Princess to Princess

Once upon a time… 

    A real-life girl was in the prince’s garden. The gardner found her there and told her to leave, but the prince said it was quite all right and let her come inside the castle. She thought it would be lovely inside, but it was cold and dark and smelled of nightmares. The walls dripped with tears and the servants were all a shade of gray, their faces dull. 

    The girl told him she must get back to her real-life mother and father, but the prince insisted she stay for dinner. Everyone knows you mustn’t say no to a prince, so she stayed. They had a feast, with fruits and meats and ice cream and everything inbetween. It was so lovely, that the real-life girl agreed to stay there until the next day.

Every night after, she would tell him she must get home, but every night he begged she stay for dinner. He told her he was lonely. He wanted company for just one more evening. So she stayed, the same thing happening night after night until she forgot why she wanted to go home at all. 

    The prince never laid a finger on her, never forced her to stay inside the castle. Even though it was damp and horrible inside, she stayed, because each night she could not bear the sad look in the prince’s eyes, that emptiness that she wanted to fill so badly for him. 

    The more nights she stayed, though, the more empty she felt, until she was no longer a real-life girl at all, but a princess, made out of sad things, like tears and cold and loneliness. She knew nothing but her damp, dark castle, and her lonely prince, who no longer asked her to stay for dinner. She stayed anyway, because it seemed fearsome to leave the castle, to step into the real-girl world when she remembered nothing of it. Loneliness was awful, but the unknown was worse. 

    Her only joy was the garden, where she had played when she first met the prince. She didn’t quite remember how it felt, to pick each daisy by its stem and take in its sweet scent, but she liked to imagine how it would be, if she was a real-girl with real-joy. 

    She visited the garden everyday, the only time she left her castle. 

    As the ages went by, she rarely saw the prince at dinner. It seemed everyone around her was disappearing, fading into the walls. Nothing ever changed, and her castle still dripped with nightmares, making her tearful each night when she laid there in the dark. 

    One day, when she was finally sure there was no one else left in the castle but her, she visited the garden in her loneliness. To her surprise, there was a real-life girl there, who glowed like a thousand suns with rose cheeks and a real-girl smile, with laughter that didn’t just come from her memories, but from her mouth, who smelled flowers and felt real-girl joy.

     The princess longed for her, more than she had longed for anything before. 

    She invited the girl inside, and when the child insisted she go home to her real-life mother and father, desperation rose in the princess. She didn’t want this joy to leave so soon. She was lonely, she was filled to the brim with sadness, and this real-girl seemed to drain it, just a tiny bit. 

    The princess insisted the girl stay for dinner. Knowing that you mustn’t say no to a princess, the girl said yes. 

    The next night, the girl seemed a little droopy, her real-girl glow a little faded. But the princess hardly noticed, because she felt a little lighter, and perhaps a tiny glow had come from inside all her sad bits. She insisted the girl stay for dinner again, knowing it could do no harm to have some company. 

    Each day the girl stayed, she looked a bit sadder, like she was slowly replacing her real-girl parts with sad-girl parts. And each day, the princess felt a bit more like a real-girl again, who could taste and feel and laugh. 

    The two of them had dinner every night, and the princess was happy.

    Until one day, the princess took a glimpse in one of her dark castle’s mirrors, which she hardly every looked at. And what she saw inside drowned her in despair. 

    Her eyes. They were filled with emptiness, the same eyes that she had stared into all those years ago, that belonged to her prince. She was empty, just like he had been, sucking happiness out of a child to try to feel like one again. But as she looked at herself in the mirror she realized that nothing had changed at all; she couldn’t retain real-girl joy anymore, because there was not one bit of her that wasn’t filled with sad things. She was just a shell, and she was turning that poor child into a shell too. 

    She tried to warn the girl, to send her back home, but it was too late. The girl had become what she had; a princess, filled with loneliness and painted a shade of gray, to match the castle walls. The new princess didn’t remember why she every wanted to go home in the first place. She knew nothing but her dark castle. 

    The old princess locked herself away in her chambers, ashamed of what she had done to the girl. Day after day, she stayed up there, while the new princess ate alone downstairs, both of them despairing. The old princess began to miss her gardens deeply, the only place she knew happiness. 

    She stared out her balcony one evening, spotting the gardens down below. She longed for them, the way she had once longed for her mother and father, the way she had longed for company, longed for a child to bring her joy. The everlasting flowers were all she had left, yet she could not reach them. She found herself needing them, desperately needing them, to find the last sliver of joy she could keep in her heart. 

    The new princess down below did not see the old princess jump off her balcony, reaching her lonely arms out to her flowers before she faded into nothing, a ghost-girl as she hit the ground.