Another Beauty and the BEAST story

Chapter XII

With shoes in my right hand, and Elsa's hand in the left, she steered me towards the West Wing. This was the only part of the castle that hadn't been cleaned by the objects, because it looked exactly as dusty and shattered as the last time I'd been in here. With ease Elsa monitor us through the broken furniture and rubble, avoiding the corner where the family picture's hanging. She takes me to the back of the room, where another balcony spreads out outside of the windows. She leaves me standing there, shoes in hand, and rushes off. After a few seconds she comes back, with a shard of the broken mirror carefully tucked in her arms. I look at her with one eyebrow raised in a question. 

She hands me the mirror shard, and then place her finger on it's reflective glass. A shot of frost emerges around the shard, enclosing it in a vibrant pattern of what looks like stormy waves of frost. 

"This mirror will show you anything, anything you wish to see," she explains and takes a small step away from me. I turn the shard between my fingers, my stomach knotting in homesickness. 

"I'd like to see my mother, please," I ask the mirror shard hesitantly. For half a second, nothing happens and I'm afraid that she's just pulling a mean prank on me, but then the shard lights up with a strange lilac glow. I blink, and suddenly I'm staring at my own mother's face.

But it reveals only suffering. My mother's face is twisted in pain, her skin is pale and her eyes are sunken in. She's coughing, and lying in some dark corner of the woods that I don't recognize. Pain surges through my heart as I see her there, and I reach my fingers up to the shard to touch her, but the picture disappears and all that is left is my own shocked expression staring back at me. 

Elsa looks at the shard over my shoulder, and when the picture disappears her face looks not only shocked, but also drowned in sadness. 

"She's sick... Oh, Mother, why do you have to be so stubborn? Couldn't you just have let me go?" I whisper to myself and swallow the tears surging up my throat. Elsa steps away from me, I can hear her bare feet against the floor, and turns toward the white rose in the corner. More petals have fallen off, and she looks at it with a secret hiding in the corner of her eye. 

"Then... Then you must go to her," She finally says, and turns towards me. She's put on a brave face, but I can see her lips trembling from where I stand. 

"What did you say?" 

"I release you. You are no longer my prisoner," she sighs sadly, and I approach her carefully. When I'm standing so close that we're practically hugging, I take her hand and rest my cheek on it.

"You mean... I'm free?" I ask, inhaling the scent of her skin. Her fingers are cold against my skin, even colder than the times I've held her hands before, and I can see patterns of stormy frost slowly make it's way down her fingers. 

"Yes," Is all she says and lets her fingers linger on my cheek a moment longer before taking her hand away from me. Before releasing me. 

"Oh. Thank you," I exhale and hug the shard closer to my chest. "Hold on, Mother, I'm coming," I say to it before making an attempt to exit the room and rush down to the stables for Philippe. But I stop myself, and turn back to the girl standing by a frosty rose enclosed in a glass jar. I reach out the shard towards her, but she pushes it back towards me.

"Take it with you, so you'll always have a way to look back, and remember me," she whispers. I hug the shard even closer to my chest, that's burning with decision agony. I want to stay, but I also can't abandon my mother. 

"Thank you, for understanding how much she needs me," is all I can come up with to say. Elsa looks down at the rose in depression, and I reach out one final time to touch her. My fingers glow with life at the short second I push them against her cheek, wiping away a silent tear as I go. She smiles, and then nods towards the door, letting me go. I rush out. 

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With the clothes I had when I first arrived on, and a leather satchel with the mirror shard in it slung across my shoulder, I rush out to get Philippe from the stables. He's nearly asleep when I burst through the door, almost aggressively puts on all of his gear and lead him out into the night. My mind is drifting between the pain-stained face of my broken mother, somewhere in the woods all alone, and the face of a small and insecure girl's sad face as she lets me go. 

I dig my heels into Philippe's sides when I've slung myself up on his back, and he bursts out of the iron gates in a rushed canter. I feel someone's gaze in my back as I disappear into the night, and it feels worse than being stabbed with a kitchen knife. When I know I'm out of sight from the castle windows, I can hear the cracking of ice somewhere in the background, and soon a giant snowflake lightens the sky for a second before disappearing.  

My dark blue cape flings around like a wild animal in the wind resistance, but I pay no attention to it and clings to Philippe's reins as I call out for my mother. My horse's hooves stomp against the ground, and snow is set adrift when we pass by. For a second it reminds me of a time not too long ago, where we raced through the sunlit woods with rosy cheeks and a stallion made out of snow. I shake my head. I can't afford to think about that now.

I find her face-down in a forgotten part of the forest, a map in hand and an empty bag a few meters away. I fall to my knees next to my mother, who has passed out from the fever, and slowly pat her grey hair. With some effort, and a lot of help from Philippe, I manage to throw her body over his posterior, and then sit myself up in front of her. We return home at a slow walk, the stars being the only witnesses to the tears I cry into Philippe's mane.