Chapter Text
Every story has a context. Every character has a past. And every curse has an origin. This one was forged not in void, but in the furnace of cruelty and despair.
Once upon a time, in a land shrouded by grey mountains, reigned a cruel king. Hypocritical, selfish, and sadistic, the king derived genuine joy from the suffering of others, both on the battlefield and in the dungeons. Yet, in those warlike times, his people were blinded by the promise of protection and victory. They saw his brutality as necessary strength, not the mortal sin it truly was.
A vile irony of fate was the king’s appearance, for he was beautiful as the sun, like an ancient god carved from marble. His heart, however, remained lonely. He refused all brides, be they daughters of wealthy burghers or foreign nobles; he would not marry for politics if the maiden’s appearance wasn’t as immaculately beautiful as his own. His sick narcissism would only permit a consort capable of bearing heirs who reflected his own perfection.
One day, while leading his infantry to crush the final resistance of the neighboring kingdom – a dispute over passage rights on an insignificant river, merely a chance to demonstrate his strength – his eyes swept over the autumnal landscape. Lands that, though technically still belonging to the ungrateful neighbor, would soon swell his domain. Along the way, his scouts spotted a wretched caravan.
About half a dozen scrawny oxen pulled a rickety cart. A family of serfs, displaced, wandered in search of refuge. Their few belongings were corroded trinkets: holed pots, dull hoes, infested blankets. No more than twenty souls, their clothes were rags unprepared for the coming winter. Their faces and hands were so caked in grime they scarcely seemed native. Thin, poor, terrified, but worst of all for the king, they were nauseatingly foul. How dare such scum place themselves before my eyes? he thought with deep disgust. Where they came from or where they were going mattered little. He only wished them gone.
“Your Grace?” inquired a captain, awaiting orders.
“Cleanse my future lands of this filth,” commanded the king, his voice sharp as ice. But as he turned towards his velvet-lined carriage, away from the ugliness, his eyes saw her . Amongst the muddy despair, the degrading poverty, he found his queen. He blinked, doubting his own sanity after too much wine. She would need a bath, evidently, but… her bone structure, her features, beneath the grime.
Tears carved paths down her face as his soldiers cut down one of the caravan men. A baby wailed, an old woman screamed helplessly. It would be quick.
With a brief wave of his hand, the maiden was spared the massacre. He let his men plunder the miserable belongings; they were crumbs to him. The girl was driven mad with horror, but what did it matter? The king knew her gratitude would come when she saw his palatial luxury. He ordered her taken to his home, scrubbed clean, and made ready for his return.
The wait wasn’t long. Within about three weeks, the lands were annexed to his kingdom, and his people hailed him as a deserving hero. In his twisted mind, he was a triumphant conqueror returning to enjoy his most precious war spoil. All was justified by an insult over passage rights. He would be immortalized in the chronicles, an example for his grandsons: handsome, merciless, victorious.
Upon entering his fortress, his first words were for her. “Show her to me. I want to see if she is truly the fairest of them all.”
The soldiers exchanged cynical glances. They dared not laugh aloud, but doubted that dirty peasant girl would become a queen. They saw her as a fleeting pastime, something to be used and discarded. They ignored or failed to recognize how self-centered the king was, enslaved by his own twisted vanity. However cruel, he had been sincere.
For young Klara, however, it was an endless nightmare.
At nineteen, she had been embroidering a trousseau for her marriage to Thomas, the miller’s son, the next spring. She should have watched her siblings grow, should have helped with the barley harvest. The war that destroyed her reality had begun over an insult between nobles whose names she never knew. “Leave matters of lords to the lords, sweetheart; the baron is there to protect us,” her mother had said. But he hadn’t.
They gathered what they could carry: saved seeds, thicker blankets, three animals. “Let’s go to the capital, near the king it will be safer,” her father, already bent with age, had said, leading the flight. Her mother and grandmother prayed day and night for safety, for water, for strength.
The baron who had failed to protect them served the nobles who served the king. The king was at the top. Klara understood that concept; what she didn’t understand was how being near the monsters would be better for them.
The first to die was her uncle. Then her father. Her brothers. Paralyzed, Klara didn’t scream like her mother, nor sob like the little ones. She turned to stone. When that nobleman, dressed in fine linen and golden details, approached to examine her like a horse, some murmured she had been “spared.” Seeing the fortress, its Gothic towers piercing the grey sky, she imagined dungeons, hands bleeding from washing clothes, and eternal tears. Only the last part would prove true.
Strange women, who likely had more coin than she did, yet called her “my lady.” They spoke a harsh dialect as they grabbed her and scrubbed her skin until every trace of her homeland was stripped away. They filled Klara with oils of lavender and chamomile, burned her rough, patched dress – her last memory of her mother – and dressed her in linen and delicate fabrics. There, Klara discovered that with thick walls and enormous fireplaces, clothes could be lighter. Those strangers tore Klara out of her own body and locked her away in a room larger than her house.
For three weeks, she was isolated. For three weeks, she prayed and wept. She wept for the dead, prayed for an end. When she refused food, the maids forced her to eat. Until he arrived. The executioner of her family, the demon who had imprisoned her. He held her face with cold, iron hands. “Perfect,” he said with his guttural accent.
Perfect . Perfectly beautiful, perfectly his. Perfect to be his queen, that’s what he meant. A face worthy of his own .
Klara spat on him.
Maids and servants murmured, shocked. But the king’s haughty smile didn’t waver. He wiped the spit away with his gloved hand and saw in her a flame to ignite his lantern, ignoring that Klara was not a hearth blaze, contained by grates, but a wildfire.
No “yes” left her lips during the hurried ceremony, conducted by a priest who averted his eyes. The marriage proceeded. The king’s cruelty soon mingled with his impatience. Purple bruises bloomed on Klara’s arms, back, and thighs – never on her face. “Your face is a godsent gift, like mine” he said, “that’s why I don’t understand why you don’t thank me for the gifts I bestow upon you!”
Because of this, one day he brought a gift. Left upon the dressing table in her chambers. Oval-shaped and nearly half a meter tall, a polished bronze disk gleamed, inlaid with blood-red rubies brought from distant lands in the Orient. On the ebony base, the words were engraved: For the Fairest of Them All. The reflection left Klara stunned.
She didn’t recognize the court lady staring back at her. She didn’t know the pale noblewoman, without sun marks, without marks of labor, dressed in silks, with a mouth that had forgotten how to smile.
“That is why, my treasure, I chose you,” said the king, emerging behind her like a poisonous shadow, kissing her neck like a viper.
Not even the king himself could have said whether it was a threat or a compliment. The gift ignited her spark. Pure bitterness, unbridled hatred, suffocated the last gasp of hope in the young queen’s heart. She looked at the reflection, seeing not beauty, but the blood of her family, the mud of her stolen life, the gilded prison.
She squeezed her eyes shut, hard.
“No,” he said, gripping his consort’s chin with those same icy steel fingers. “Look. Look and be grateful for what you see.”
The queen’s mouth trembled, but she said nothing. She couldn’t.
The king stepped back but kept his gaze on her through the reflection. “You will not leave here until you smile at what I’ve given you,” he said, and vanished.
Klara released the breath trapped in her lungs but didn’t move. She searched that reflection for some memory of herself but found none. Each minute after this realization crystallized her hatred and rancor until the words finally formed:
May every woman forced onto this throne see in this glass not beauty, but the blood that sustains it. May the vanity that brought you to me devour those who gaze upon themselves here. May this reflection be a prison for their minds, as it is my prison. Until innocent blood is avenged!
These were her last words.
And then she laughed. Not the smile of an innocent dove, but a hysterical, broken laugh.
A sinister glow, crimson as her brothers’ blood, emanated from the inlaid stones, solidifying her curse.
Klara did not know how to fly. But she knew she would not live another day in that gilded cage. She hurled herself against the tall stained glass windows, taking with her the young peasant girl she once was, but leaving behind her fury frozen in the bronze and rubies.
The mirror survived. And Klara’s curse, born of the purest hopelessness and a twisted thirst for justice, began its long, dark vigil, awaiting the next queen forced onto the throne.