Moster.
That was what they called me, long ago. But I wasn’t a monster. I was a girl.
The creature, emaciated, skeletal, glowered at me - its legs little more than bones, stray bits of flesh dripping off, tattered, still encrusted with specks of blood. Its ribs and hips plunged outwards, the sallow skin wrapped around it sagging like a blanket loved to tatters. The shroud strewn across its pallid body personified frozen tundra - blank, perfect white, illuminating the decayed yellow of its fingers all the more clearly. And it’s face…
I was only a little girl - a raven-haired child whose days were enhanced by joy, innocence, before I understood the dark place the world could be. I dreamed of heroes in brash, bold colors, shivered at the fearsome, feral beasts lurking in the dark. At the end of the day, I raced into the warm, rose-scented arms of the person who loved me unconditionally.
I was just a girl.
Its skull, as I watched, crumbled on upon itself, bit by bit, bone softening, flaking away like plaster until only half of the head remained, the rest a cool, carved dish. Strands of oily onyx tresses shivered away into the darkness with the skull.
The monster’s throat contorted as a pig -like squeal swelled from its throat. It mourned the loss of its hair.
Empty eye sockets blazed towards me, faint traces of red glazing their edges.
My mouth plunged open, and the monster mocked me, jaw unhinging like a serpent’s with a metallic click. Again, that pig- like squeal blossomed from its throat. A dark howl of laughter.
But in the starving village, where crows perched atop crumbling houses, where those unlucky enough to be caught past curfew were killed and not seen again, they despised me. They gave me space to live on the outskirts, and I settled. I attended the village school. I met the person whom I loved with all my heart there.
As the creature’s bony arm popped and clicked upwards, running a hand over the half of its face, its eyes sockets darkened. A scent wafted over me, washing my tongue free of the castle’s dust - not a foul reek, but the soothing odor of roses and roast beef, kindling memories of home, of love and sanctuary. I stiffened, and so did the monster. It knew. It knew I had come to kill it. Playtime was over.
For many a year, I remained in the village, and cultivated my dreams. Ideas of heroes filled my mind once again, but this time, it was I on the silken steed, with the person I loved with all my heart beside me.
I lunged - but found my eyes drawn to the monster’s throat. Nestled between the intertwining bones there rested a cold, smooth stone, carved with care into the shape of a human heart.
The person I loved with all my heart was my sole confidante, my soulmate. When we touched, it was as though particles of light and air burst under my skin, molding me into a being light enough to fly. I cared for them so, that I attempted to give them all they desired.
I watched as their face shriveled, ice worming into their eyes, settling there, mouth a mask of horror. They did not want me.
The starving village chased me away - knives and steel and flames clasped in thick hands. My home burned. I burned.
The monster guarded its own heart. Once, it had been whole, a being with a curved body and steadfastly beating heart, a golden soul.
Pain and betrayal and loss and heartbreak had waged war against the heart and soul, until, in order to save its heart, the monster had removed the source of the pain. Ripped out its own heart. Its body withered, yet it fled, to the darkness of this castle, where it skulked, clicking and screeching in the hours of the night. No one - not even the famished crows - dared approach the cursed site.
And what had happened to its mind? While the soul eroded, and heart remained encased in stone, perhaps the mind vanished. Perhaps it had ripped it out too, so as to forget its failures and faults.
Who was this monster, now? How could I possibly defeat it? What did it want?
It was as I lay dying in the forest, skin charred, face withered, beauty chased away like to moon at dawn, that the sorcerer found me.
He taught me the arts of magic, fed me heat and meat and witchery in his hut. He healed my heart, beaten and torn, and made it whole once again. He helped me to move on, not to mind the past., to smother those thoughts of love and loss that had so plagued me. I reached out, once, and touched happiness, under his care.
But when I wished to care once again - to open my heart, to weep and scream and shriek with laughter - he would not let me. I was safer this way, he told me. And so I slipped away, under the cover of darkness, to slay the beast I had heard to much of. In late years, it had arisen, stalking the night, screeching and clicking, luring travellers with the scent of home and heart before trapping them in the darkness of the bogs, in the pitfalls of the woods. If I could kill the beast, I would open my heart once more. They would love me. They would have to love me.
I would kill the beast.
I hesitated, petrified, moved to pity, for too long.
The monster clicked once, a sorrowful noise that set my skull to tingling. Bony fingers scrabbled at its throat. The heart of stone ripped away, shattering across the shadow-cloaked floor.
The monster eroded - slowly at first, then with greater rapidity, like a billowing curtain drawn over its jagged form. Dust spattered across the floor as the jagged, angular feet vanished, then the creaking legs, the drum-like torso, the neck. The black tatters of what might once have been a cloak burst into miniature flames, expelled by the shock of magic, while the shadows of the room rushed in, giving form to nothingness, shrouding the beast.
The skull swiveled on its nonexistent neck, but did not dissolve. Instead, it heightened, whitened. Thick, raven hair bloomed from the shadows across its face; it squealed in joy and triumph. When the eye sockets met my own again, they swirled with flames as violet as madness, dark as the witching hour.
I understood with vivid horror.
I journeyed to the castle, tenacity nipping at my heels. I rode in without pause, searched room after room, until, in the highest tower, sword cold in my grasp, it appeared to me.
The monster, now intangible, had completed its quest. Once a beginning of flesh and bone, it could now slip through the shadows, wheel across the sky, before plunging through the windows of those it hunted - sleeping parents, blissful children, innocent girls, devious young men intent on breaking hearts. There… its cold eyes gleamed, passageways to the abyss.
It would save them. With its scents of home, it wanted to save them - to take them, preserve them, keep them from heartbreak, the eroding, gasping pain it had endured. But something in its foul nature, some vindictive twist in its soul, would ensure that they would not be saved - rather, they would enter a state of eternal sleep, within the catacombs of the castle, in which their dreams were forever haunted by the loss and pain of the monster. And when their bodies finally withered away… they would join it, skeletal creatures, in capturing its next victims - souls as mutilated as the monster’s.
I gazed into the face of evil incarnate.
And saw there the eyes of a frightened child.
My chest rattled, heaved with fury. I would not be defeated - not now. I would save the children, the youths and maidens, from this beast. I would save them.
I was just a girl.
All I wanted was love.
With a desperate cry, I raised my blade to slay the beast.
The glass fractured, spinning outwards in crystalline arcs, as the skeletal hand grasping the ancient sword shattered to fragments like the rest of my burnt, mutilated, human body. No more.
I needed no mirror now.