The Charming Curse

Sunlight moved slowly over the Frostborn Mountains. It always took a leisurely pace over the dangerous cliffs, but once it reached the peak, it rushed into a gallop down the mountainside and into the valley proper. On this fateful day, the light tripped.

The light tumbled clumsily down into the valley of Everland. It flowed past the pixies in the woods, just as it flashed past the dwarves in their deep mines. It did not stop until it slipped right into the castle through a window slit and landed upon the head of a newborn child. That drop of sunlight blessed the child with unnatural and irresistible charisma.

The child’s parents were the Good King and Queen of Everland. He would eventually be known as Prince Charming, though that was not his given name, for who would grant a child such a silly name?

However, as so often happens when fate bestows blessings, it also bestows curses.

As night fell, a streak of black tore through the sky and entered the prince’s bedchamber. This bolt of darkness was a Fairy who had always longed for a child of her own... and she had become smitten with the small prince.

She asked the baby to come with her, speaking the language shared between newborns and fairies. But the prince, in his infant innocence, told her he did not want to go. He wished to stay with his family and share with them many happy days...

The Fairy screamed, a cry so violent that she burst like a bubble of tar. A sliver of darkness sank into the prince’s smile and twisted its way around the drop of light.

And so it was, on the day of Prince Charming’s birth, that he was blessed and cursed in equal measure.

It was also the last day in Everland when there was more light than dark for a very long time...

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All who met the child would find their days and lives brightened, for when he smiled, the world felt light and sweet. The prince often played with Princess Margaretha, a scion of another great kingdom in the valley. She was a pale, lanky tomboy... all knees and elbows... and she was so pale that the prince often called her Snow White. Their parents considered wedding the two when they came of age.

It would never come to pass.

The prince spent most of his time with the Good Queen, who had made herself his tutor. As he grew, she became possessive, desperate, terrifying. She would fly into violent rages any time she was denied her son’s presence.

Desperate for answers, the Good King summoned the Frost Matron, a beautiful and powerful enchantress from the frozen north. She was known as one who understood the deeper magics of the world, especially the darker ones.

Upon hearing that the Frost Matron would be entering her home, the Good Queen said she wished to fly like the smile of her beautiful child, and threw herself from the highest tower.

The Good Queen’s death was the first, but it would not be the last. It was the Frost Matron who discovered that the prince possessed both a drop of sunlight and a bolt of darkness inside him. Together, they made him charming, but dangerous. Those who knew him were doomed to love him, but the greater that love grew, the more it twisted and dug into the soul like a dagger... until madness was the only outcome.

For his own safety, and for that of the rest of the kingdom, the prince was confined to his room. His only visitors were the Frost Matron and, on occasion, his father, the Good King.

The Good King, lonely and perhaps naive, grew close to the Frost Matron, and it was not long before they were wed.

The Frost Matron, however, was as cold as her name suggested. She made sure the Good King spent a great deal of time with his son... too much. When he lost himself to the prince's curse, he threw himself from the very same tower as the Good Queen.

The prince, realizing that his stepmother had used him to kill his father, confronted her with a dozen guards.

The prince and his guards were never seen again. The next day, a dozen ice sculptures stood silently in the castle gardens, and a tapestry of the prince hung in one of the royal guest rooms... a tapestry that was said to be exceptionally lifelike. Some whispered that in the early morning light, if one looked closely enough, it would even shed a tear...