Blinded by your grace, Stormzy

Beauty and Good Fortune XII

Part XI

After setting out for a great adventure to rescue a girl he never even got a good look at, Chance found himself trapped at Fiamma's hut for months on end. Days started early as the witch had to deliver her potions, ointments, oils, and concoctions to the surrounding villages and she always left a long list of tasks for him to complete while she was away. In the morning, it was hard to even find your way around the house with all the open jars, dirty pots, and occasional spills. He always started with his favorite task, finding mushrooms, roots, leaves, and flowers from the nearby forest using a small notebook with drawings: mandrake, belladonna, wolfsbane, sage, nightshade berries, mugwort, valerian, milk thistle, and Saint John's Wort. By the time he got back with his basket full, he still had to clean and put everything back in place, feed the cat, tend to the garden, mend the clothes, chop the wood, and try to put together some warm meal.

The trouble was, there was only one fountain in the courtyard, but the water was so bitter it was only good for watering the garden. To get drinking and cooking water, you had to go all the way to the valley and come back up the hill with two buckets full. But you could only wash clothes and your hair with rainwater; otherwise, your laundry would get stiff and your hair would get as rough as a broom. He had to learn all this on his own, and even after months, he still got something wrong, and there were still a million other things to do when the witch got back. So she was huffing and puffing, scolding him and calling him every name in the book.

Beauty and Good Fortune XI

 Part X

The following evening all the guest were at the table as every other evening enjoying the gentle music and the smooth wines while the Dark Prince was doing his best to ignore them all with one of his usual absent looks. He was too busy trying to mentally prioritize his list of new aquisitions to pay any attention to their chatter. The doors opened as usual and everybody went quiet for the moment they were all waiting for. But instead of a vision of beauty and charm the old wizard came in with a most curious grin. He advanced slowly to the side of the prince and told him that the girl was nowhere to be found and that he prepared a search party and hunting dogs to find her first thing in the morning. The prince just stayed there as a stone completely astonished and he did not even move when the guests started to leave the Grand Hall one by one. That night he could not sleep at all just thinking how she could leave all these beautiful things behind. He walked from room to room looking at everything he worked so hard for. 

At the first light he finally understood that the answer was simple, she just realised how pointless all those beautiful things are. He called his guards and asked them to lock that cockroach of a wizard in his deepest dungeon for the fraud that he was. And then he send news to the four corners of his realm that any wise man or woman can come and choose an object from his collection as long as they can tell him what is the meaning of life.

Beauty and Good Fortune X

 Part IX 

You would think that nothing ever made her smile in the endless emptiness of her existence, always centered around the needs and wants of strangers with greedy eyes and empty hearts. Another dress, another song, another twirl. But she found her bit of luck eventually, a small crack in the wall of the back gardens. Not big enough to escape, just big enough to get a peak at a loud busy market, bursting with people that were sometimes shouting, sometimes selling, sometimes buying. Most often they were just looking at what was on display or who was passing by. There were always long looks for wealthy garments and shiny shoes and young pretty faces with flushed cheeks. But never for old ladies in ragged clothes with thin hair, dirty teeth, and bad backs. They were coming and going as if already half ghosts. 

She had always been an early riser, but she began pretending she needed more time to rest in the morning. After sometime nobody even noticed if she showed up well after lunchtime. And then she started piling up books about the wonderful art of theater. Such useful training for entertaining guests, everyone assumed. Ways of walking, gestures, accents, costumes, makeup and hair. Enough information to bring any character to life, even an old woman who is hardly ever noticed. The hard part was finding a few pockets of dirty wool and some old clothes, no easy feat when you live in a spotless castle filled with fine things. But she finally had her wish, and when she looked at herself in the large gold-rimmed mirror, she made the biggest smile with her blackened teeth and ash-smeared face. 

Beauty and Good Fortune IX

Part VIII 

The days and months and years passed like water in a mountain spring, each one held in place by the same event. At dusk they came to bathe and dress her and then she would be presented again to those that dined with them. They would all marvel at her beauty and her grace, the way she could make any instrument sing, praise each and every one of her accomplishments but never talk to her, only about her. Each night new and old guests would look upon her as another wondrous work of art, and yet in a palace filled with countless works of art all her accomplishments seemed like another grain of rice in a whole warehouse filled with it. 

But those still black eyes, so dark that they seemed misplaced on a face that seemed to glow from within with magic, those dark eyes never looked at her with longing. They rested just as they always did and try as she might, she could not find a trace of all she felt. It must be that when you spend your life surrounded by beauty and perfection and spend all your waking hours searching for more you lose that which moved you to acquire it in the first place. Beauty is beauty because it is surrounded by things that are less so, a kind heart is kind because we are surrounded by unfeeling hearts. There was no reason in her mind, no reason behind anything that resided in this damnable place. Just beauty, beauty that lost all its glamour once it passed by its gate. 

Rooms and rooms that were filled with perfection, but they all lacked the background they needed to truly shine. And so they each stole from the beauty of the objects that surrounded them, and everything hungered for its own place.