Prologue: Far from Charming

Just the prologue. If you're not the type of person that reads prologues, this isn't too important, but it can be useful if you want to get a feel for the main character's personality right away.

Prologue: Far from Charming

 

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a young prince lived in a shining castle. Although he had everything his heart desired the prince was spoiled. Selfish. And unkind. But then, on one winter’s night an old beggar woman came to the castle. She offered him a single rose in return for shelter from the bitter cold. Repulsed by her haggard appearance, the prince sneered at the gift, and turned the old woman away.

But she warned him not to be deceived by appearances, for beauty was found within. And when he dismissed her again, the old woman’s ugliness melted away, to reveal a beautiful enchantress. A flowing green dress rolled out from her tattered cloak, and her gray strands of hair blossomed into thick golden locks.

The prince tried to apologize, but it was too late; for she had seen that there was no love in his cold heart. For punishment, she transformed him into a hideous creature; the prince’s skilled fingers elongated into disgusting claws sharper than daggers, his handsome face contorting to preposterous proportions, growing a long, hairy snout and ears like that of a dog. In the place of his soft blue eyes there were piercing reflections of the old pair. Fur sprouted from skin; his back extending and hunching, resembling a monstrous beast.

The enchantress then placed a powerful spell on the castle, and all who lived there.

Ashamed of his atrocious form, the beast concealed himself inside his castle, with a magic, silver-plated hand mirror his only way to the outside world.

The rose the enchantress had offered was truly and enchanted rose, which would bloom until his twenty-first year. If he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time.

As the years passed, he fell into despair, and lost all hope; for who could ever learn to love a beast?

 ^^

The book shut with a thud, the offended noise an expression of Isabelle’s distaste. She sighed softly and fingered the intricate drawings on the cover. A beast, just as the book described, twirled a girl in a golden dress down a dance floor. It was drawn so realistically, it looked as if the couple could dance right off the book and into the real world.

Isabelle blew a strand of her russet brown hair from her face and tore her eyes across her surroundings. She wouldn’t have been surprised if they had actually been torn to shreds by her eyes, which had studied the same scene far too many times. A grass yard. A mulberry tree. A white picket fence. Beyond that, a tiny side street with houses squished onto the lots like sardines in a can. A child on a tricycle wheeled by on the sidewalk, his parents riding down the street on their bikes, laughing. A dog barked.

If life could have been any more dull or dreary, it would have been news to her.

The town was not Isabelle’s idea of fun. It was dropped at the top of Texas, a place called Amarillo. The girl didn’t know where she wanted to live when she was an adult, but she knew she didn’t want to live here. It was a stereotypical Texas town, concerning the primary and most prominent feature to visitors: the smell. Isabelle still remembered when her dad moved them to this god forsaken place. They just got off the freeway, and were stopped at their first red light, when the smell wafted through the air conditioning. Isabelle turned to her father with eyes that screamed Oh god! Please no! Her father only shrugged sheepishly.

“That’s the smell of money,” he told her, trying to laugh it off. “Don’t worry; you’ll get used to it,” he then said, on a more apologizing note.

Sitting on the steps of the front porch of her house, Isabelle chucked a stone as far as she could. It sailed over the street and into the front yard of another house, nearly breaking her record but getting slowed by the branches of a tree. I don’t want to get used to it, she thought. And what was scarier: she was getting used to it. Unless there was a sharp wind from down by the fields, she couldn’t smell it anymore.

Sighing, she pulled herself to her feet, grabbing her book and going inside. She went to her room, a little space with only the necessities, and dropped it on her bed, not giving it a second glance. She wasn’t angry at her dad; just frustrated. Her father knew she liked to read. It was one of her favorite things to do, and she had her nose in a book constantly, so her father would have really tried to not notice it one of those days. The thing was, he didn’t know what she liked to read.

Unfortunately, Isabelle’s father got her the book as a gift. A book of fairytales. She accepted and tried to look grateful, but she was not the kind of fairytale girl. She never understood the princesses. Why would I want to be locked up in a nasty dungeon and wait for some dude to rescue me? As a small child, she asked her mom why Rapunzel never just climbed out of the window down the thick ivy on the tower wall, or try to pick the lock on the door with one of the many bobby pins it must have taken to get all that hair into such a perfect braid. She asked why Cinderella didn’t just pack, run away, and disguise herself as a girl named Ellacinder when her stepmom went all creepy-psycho-evil on her. And worst of all, she wondered why Sleeping Beauty would be stupid enough to actually poke a needle with her finger in the first place. Golly, that looks sharp enough to draw blood. I want to touch it and see what happens!

Prince Charming, she scoffed. I’d rather rescue myself.

Author's Note

Sorry - the only way I could separate it into paragraphs was by double-spacing each one