beheld_beauty | mon ennemi

mon ennemi

With the party concluded, Belle wants to go back and investigate the wicked enchanter and find out who it is she killed.

Does her husband wish to accompany her?

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No.

Then she kisses him goodbye, and rather than spend hours in flight, she turns herself invisible and - a useful new vocabulary word and power - teleports.

The stranger's body is where she left it, untouched. The stranger's palace is empty.

He does look familiar, doesn't he? A little like -

Like her husband, actually.

That's disturbing.

She investigates the palace for books, writings, anything that would hint at who lived here and what he was about.

Well, apparently he was a marquis.

The Marquis Étienne des Landes, to be exact, son of another Étienne, who himself was the son of yet a third. All of the portraits of these men look suspiciously identical.

Belle herself does not look twenty-two. And she knows that he was an enchanter.

Are there other clues here?

Or - no. In fact she does not need other clues.

She now has an arsenal of wishes, and one of the wishes will let her look into the past, and find out whether they were in fact all the same Étienne, and what could possibly have led the dead man to believe that her husband belonged to him.

They were all the same Étienne, going back a hundred and fifty years, to when he was still an apprentice.

Before he was an apprentice, he had a family - a castle - a brother.

Lord above.

A brother.

Belle watches these brothers, especially the one who looks so achingly like a certain laughing face she once spied with a past-watching spell.

They did not live a happy life.

The elder brother caught the worst of it, but Étienne wasn't spared much. Their father was cruel; their mother, mostly absent.

One day Étienne's brother burned the castle to the ground.

He knew the enchantress already; that was when he went to her to become her apprentice. She taught him many things. He inherited his father's title, since his brother disappeared the day of the fire. He wasn't there; he didn't know whether his brother had escaped or not. Either way seemed as likely as the other.

It took a few years for him to stop looking.

It took decades, well past the end of his apprenticeship, for the enchantress to tell him about that chance meeting and the curse she cast.

She told him that all things belonged to him, his brother included. She told him that the curse was just and fair, that his brother would make a monster of a Marquis, that it was a good thing for everyone that she had erased the name of Modeste des Landes forever.

He came to believe her, eventually.

And no wonder that if he chanced upon Beast he'd take him as he did.

Belle cannot much regret Étienne's death.

She is done here.

She teleports home to her husband, sober-faced.