Stars over Stephensville: A Myth of the Dying God

Fairy Tale 2: The Princess and the Veil

Once upon a time there lived a beautiful princess who fell in love with a commoner. Although this foreigner was brave and heroic and did many great deeds to earn the love of the princess, her father would never allow the two to be married, for she was very beautiful and had the most heavenly voice that her people had ever heard, and he was from a poor family from a foreign land. But then her father's kingdom was attacked by a mighty army, and it was the poor foreign hero who led the defense of her land. When her father saw the hero rallying soldiers and leading the desperate final charge to save the princess, he at last changed his mind, but alas it was too late, for though the hero was victorious he was captured and carried away by the invading army.

The princess was distraught and prayed daily for her lost love, but he did not return. One day as she sat by a lake crying over the man she had wanted for a husband, assuming him dead, she heard a voice that told her that he was still alive, but kept in torment by his captors. However, it turned out that he had not been captured by men but by creatures of the underworld, and although he was alive, he suffered torment daily in the world below.

At this news the princess was more upset than ever, wanting to rescue him but knowing that there was no way for a mere mortal to enter the underworld alone and live. The voice told her, though, that it would lead her into the underworld and be her guide. If she ate no food and spoke to no one else on the way, they might be able to save him. And so the princess left and went down into the world of the dead, and when she passed the threshold out of this world she could see that the voice belonged to a water fairy. It had heard her cries each day as she sat by the lake where it made its home, and though fairies are not supposed to talk to people in our world, it had decided to try its best to help her.

The road of the underworld was very long, and on the way she grew hungry, and as she began to get hungrier and hungrier she started passing more and more delicious-looking food, bread and fruit and cheese and the best cuts of meat. But she reminded herself that she wanted to save her beloved and refused all food, and so came in time to the lowest region of the underworld where sat the king and queen of the dead. There she found again her beloved.

Without saying a word, she turned as the fairy had instructed her and began walking back the way she had come. It was then that she began to see the shades of her own loved ones who had passed away, and her trial grew worse. She saw many she knew, old and dear friends, and even her own aged grandfather, upon whose knee she remembered bouncing when she was very little, and they all reached out to her and called her name. She bit her lip to keep herself from speaking, and soon a trickle of blood ran down her chin. But she was a soft-hearted girl, and when she saw her brother who had died in the war only a short time before, and when he reached out to her and called her name in a voice filled with anguish, she felt her resolve slipping. When he said that she must never have loved him at all if she would not speak even a word to him, her only brother, she broke at last and told him that she loved and missed him.

At once she heard her beloved calling her name, fading away back whence they had come. Despite the fairy's warnings she immediately turned and followed him back into the deeps of the underworld. She came again to the dreaded king of that realm, and begged him to let her lover come with her once more, and she sang a song of grief and woe to him. And it happened that the king who had never once known pity, when he heard this song in her beautiful voice, shed a single tear for her loss. Therefore he gave her a pardon, but warned her that accepting it came at a price. She would be allowed to live with her beloved for one year, but at the end of that year he must return to the world below while she must stay and live alone to the end of her days.

The princess quickly agreed to this, and before she left the queen of the underworld gave her a bridal gift. It was a veil for her to wear at her wedding, and through it the princess would be able to see all the fairies from from far and wide who would attend, because word would spread of her song and the stern king's sympathy for her plight. The princess then came again to the sunlit realms, and the next week her father held a wedding for her that was unrivaled in its grandeur and beauty throughout all the surrounding kingdoms. Through her veil the princess saw a vast crowd of many kinds of fairies and even the king and queen of the underworld themselves, so greatly did they honor the love and devotion of the princess who had dared the perilous journey of the underworld, and in joy she finally married the great love of her life.

For one year the princess lived in bliss with her beloved, and soon she was with child. The child was born early that spring, and only one month later the allotted year had passed. The king of the underworld himself reappeared to the princess and her beloved, and though she begged him, and promised him her whole kingdom and even her firstborn child, he would not again break the law that had ruled his kingdom since the foundation of the world. And so in great grief the princess watched as her beloved was again taken down to the world below, though this time he went in honor without pain, and when he went the veil she had worn at their wedding turned black.

When she wore it she saw again the fairies who live in our world invisible to all other people, and they grieved with her whenever they saw her wandering through the forests of her home. She never again loved another, and stories began to spread of a woman who walked alone through the forests in a long black veil, weeping and weeping for her lost love. When she was at last an old woman, she hung her veil, now grayed with age, in the limbs of an ancient oak tree, and she laid herself down and died. And it is said that the fairies took her veil and shared it with one another, spreading it through the trees, and that is why the trees of her home are still to this day sometimes covered with gray veils, looking sad and forlorn.