove her further. She gripped against the banisters of a half-finished balcony, pulling herself up by her arms to the tip-top of the tower, where a long wooden plank stretched haphazardly out from the safety of the railing and out into sheer abyss.
The clerics’ tower stood higher than any tower she’d been atop before. Even Rumplestiltskin’s barbican couldn’t amount to the sheer, desolate stature with which she was faced now.
“There was a time…”
A simple kiss, the swell of her heart upon making contact with him, replayed over her bloodshot and tear-filled eyes. His sweetness filled her in that instant, as gentle as an autumn breeze and as kind as the man she knew Rumplestiltskin to be, and when her eyes cracked to see him, she saw a mere glimpse of the man he was, who he could have been. There was nothing like that tenderness, nothing like that delicate, hesitant kiss. And in that moment, she could have believed in a life where she and Rumplestiltskin could have lived together, hand in hand, wandering and adventuring the world, both free and in love enough to conquer anything.
Belle pulled in a sobbing breath, the tears in her eyes drying to ice.
“Then it all went wrong.”
“Any curse can be broken.”
She’d made a mistake.
“WHO TOLD YOU THAT?! WHO KNOWS THAT?!”
She’d pulled back, startled, afraid— his curse was revived, ugly, terrifying in its ferocity, and then mocking her in its victory over Rumplestiltskin’s cowardly heart.
“It was working—”
“SHUT UP!”
“This means it’s True Love!”
“SHUT THE HELL UP!”
She couldn’t have said anything differently, couldn’t have convinced him otherwise. The delicacy of the kiss was lost with his rough, scaled hand upon her arm, gripping hard enough to bruise until he threw her in the dungeon, so viciously angry that meters below she’d heard the devastation wrought on the castle for hours— days onward.
Banished, alone.
Heartbroken.
“I dreamed a dream in time gone by…when hope was high, life worth living.”
But Belle was not dead, and despite the inherent severities of the world, she remained fearless as well; for what could hurt her worse than a broken heart?
In those days, her smile remained kind, though the edges were lined in sadness, her eyes quick and mindful, but wary as well. Rumplestiltskin’s treatment of her had taught her better than to be unreservedly trusting, and the men of the world were rough and barbarous, cruel and mocking in words and actions. Despite the setbacks of traveling alone and relatively inexperienced, her days were filled with excitement and interesting stories from those she’d been lucky enough to befriend. Her father’s castle, in the fourth month of her journey, lay not far out of her path, and the ache to see him again grew as she neared her old home. The ogres, as Rumplestiltskin had promised, had not ravaged the land, even when she’d been banished from his castle. A dangerously sharp fluttering in her heart pervaded her control for a moment, and she missed him again. She’d hoped that time, adventure, and plenty of good ale would have at least dulled the poignant ache, and yet whenever his face passed over her mind’s eye, she felt it acutely.
True Love, she had mused in disdain, might not be so easy to forget after all.
In the strong though cold light of the setting sun, frigid and bare, Belle now clutched the thin collar of her ragged chemise, as if protesting even now the flare of her shattered heart.
"I dreamed that love would never die…"
From the woods she’d been taken by knights she didn’t recognize, despite being on her father’s land, and when she was brought before her father in the throne room, she was forced to the ground like a criminal. Her protests were met with cruelty, a strike from the guard captain, so forceful it left her hollow. When she finally dared to look up at the throne, her father’s place, she bit back a pained cry. For he was there, her father, who used to sit her on his knee and read to her on cold nights, though there was no pity nor love nor kindness in his once warm eyes. On his right and left shoulder stood hooded and cloaked men in inky black, as thick and tall as the knights who restrained her and yet about them, Belle could feel an evil so thick and mutilated that it seemed to darken the room. To her horror, they whispered into her father’s ear, their purple lips the only visual part of them.
“Belle,” her father said, stern, cold. She shuddered at the sound of it. “You are no longer welcome on these lands. The Lord Gaston, your betrothed, is missing. And you—” Even on the cleric’s tower, Belle would never forget the acid in his voice as he spat to her— “have been contaminated by that beast!”
Her voice had been calm, assured. “Father, no, he never—”
She was cut off by the men, the clerics, as they whispered words into her father’s ears. He nodded, eyes clouded.
“You’re not my daughter any longer.”
A spear could not have wounded her more. “No, father, please—”
“You’ve no longer any title…”
“Father, it’s me—”
“Any land…”
“You can’t just do this!”
“And for your infidelity at the hands of the Dark One, you shall be cleansed.”
“Infe-- I never! Papa, please don’t do this!”
“Until at such time when we will decide the day of your execution.”
Horrified into speechlessness, Belle’s mouth could only hang open in disbelief as she was dragged away, into the cold, into the dark, into death.
"But the Tigers come at night, with their voices soft as thunder…"
She’d fought at first— for days, weeks, maybe months on end. Every time her chamber door was opened to allow the clerics in with the scourges, she’d done anything to keep them from her, but eventually they’d limit her food, and her weakened body couldn’t fight. The flames had come next, tipped on the edges of long, wooden poles, and Belle was fastened by skin-ripping cords to a wooden rack while she received the blows for hours on end. At times she’d cried out for her father, for her friends in the forest to come for her, but always at the end of a round, when her mind was wearing from the pain and numbness, she’d whisper his name into the dark.
“Rumplestiltskin. Rumplestiltskin.”
But they’d gag her before she could say his name a third time, and even then, they came with wards and talismans and vials loaded with black magic. They put dust on her hair and clothes that smelt of ash and dead animals, rubbing it on her face, on her nude body after a beating. They whispered of the king, of the permission he’d given for each new torture, and no matter how she cried, no one could hear her. Belle’s father had abandoned her to the dark, and her lover had shut her out of his protection.
"As they tear your hope apart."
Belle had finally reached the very top of the tower, shaking so violently that even clutching herself didn’t help. The wide plank before her stretched out into the abyss. Her hands clutching the sides of the walls were mercilessly numb that when she finally let go of her perch to take the first step out, she didn’t feel herself let go.
“As they turn your dream to shame.”
They didn’t clean Belle, though icy water after a flame-seared scourge was soon thrown upon her. They’d often submerge her head by her hair into a bucket and leave her under so long that she’d stop fighting, pray to drown, but they’d pull her up in the next instant before putting her back again. Eventually, cackling women with warts on their noses came for her hair, plucked out the unbloodied parts and left the rest for the clerics to tear with their bare hands.
In the night, alone on the straw and filth-ridden floor, she’d cry for Rumplestiltskin in little, pain-soaked whimpers. She’d whisper and hope for him in her desperation— she hoped that even in his wrath he might take enough pity to deliver her. But he never came, not despite all the thousands of dreams she’d had of him.
He never came.
"There are dreams that cannot be. And there are storms we cannot whether."
The wind about her now howled in laughter at her, blowing in harsh gales, attempting to knock her down. She convulsed under the abuse but continued onward to the end of the plank, and when the gales grew harder, she battered against them with her hands and screamed, “I had a dream my life would be so different from this HELL I’M LIVING, so different now from what it seemed!”
And for once on that rotting tower, the wind’s howl’s ceased altogether, the snow stopped blowing, the air completely stilled. And Belle was alone on top of the world amongst the mountains. A sliver of golden sun breached through the clouds and lit her from behind, her silhouette glorious and warmed finally. This was the last bit of mercy the gods could show Belle, the maiden whose only fault was to fall in love.
And as a gift, there he was, before her, Rumplestiltskin, his visage faded and ethereal, like he always was inside her mind, though his fitted silks and scaled skin were all so detailed and marvelous to her bleary eyes. She sighed and in his eye was the cautious curiosity she’d learned to adore looking for in him. Like this she could have kissed him again, but he wasn’t truly there, and when the wind began in earnest, he faded as well, the final blow struck. With this last dream taken, Belle could hold on no longer, folding in on herself like a rag.
“Oh,” she whispered finally into the air, “life has killed the dream…”
A final sigh and she fell, fell, off the tower and tumbled end over end into the nothingness below like a doll in the wind. Whether she was dead before or when she hit the ground, not even the gods could say. Though the smile on her face spoke not of a horrific smash against the ground but of a soft landing, as if something had caught her tumble out of the air.
After all, she had fallen once before a windowsill, and a monster had been there to catch her. Perhaps she’d believed the same this time. No one knew.
Only this was ever truly said of Belle: She threw herself off the tower. She died.
“I dreamed…”