Challenge Submission Down Deeper in the Woods - Story of a Clockwork Kingdom

[LeatrixSage]

You know me as Beauty, Belle, or perhaps La Belle Enfant. My name is not so sweet as all that. My mother branded me with her last breath with the moniker of a deadly poison – the poison that killed her as she gave it life. I am Belladonna Lestrange, and I was born knowing the Beast's Forest as if its story was carved into my very bones.

People think my story is one of magic, wonder, and romance. A fairy tale they tell their children, particularly little girls that wish for adventure off in the great wide, somewhere. I wanted it more than I could tell. Wouldn't it be grand, I thought, to escape the safe, simple life offered by a safe, simple village, that wanted me to be a safe, simple woman. I wanted so much more for my life than what I though fate had planned.

My father, Maurice, was a merchant and inventor, and he doted on me shamelessly. I won't lie, I absolutely took advantage of my father's inability to tell me no, and spent very little time with the tutors and nannies he acquired to teach me womanly skills. Instead, I spent most of my time in the workshop, tinkering with gadgets and gizmos at my father's side.

Monsieur LeGume, our neighbor and my father's boyhood friend, did try somewhat to help mold me into a more acceptable young lady as I got older. But his efforts to get me to spend time with his wife and daughters were thwarted by his son, Gaston. While enemies at the first, we grew into fast friends after Lefou convinced Gaston to let me go hunting with them. The boys thought I'd lose my way and get a good scare out of it, and that I'd quit dogging their heels after that.

Imagine the looks on their faces when I not only knew the forest better than they did, but helped them take down a boar that day. Mind you, it was no small amount cleverness and sheer, dumb luck that first time, but the pair sought to teach me to hunt with all earnestness from that day onward. The time we spent together led our fathers to believe Gaston and I were deep into a courtship, and this was no small problem.

Gaston was betrothed, you see, and to a young Lady of a family of some nobility and renown – of which I was neither. I could bring no great fortune or titles to support Monsieur LeGume's ambitions for his son, and this began to create a rift between he and my father. It was decided we should stay apart – a decision we both willfully ignored.

In public, if we crossed paths, we put on a go show of hating one another. In the woods, we tracked, hunted, and shared our lives together in secret. While I hate to disappoint you – and wish I were a better liar with the skill to embellish my story believably – Gaston and I were never lovers. One of my great regrets is never knowing what kind of lover he might have been to me. We did kiss once, but that tender moment was our undoing.

Lefou protested loudly each time Gaston 'risked his future on the daughter of a crack-pot inventor,' but neither I, nor Gaston listened to him. Lefou was often the third wheel to our pairing, and – both of us blind to his feelings – we allowed resentment to fester within our friend. He saw when Gaston backed me up against a tree and stole a kiss from me, and he saw my maidenly adore in my response. Before we'd even left the wood that day, Lefou had flown word back to Monsieur LeGume, and arrangements about what to do with me had been decided.

They came in the night, a band of six men to snatch one young woman from her bed. A misjudgment of those not naturally given to such acts of cruelty, and one that resulted in far worse than they had planned.

Someone knocked over a small table in my room and woke me. Upon seeing my room filled with hooded men in dark clothing, I screamed. It woke my father, and a fight followed. One of their number became my father's murderer. I believe LeGume was there, and that it might have been his knife, but only Lefou knows for certain. I grappled with him when he tried to snatch me from my bed. He got me to my feet, and I snatched my letter opener from my writing desk as he dragged me past it. He howled when I stabbed it into his shoulder, but I did not know him for who he was until I snatched the hood off his head.

I was so stunned to see his face – filled with pain, hate, and fury as it was – that I was struck dumb. Someone else struck me from behind, and that was the last clear-headed moment I know. I remember being on the floor with my head throbbing. And then my father's final screams of outrage calling out to LeGume. Many voices argued weather or not it was better to simply kill me and be done with it, but then many hands gathered me up and hauled me down the stairs. Next, I was in a cart and very cold. It was late autumn and the nights already had a winter chill. They'd not even bothered to cover me with a blanket. There was darkness then, an uneasy sleep filled with shadowy nightmares of half-remembered things I was uncertain were real or imaginings, and then I was thrown from the cart onto hard, icy ground.

I woke just long enough to know that my hair was being pulled and my head yanked back. I didn't know his face in the darkness, but I knew Lefou's voice. "You brought this on yourself," he told me. "All you had to do was stay away. Why couldn't you just stay away from him?"

He kissed me then, a harsh, cruel thing that bruised my lips against my teeth and made them bleed. I thought for a moment he would do much worse, his hands grabbing at my nightdress and bunching it about my hips – but he did not. With a final curse he pressed my face into the dirt. "There's no taste of his love on your lips. Just the foulness of his betrayal," he said, and left me there to freeze.

* * *
​

Everyone in Yeva knew the stories about the deepest parts of the forest: a broken kingdom, a cursed valley, a ruined castle, a world of creatures only spoken of as part of fairy stories, and the Beast the presided over it all. It was his territory, that dark interior where sunlight could not reach. And Lefou's hatred of me had become so strong that he had risked venturing beyond the broken bridge and the wide, shallow river it had once spanned to abandon me there.

I woke shivering into a gloom that was twilight at best. I couldn't tell the hour by the sun, because I could not see it. An endless grey hung on the world. The canopy above me looked as black and far away as the night sky, and thick fog curled around gnarled and bent trees unlike any I had seen before. There was no bird song, no scurrying signs of life, and no clear footpath or game trail for me to follow. The biting numbness in my frozen limbs ached, but it spared me noticing the many thorns under foot.

I walked blindly because I knew that I had to. If I did not move, I would die. And I could not die before I repaid those that had wronged me. As I mentioned, there was no path to guide me, and I had no way to measure what direction I walked. I went where my intuition insisted I must. Everything I saw was alien and new, but my blood sang as if I had just come home from a very long time away.
Down deeper in the woods I wandered, the trees pressing in closer and closer until I could scarlessly slide between them. I became stuck more than once – and so stuck a time or two I thought my journey was ended I would die there, hanging between two great trees that refused to let me go. Until finally, they ended. It happened so suddenly that I did not at first understand that I stood at the edge of a vast valley.

I had traveled so far that I was deep into the mountains and they stood towering over the world to either side of the valley. The forest nestled in close and tight, forming a near unbroken wall of wood and bramble and thorn. From my room at night, I had admired these very mountains, and they had seemed so far away and unreachable. Lefou must have traveled very long indeed, and I must have been asleep much longer than I realized. Days, at least.

There was still no sun or brightness, only a grey cap of thick clouds that promises a storm and more fog. The wide valley stretched what seemed many miles, long and winding around the feet of the mountains. At its lowest point a thin stream cut a path through tall grass and jagged rocks. I made my way to it slowly, and very carefully, so to not damage my feet worse than they were already. The water was colder than the frigid air, but I drank and washed my feet, and then bounded them in some tattered bits of my night dress before I continued.

I followed the stream's twists and turns through the valley, keeping it ever at my left to not lose my way, until it finally met with a tiny bridge and a narrow lane. All the more blessed was a broken-down carriage of the queerest design I had ever seen. It was more metal than wood, with a complicated locking mechanism on the doors and sturdy pipes like those my father had used to fashion the boiler that had heated our home.

I had no tools with me, and to get into the carriage I resorted to the finesse of bashing a sharp rock into the lock until it finally broke. Climbing in and shutting the door did not instantly bring the warmth I so desperately needed. But the bench seats opened into storage spaces, and one had a thick, motheaten blanket within. I cocooned myself into it and my shivering returned, and got worse well before I actually began to warm again.

Exhaustion took me then and I slept. I have no idea how long it was before I woke again, but what served as day light in the grey valley must have passed, for it was darker and colder upon my waking.

Within the carriage I had warmed considerably, and with it came all the pain of the many cuts and scrapes I'd not felt before. It made moving even more miserable, but a will to live – and no small amount of curiosity – spurred me onward. There was somewhat else inside those seats, a dagger, some scattered craftsman's tools, a pair of tattered slippers, some lumps of coal and a vest. The slippers were ill-fitting and the man's vest did little to make a nightdress into reasonable clothing, but they helped.

From there I spent some time discovering the inner workings of the carriage itself and the purpose of its pipes. I found a section of pipe that had blown out – too much pressure, I supposed – along with a rusted reservoir atop the carriage that must have held water once, and on its belly, a wide, flat pan with ash and soot from fuel that had burned within. Following the maze of pipes and using a rock to score letters into each - so that I could follow where each began, traveled, and ended – I learned that water was slowly released from the reservoir to pass through a narrow lattice of slender pipes that traveled through that flat pan at the bottom. I labeled it the furnace, as its purpose appeared to be creating steam that would be pushed under great pressure through pipes intricately woven throughout the carriage. The steam would eventually reach the revisor where there was a thin net like a gardener's dew collector, recycling the water to mitigate loss.

It wasn't very efficient – at least, in my opinion – in its design, but it would surely heat the carriage and keep me alive a little longer if I got it working. What else the pipes leading to the wheels did, I wasn't certain, beyond the notion that a valley given to extreme colds might be iced over often. So, my focus, I admit, was entirely to the body of the carriage itself.

With the scattering of small hammers and wrenches within the bench seat I attempted to beat the broken pipe back into shape. But I had not eaten in what must have been a number of days, and proved far too weak to force the metal into submission. So far as I could tell, it was a vital piece, and since I could not patch it, I instead removed it. This was almost as difficult as trying to hammer the iron back into shape, and I earned myself many blisters for my efforts.

It took most of the night – of which I knew to be different from the day for the utterly pitch blackness that enveloped the world – and I took many breaks to rest and sleep. But I eventually removed the broken section of piped, and another section from a pipe that seemed less critical to the warmth I longed for, and swapped them with each other. The busted pipe I blocked up with rocks and dirt from beneath the bridge to limit how much steam was lost. I used the slippers as buckets to collect water from the stream and fill the revisor, and then stuffed all the coal I could into the tiny furnace.
Lighting them became my next big problem. I tried striking rocks to the hammers, and did manage a few sparks here and there, but not enough to light the coal. I had no oil or matches to make it easier, and instead had to make a nest of dried grass and risk setting the inside of the carriage alight by making a tiny fire. It took several attempts and many failures, but eventually I had a next of flames burning my hands while I tried to stuff it into the coal box.

I blew at those small flames until one coal caught, and then another, and another. Elated, I whooped and shouted at the fridged valley. My voice bounced along the mountains, but I didn't care. As soon as that little furnace was burning and those coals glowing, I found the valve to release the water and let it trickle down. Odd as the contraption was, it worked! The water quickly became steam that flowed hissing through the pipes, and in no time at all, that radiated with so much warmth and life that I cried.

I crawled into the carriage, curled into that motheaten blanket, and bawled like a baby to be truly warm again. I had been lucky none of my fingers or toes had blacked and withered, and was even more lucky that I had woken from each time exhaustion had forced sleep upon me. With true warmth about me, I imagined I could begin to truly survive. I'd need wood, both for burning and for crafting, and those sharp stones would make fine enough knives and arrow heads. I had no twin or sinew to make a decent bow string, but some vine would serve. And while I planned these things, I began to fade again, so warm and relaxed that the world seemed to gently rock me to sleep as I allowed my eyes to close.

* * *
​

"How did she get it to work, do you think?"

"Work? What do you mean? That wheel doesn't even turn. You, see? It drags. It's dug a groove into the road!"

"Come now, Cogsworth, when's the last time you saw a working clockwork beyond yourself?"

"Hmph, the last time I looked at you."

"Hah, exactly! This is more than we've managed in a generation."

"You're a fool, Lumiere."

"Perhaps, but no greater or lesser a fool than you, my friend."

"Bah!"

"Hush, you two. She is listening to you."

"Eh, what do you mean Plumette?"

"Lumiere, she is awake! Can't you see?"

I was awake, and listening, and watching through my lashes in a blended sense of horror and wonder. They were all clockworks, each of them a collection of rusted metal, wood, pipes, gears and cogs, that wore clothes and moved and spoke as people. They even looked like people in the face, and must have been carved by truly talented craftsmen, as their wooden expressions seemed to change and show impossible emotions.

"Oh, oui, she is!" The tall one, Lumiere, looked aghast, and then doffed his hat to bow in my direction. "Our apologizes, madam. We haven't had any visitors in quite some time."

"As we well should not," the shorter, plumper of the two – Cogsworth – groused under his breath in a way that made his horsehair mustache bristle.

"Never mind them," the lady among them, Plumette, reached for my hand and I found myself dragged from the carriage and unto my feet with an effortlessness that was terrifying. "Cads, the both of them. How did your fix the carriage?"

"I," my voice began, and then stalled. I had to swallow many times to find it again. "I changed the pipes. Where am I? Who are you?"

"This is Château de Chambord. Madam," Cogsworth made that title sound like an insult. "And you are not welcome here."

"But of course, she is!" Lumiere wrapped a wooden arm around my shoulders and I was startled by how warm and alive it felt. As did the rest of him when he gathered me in against his side. "We need someone that can fix things, do we not?"

"We do," Cogsworth conceded, and then glared at me. "But we do not need her."

"And why not?" I wondered aloud. "If you have things that are broken, and I could fix them, why wouldn't you make some use of me?" I don't know why I said it, only that it seemed what should be said at the time. It did the job of silencing Cogsworth, which seemed the only thing that had prevent Lumiere and Plumette from whisking me into home of a ruined, and unusual castle.

Like the carriage, there were many pipes – so much so that I could have mistaken half the walls for parts of a pipe organ. The wrapped around wood and stone alike and traveled through the castle like its veins and arteries. Most had gone to rust, many were loose, broken, or simply missing sections, and I began to see their need for someone to put their home back to rights.

"The Master tore it all apart after the fall," Plumette explained for me when I found a pipe with looked like claw mars dug into it. "After his heart was broken, he had no love in him left for what he had built."

I did not ask them then, but I did learn later. The Master of the castle was a brooding sort that kept very strictly to the west wing. He never ventured out of his rooms, or so they told me – except for the very rare occasion he went hunting. He slept or ate, and had ruined many of those clockworks that had attempted seeking him out to bring him comfort. Their tattered remains were strewn all about the bottom of the stairs that led to the west wing, and upon seeing them, I decided I would begin my work there.

I learned much more in attempting to piece together the clockworks than I had from the carriage, about the method behind the oddity of the structure of pipes that ran them. It was very slow work at first, and much of the finer aspects escaped me until I learned that Cogsworth's snobbery was due in no small part to the fact that he was actually quite brilliant. He was tight lipped and distant at first, but as it became apparent that I valued his input and respected his knowledge, I found him a very astute instructor and assistant.

The clockworks were unique from the carriage or the castle – which ran entirely by steam and coal. At their hearts were unusual crystals. I've never seen their like before or since. They come in culdoscopes of color with grain structures entirely unique from each other, and from any other stone or crystal I've seen. They are cold when outside a clockwork, but when placed within they hum with a warmth that seemed to power the wood and metal and bring them life.

I reassembled Dickie, the stove top, first, and with his return to the kitchen came meals so much better than what I spent weeks boiling in a pot. Even so, we have little else but wild flowers and a spattering of vegetables from the gardens to cook. Dickie demanded there be meat in my meals to keep me strong, and so I began portioning parts of my day to hunting. I caught mostly small game in traps until I finished repairing D'Arque, the hunter. He was a willowy and frightening sort that did not speak, but he proved an even better hunting companion than Gaston had been.

After a time, he assured me he did not need my help hunting and bid me spend more time bringing life back to the castle. For the most part I allowed it, my curiosity driven to understand more of the magnificent castle and all its secrets. There were many more clockworks, and each one with a unique personality so alive and human I stopped thinking of them as machine in nature. Mrs. Potts the maid, Armoire the wardrobe, Tom the stable hand, Walter the Baker, Stanley the farmer, and so many others, became like friends and family to me through those long winter months.

* * *​

With the thaw of gathering spring, the castle felt truly alive. The north and east wings were almost entirely intact again, as well as clean and livable. There was now only the west wing that stood in tatters. And the more the rest was put to rights, the more often I heard that terrible, growling come rumblingly down those stairs at night to fill the halls with their Lord's menace. I was told he'd taken to hunting more often, as well. According the Lumiere, "It displeases him to see put to right the things he believes cost him what mattered most."

This was something no one would speak of, a story I could barely piece together. Their Lord had made a promise he couldn't keep, something involving his passionate creation of clockworks, and the cost had been greater than he'd bargained for. I had been satisfied with that meager explanation while distracted with too much work to do. But as the thaw settled in and I found my hands idle more often than not, my curiosity was left only one direction to explore. That of the west wing, and the enigmatic Master of the Château de Chambord.

Whatever the stories might say, I admit that I was neither fool enough, nor brave enough, to intrude upon the Beast in what was ultimately his sanctuary of misery. I'd been given no small warning that I could find myself torn to pieces much as the clockworks had been, if I dared assault him in his own home. Instead, I waited until I heard him shuffling through the castle at night on his way to hunt, and then followed him.

His growling always came first, a great rumbling sound that I was certain housed words I could not understand. Then the weight of footsteps bearing something large and lumbering down that great stairway and the grand hall. Plumette swore she'd seen him scaling the castle walls once, but he seemed to me to always take the same path any man might take in leaving his castle to go amuse himself at a hunt.

I waited till the heavy double doors swung shut with a bang and then crawled as silently as I could from my bed. I dressed quickly in hunting leathers I had pieced together for myself, threw on a thick cloak of deep, snatched up my bow and quiver, and snuck out after him.

By the time I had emerged, I thought I had already lost him. Despite his apparent size, he left no trace of himself behind. There were no great foot prints or giant animal tracks to follow. And I only caught sight of a great, dark form vanishing between trees behind the castle walls because a low branch snapped loudly.

Behind the castle, the valley climbed so steeply it was near a cliff, and at its top was more dense forest. I'd grown used to the dark of the grey valley and saw his lumbering from finished the climb and slide between the trees with a hard-won ease. Immediately, I followed. It took me round the castle proper and through a side courtyard. I ran along the garden wall to the first small door. It was just big enough for me, and surely not how he had reached the valley cliff, but it was the shortest route to take.

Clambering up the steep wall to the forest floor above was no meager task. Even well fed and plenty recovered, it was more work than my body was used to and my limbs ached with complaints by the time I had slung myself over the cliff's edge to flop onto my back amid the trees.
"That was an impressive climb for one so small."

The rumble of his voice rolled over me, the sound itself seemingly heavy enough to press me down into the damp earth. It seemed more struggle than it should have been to gain my feet, an effort that proved useless when a great paw pressed against my belly and lifted me into the air to pin me against a tree. My bow was left on the ground somewhere below me, snatched from my fingers as easily as the air was pushed from my lungs. My feet dangled uselessly beneath me while I pried at a large claw that threatened to pierce my side. And then a looming pair of bright yellow eyes looked up at me, and I went still.

"So, you're what has been causing so much trouble," white fangs flashes inside his wolf-like maw as the Beast spoke. "I'd caught your scent before, but I hadn't thought you really were a woman."
"Surprised a woman could recreate your work?" I wondered out loud, and with no small amount of bitterness.

Those shining yellow eyes widened, and then his brown creased. "No. I am surprised a woman would be so stupid as to stay in a place clearly cursed. I thought your sex had better sense than that."
My laughter was a sharp bark of resentment. "I've never been attributed much in the way of common sense, or self-preservation, when it comes to my curiosity."

"Has no one told you that curiosity killed the cat?"

"Oh, of course," I said, and grinned mirthlessly down at him, "but satisfaction brought him back."

Again, those yellow eyes widened, and that time, his grip on my loosened and allowed me to take a full breath. "Who are you," he asked then.

"A woman scorned," I said. "Who are you?"

"A man broken," he replied.

I chuckled at that and asked, "What a match are we?"

"How did you come to be here?" His voice grew harsh and those glowing eyes narrowed. "How did you find this place? Does anyone else know where you are?"

I began to answer, but only wheezed out air as his grip tightened again. I was beginning to make out his shape, and found the Beast was more man than animal. He was larger than he should have been, at least eight feet tall, and he had me propped up so high against the tree that my feet dangled above his wolf-like jaws of sharp, starkly white teeth. He had ears like a wolf, his body was covered in soft, grey fur, and behind him swished a shaggy tail, but his arms, legs, and torso were very much those of a man. He even wore tattered trousers and a torn shirt where a man's modesty might demand he cover his nakedness.

"Answer me!" His frustration gave him to shout. The hand wrapped around my waist tightened its grip further. "Tell me, girl! Who will come looking for you? How many will I have to kill?" Finally, that claw that had been digging into my ribs broke through cloth and skin and push between bone. I howled out in pain, and then suddenly he let me go.

I hit the ground hard and stars burst behind my eyes at the same time that all the air in my lungs whoofed out of me. I was left gulping like a fish for what felt like hours before I finally gasped in a fresh breath of air, and then a coughing fit seized me. It made my side scream in agony and I pressed a hand to my ribs. My clothes were warm and slippery, and for some reason, my terror that I might be dying made me laugh.

"No one will come for me," I choked out. I tried to stand, but found the effort wasn't worth it. Instead, I rolled to my back to look up at the oddly wide and frightened yellow eyes that watched me from the shadows. "I was kidnapped, and then abandoned. I was brought to this forest to die."

A crease formed in the Beast's brow again. "Why would someone do that to you?"

"Because of love, I think," I said. "Unrequited love, and misplaced loyalty, and jealousy that led to resentment and hatred."

The Beast was quiet for a long time, and then said haltingly: "Something in that… sounds all too familiar to me."

With the greatest gentleness, his great arms gathered me up from the cold, hard earth and cradled me to his chest. He was warm as a low-burning hearth fire and I settled into the soft fur that covered his body without complaint. He carried me back to the castle, and for the first time in an unknowable number of years, he summoned his clockwork subjects to his service.

I was seen after – washed and stitched and bandaged – and then put to bed, all under his ever-watchful, yellow gaze. Had I not thought myself dying, maybe I would have felt bashful of my nakedness, but it seemed so unworthy a think to think about at the time. He stayed with me, so much like a worried canine companion that the sight of him made me laugh, even when fear gripped my mind. Or perhaps, because the fever made me loopy.

I was told it was some days before the fever broke, and a number of weeks before I did more than sleep and eat. Plumette told me the Beast never left my side, not even in the worst of my hysterics, and that they had all learned from my ravings how exactly I had come to live in their cursed valley. He only left when they were all certain I would survive, and even then, he never stayed gone for long.
When I was well enough to leave my bed, the Beast joined me for our first meal together. Over many hours, I learned his name was Ardent de'Laurent, and he had once been the Count of Chambord, before what he styled as his fall from grace. While he truly divulged little in the way of details, there was much to learn over the course of a single meal, and we stayed up and talked well into the night.

From what little he would say of himself, I came to understand he had built his unusual castle and its clockwork people for the love a woman he could not have. He adored her to the to a point of obsession and had devised to abduct her and marry her in secret. What went wrong, he would not say, only that it cost him his love, his humanity, and his soul. Something about the clockworks, and those warm, humming crystals in their chests, was more dark and distressing than I wanted to acknowledge. Ardent's guilt and shame at the sight of them was more clue than the things he said, and I can imagine what dark pact he must have made.

When speaking of himself became too distressing, he finally pressed me to speak of myself instead. After he was gracious enough to tell me some of his story, it seemed only fair that I did the same. At its conclusion at the carriage driving itself to the castle, the Beast was quiet and ponderous. I waited some long moments before I finally ventured, "What are you thinking?"

That yellow gaze lifted from the fire to settle over me with a new thoughtfulness. "That you aren't telling me everything," he said, and then smiled a very wolfish grin. "And that I might be willing to help you with the things you are not saying out loud."

"Oh?" I asked of him. "What things?"

"Vengeance, starters," he said plainly and certainty. "While you needed to focus on your survival, you buried it. Under the brunt of winter, you ignored it. But now you have survived and the thaw will soon give way to yet warmer weather, and you know your way back now." I stared at him in mute shock and he let out a growling roll of a chuckle. "Don't be so surprised. I've seen you pouring over the maps in my library."

"You've been watching me." I said through a smirk.

"Of course," he admitted with an ease born of a new closeness. "I worried you'd come here to end me."

"Then why did you let me live?"

"I wasn't entirely certain I didn't want you to."

He didn't look at me when he spoke, but I felt the truth in his words. Something unknowable drew me up from my chair and the Beast looked up at me when I reached for him. He flinched, but allowed me to take one of his great paws into my hands. I felt so tiny and fragile standing before him, more aware of my own mortality even than when my life had been seeping from my side. It astounded me how easily he could end my life, and yet he shivered as if he were afraid of me.

"And now?" I asked him.

"I want to live," he said, and then grinned again. "At least long enough to help you seek your vengeance."

* * *​

Spring was well underway by the time the valley's ice had completely melted completely. With Ardent's help, we fixed the broken carriage properly, and he allowed that I even made an improvement or two upon his original design. As much as he wanted to ride along with me, he couldn't fit within the carriage, and instead he settled to lopping alongside it.

He looked unnatural on all fours – more like a man crawling awkwardly along, hunched over and walking on his hands and the balls of his feet – but he moved with a grace born of being accustomed to the motion. He wore finer clothes, and had insisted I dress myself handsomely as well, even if he would be staying at the edge of the woods until I signaled for him. His plan was bold and came with risks, but I was far from a wilting flower, and appreciated that he thought me more than capable.
The journey took a few days, but it was easy travel for us both. And while on the road, I think we became friends. "Good luck," he wished through the window, and nuzzled his maw against my cheek. "If I don't see the torch lit before the moon is high, I will come for you."

It was already evening when I road the carriage into town. It caused no small amount of curiosity among the safe, simple villagers and news traveled ahead of the oddity that had arrived to disturb their save, simply lives. That unrest grew when it stopped before my home and I alighted from within.

Gasps and whispers were like the twittering of birds and buzzing of bees around me. I ignored them, spell bound by the ruin of what had been my home only half a year ago. It had been burned to the ground, and what little remained seemed untouched since that day. There was a wooden sign nailed to a post that had withstood the flames. It read, "Here rest the remains of Maurice and Belladonna Lastrange."

So, they'd made a tomb of it. A warning, I would assume, to any other that might cross LeGume and his ambitions. Tilting my chin a notch higher, I went about picking among the ruins of my late home for some sign of my father and his end. I did not find his bones, but I found a dagger under a pile of ash at the bottom of the stairs. Lifting it, I found the initials GG scrawled into the hilt, and felt my heart sink.

"Belle?" The last voice I wanted to hear in that moment curled around my name like it was the loveliest sound it could create. "Is that really you?"

I turned to see Gaston standing on the stone steps that once led to hearthway of the crumbling structure. A smile was broad on his lips, but his eyes were full of fear and wrath. What had Lefou seen that day, I wondered, when Gaston backed me up against a tree. He'd seen a kiss stole from me, and surely known my maidenly thrilling for something so precious and so unspeakable. Had he gone too soon to see me push Gaston away, and never heard me plead with him not to break my heart with things I couldn't have? I had assumed so, but as I looked at Gaston, Lefou's last words played over again in my mind.

"There's no taste of his love on your lips," he had said to me. "Just the foulness of his betrayal."
"What did you do?" I demanded in a new fury, and marched toward Gaston, only to come up short. I noticed then five others behind him. Lefou among them, the other's members all of the Hunting Lodge. Nowhere to be seen was Monsieur LeGume, and something icy and terrible seized hold of my heart.

"It wasn't your father," I murmured then. "It was you. You killed him. And you tried to kill me."
Gaston's smile melted away into a deep frown as I spoke, and then twisted into a sickeningly satisfied smirk. "You shouldn't have denied me, Belle. You shouldn't have embarrassed me like that in front of my friends." My gaze flicked to the collection of men at his back, and each them leered with knowing grins that explained all too much. "I'd never lost a bet before. Maybe I could have handled it better, but you had it coming."

I was like a doe that had just scented the wolf ready to pounce. I froze, and they launched themselves at me. The village streets had cleared, and while I screamed and fought, I heard shutters and doors snatched closed to block out the sound. They tore at the fine dress the Beast had bid me wear, pulled at my hair and pawed my body with sweaty hand and cruel fingers. Laughing all around, they let me struggle myself to exhaustion, and then gave me over to Lefou to contain. The rest banded together to knock over the carriage, some among their number revealing clubs to smash the pipes, doors, and wheels.

I was begging them to stop, to show the carriage mercy – a plea they misunderstood as hysterical nonsense – when a deep growl rolled like thunder across the night. A silence followed it. Even I held my breath and waited.

"You never loved her," the Beast snarled from shadows. I could not see where he crouched in the darkness, but I felt his yellow eyes on me. "She came back for you, was willing to risk her life for you."
"Then she's an idiot," Gaston boasted to the darkness and unsheathed his sword. "Who would love a girl that styled herself so much as a man? There's no softness in one like her. She's only really good for one thing."

There was the sound of a great wolf running closer, then a man screamed and his body hit the ground hard. We all turned in time to watch one of the five vanish down a narrow lane.
"What was that?" one of them shouted.

"The Beast," I answered, cackling like a mad woman while Lefou struggled to keep me from wriggling out of his grasp. "He's come to take me back."

"The Beast?"

"You mean it's real?"

"She's lying to you," Gaston attempted to rally what courage was left in his cohorts. "It's a fairy tale. There's no castle in those woods."

Another man screamed, but this sound was wet and gurgling, and I saw why when his body hit the ground. His chest was cleaved open and his throat torn to shreds. Lefou released me and ran. I saw Ardent then, racing across a roof top before he leapt and landed hard on Lefou's back. I watched his jaws close around Lefou's head, and then closed my eyes when I heard a terrible popping sound, like the bursting of an over-rip melon.

"There!" someone shrieked. "He's there! He's real!"

"Run!" another screamed and scrambled away. "It's a monster! A curse!"

I huddled on the ground and wrapped my arms over my head. I didn't want to hear them screaming and dying around me. It turned my stomach until I thought I'd wretch, and I realized then how vapid my notions of vengeance had been. The violence and blood appalled me. I never could have killed any of them, not even Gaston. But the Beast could. He'd killed plenty, and he killed more without a moment's hesitation.

"Get up," a cruel hand wrenched at my hair and dragged me to my feet. "Up, I said! Useless bitch, get on your feet!"

Gaston tore chunks of my hair loose before he finally forced me to my feet, and he hauled me down a side street. I would have called out to Ardent, but Gaston kept one gloved hand clutched over my mouth to keep me silent. I could see Beast struggling finished another of the men, then looking around, and then I was snatched around a corner and he was out of sight.

"Let's find a quiet place that we can chat," Gaston hissed in my ear as he dragged me along. "What about the Lodge's basement? You so enjoyed sneaking in there to feel like you belonged. I wonder, how long was it till you fooled yourself into thinking you actually belonged, hm? When did you start to believe I loved you?"

More questions and taunts came, but I was numb to them. I was listening to the night instead, straining my ears for sign of Ardent giving chase. It seemed all too soon that we reached the lodge, and Gaston wasted no time in hauling the narrow side door open and tossing me down the steep steps on the other side. My leg snapped when I hit the ground, the pain so sharp that my scream was a near silent rasping.

Gaston followed after me, and stepped on my leg twice to snatch my scream free of my throat. "There it is!" he crowed warmly. "That's my girl, call him to me." He stopped again and I screamed whether I wanted to or not.

From above came a roar and a pounding upon the earth, and Gaston backed away from me. I heard him rummaging behind me, but focused on dragging myself to the steep stairs and trying to pull myself up them. I heard the soft thrum of a bow string, and a second later an arrow hit bit into my broken leg. My entire world became a red haze of pain. I knew that I screamed, I felt it, but I could not hear it. Then I saw those yellow eyes above me. The door was too narrow, but Ardent reached for me. I felt his claws snag at my clothing, and then I heard the bow again. A flaming arrow sank into one of those beautiful, glowing yellow eyes, and the Beast howled and trashed and snatched himself back from the narrow door.

"Gotcha!" Gaston howled his victory and rushed up the stairs. I heard him laughing before he grabbed a fist full of my hair again and dragged me up the stairs. "You thought you'd end me with this monster, did you?"

He threw me toward were Ardent lay shaking. He'd torn the arrow from his face, and with it, his eye. They were on the ground before me, and he was crumpled and bleeding horribly.

"Ardent," I tried to call to him, but my voice was in tatters. He heard my rasping, and his one good eye met with mine. "Run," I begged of him, heedless of the tears streaking through the dirt on my face. "Please, run. Don't die. Not for me."

"No," Gaston sounded angry at first, and then he started laughing even harder. "Don't tell me you're in love with this thing!" Careless in his confidence, Gaston knelt at my side and hooked a hand under my chin to bend my body back and hold my head up next to his. "Did you let this thing touch you, where you wouldn't give yourself to me?"

"Get your hands off her," Ardent snarled, and Gaston dropped me, but only to laugh at the beast and put one booted foot on the back of my head and grind my face into the dirt.

"Are you in love with her, Beast?" Gaston asked. There was a growling of an answer, and then I heard Gaston chuckle as he unsheathed his sword. "Do you honestly think she'd pick a monster like you, over someone like me?"

Gaston raised his sword and Ardent lifted his arms to defend himself. The blade bit into flesh and fur and Ardent howled out in pain. He was forced backward down the slim lane until he collapsed to his knees, and Gaston roared with all the more victorious laughter. "It's over, Beast," he hissed in a whisper that twisted my gut. "Belle is mine."

Ardent looked up at him in cold defiance, and then beyond Gaston to where I lay on the dirty and bloody ground. A smile touched his wolflike maw, and my heart broke. I watched his good eye close in acceptance, saw Gaston raise his sword high, and then my hand touched Gaston's discarded bow.
"Gaston!" I screamed his name and reached for my leg. I found the haft of the arrow and wrenched hard, shrieking with pain and fury as I forced it loose.

"What do you think you're doing?" I heard Gaston demand. "I'm not finish with you, yet. You won't die until I say you can-"

Nock, draw, loose.

It happened faster than I was able to comprehend what I was doing, and then I stared in wonder at the haft of an arrow protruding from Gaston's throat. He grabbed at it with both hands as he fell to his knees before me. He gurgled and yanked, and then hot blood rushed out from the wound when the arrow slid out, tearing a bigger hole into his flesh. Gaston's eyes rolled back into his head, and then he fell. His body twitched a few times, then went still.

"Bella?" Ardent's rough voice made me look up. He was hobbling and weak, but he gathered up and held me as gently as he could. "We have to get you back."

"I have to patch you up," I told him. "Stop some of the bleeding."

"I'll be fine," he said, ignoring my attempts to slow him or help him. He carried me back to the woods, and then through the rest of the night and into the next day. I had lost the fight against sleep and drifted off well before Ardent stopped to set and bandage my leg. As no small mercy, I slept right through it, and didn't wake again until he staggered and fell, just beyond that broken bridge that marked the border of his grey valley.

When I woke, I was in his arms, but Ardent had stopped breathing. The Beast was dead, and I was alone. I spent some number of days at his side, refusing to leave him, until Cogsworth and D'Arque found us. D'Arque carried me on his back while Cogsworth dragged Ardent along behind him. I slept for most of the journey, refusing to eat when I woke, and stubbornly willing my body to waste away and let me die. The pair did not force me, but they soldiered on in the burden to bear us back to Château de Chambord.

Our arrival was a somber affair. Lumiere and Plumette saw to my care. They bathed me, cleaned my wound, tended my mounting fever, and put me to bed. I still refused food, and after I started throwing things at them, they relented and let me be. I could not say if it was days or weeks that I remained that way, inconsolably mean to every face that dared darker my chamber door.
Until one morning there was glaring sunlight streaming through my window. It was so bright it hurt my eyes. I would have thought I was dreaming it at first. And then supposed maybe I had gone insane entirely when I noticed a tall, slender figure throwing a shadow across my floor.

"Who are you?" I snapped, and then reached for a candelabra and prepared to throw it. "Get out! I don't want you here!"

"Belladonna," the man turned and chided me with a gentle reprimand. His hair was long and grey and looked softer than sable. His smile was wide and wolfish, and his one good eye was startlingly yellow. "I understand if you are mad at me. I really thought I'd last long enough to get you back safe, at least."

"Ardent?" His voice was missing its animal growl, but it rumbled with a familiarity that broke my heart. I dropped the candelabra and scrambled out of bed. He rushed to me when it was clear I meant to hobble, crawl, or whatever else it took to fall into his arms. "How do you live?"

"You saved me," he said in bewilderment. "Don't you remember? You could have let me die, but you risked your life for mine."

"But you died," I cried into his chest, bawling all the long, pint up emotions that had been bottled up inside me since I woken to see him lifeless at my side. "You died because of me."

Ardent chuckled and smoothed a hand over my hair to sooth me. "The Beast died," he said softly. "You gave me a new life, and a second chance."

The grey valley was brought new life, too. Stories of a rabid beast kept most people far from our clockwork castle of wonders for many years. So many, that by the time we had children and went out into the wide world to tour and expose them to its wonders, it was all supposed as some crazy bear that had rampaged through a village one night.

When Ardent felt the time was right, we cleared some of the forest and rightened the road leading to the castle. We traveled to the village to sell less complex clockworks alongside newer versions of the steam powered carriage. That lasted until Ardent began to acquire some fame for his creation, and we funded the building of a inn and a small market closer to home.

And we lived, Ardent and I. We lived fully, and deeply, and richly. We had children, and they had children, and then they had children. And together, we created the foundations that would become the first of the Clockwork Kingdoms.