The Princess Kissed Awake the Slumbering Demon
The princess kissed awake the slumbering demon.
This was the last time she would kiss him awake. Twenty years had passed since the first time she had done so.
Twenty years ago, she was still a carefree young princess—the only daughter and legal heir of the most powerful and prosperous kingdom on the Fairy Tale Continent. She possessed unparalleled beauty and was doted upon by all, so much so that even her finicky nature, which could not tolerate a single pea hidden beneath twenty mattresses, was praised by others as a precious virtue.
All she lacked was a passionate, sweet love, and her life would have been truly complete.
She yearned for it, anticipated it, but never grew anxious or worried.
For a beautiful princess to fall in love at first sight with a handsome prince was as destined to happen on the Fairy Tale Continent as sunrise and sunset, as the ebb and flow of tides.
Love arrived as promised, yet the one who captured the princess's heart at her coming-of-age ball was not a young prince, but a middle-aged king from a neighboring small country.
His first wife had just passed away the previous winter, leaving behind an infant daughter who could barely speak.
When the news spread, the whole kingdom was in an uproar. Everyone declared this was no match for the princess.
But even the most powerful witch could not break the curse that love had cast upon the princess. She was thoroughly bewitched—how could a young woman with no experience of the world resist the charm and sweet words of an older man?
The princess's mother wept day after day, while the king was so furious he wanted to march his army and wipe that small country off the map of the Fairy Tale Continent entirely.
The willful princess also felt afraid. Her lover's letters kept arriving secretly, one after another. She looked at the tenderness woven between the lines, feeling both sweetness and anxiety.
After much deliberation, the princess slipped into the palace garden in the dead of night.
When the princess was still a little girl, she had learned a secret. Her aunt, who had captured her prince husband using a glass slipper and coy games; her second cousin, who had married a beast to gain entry into the royal family; and her aunt-in-law, who had obtained a pair of beautiful legs through magic surgery only to give birth to children with fish tails—each of them had revealed fragments of information. Pieced together, they formed the truth the princess now knew.
At the stroke of midnight, kiss the most vibrant rosebud in the palace garden, and a sleeping demon hidden within would be awakened by the princess's kiss.
What can a mortal trade with a demon? The princess remembered asking, tugging at the thick hem of a woman's skirt when she was still a child.
Heh. The older woman turned around, her face one of many that had once been beautiful but had been ravaged by age, her tone equally indifferent. Love, of course.
The young princess didn't understand the meaning of those words then, and perhaps she still didn't now. But she couldn't wait any longer.
The princess timed her movements precisely to the midnight bell. She rose on her tiptoes and kissed the rosebud blooming highest on the bush, watching the petals slowly unfold, nervous and bewildered.
The mist dissipated, and the demon materialized.
His appearance was not as fearsome as rumored—at the very least, he didn't repulse the princess.
"Beautiful princess." The demon had just been disturbed from a pleasant dream and was still yawning, but he bowed dutifully. "At your service. What is your request?"
"Let me marry the one I love." The princess pleaded eagerly. She knew the demon had the power to make the impossible possible.
The demon stared at her. "That won't come cheap."
The princess understood the rules of dealing with demons, but she was still somewhat frightened, and her voice dropped: "What do you want?"
"The throne." The demon replied. "The throne you're meant to inherit."
The princess recoiled in alarm. "You want to become the king of this country?"
"No, no." The demon smiled and shook his head. "I can't be a human king. I just want you to exchange your right to inherit the throne for the marriage you desire."
"But what good does that do you?" The princess couldn't figure it out—by any calculation, she was the one getting the worse end of the deal.
"I'm a demon." The demon's grin widened. "Doing harm without benefiting ourselves is our kind's favorite pastime."
The princess agreed to the trade, exchanging her right to the throne for a white wedding dress. The wedding procession was sparse. Her father and mother stood atop the high castle walls and did not come down to see her off. The nobles avoided her as well, fearful of being associated with the disgraced princess stripped of her royal inheritance.
But even with her only dowry being a handful of red roses, the princess still smiled as she married.
She resolutely gave up her grand world and walked openly into her beloved's small world.
The first thing she did upon arriving at her husband's palace was to plant those roses in the garden soil. They took root immediately, climbing across half the rear wall, blooming with bud after bud of brilliant crimson. Set against the blue sky and white clouds, they swayed gently in the breeze. The scene was so much like the home she knew.
The bride looked at the flowers and smiled, the happiness overflowing from her grin.
She was home.
---
Love conquers all. The young princess believed this firmly. All the beautiful stories in the Fairy Tale Continent said so.
Unfortunately, stories and life are, after all, different.
The princess—no, she should now be called the queen—soon discovered the difference.
Stripped of her inheritance as the most valuable dowry, the position of a commoner queen was not as glamorous as it appeared. The courtesies among nobles needed to be carefully weighed with the scales of power and influence. A queen with a title but no backing couldn't withstand the scrutinizing gazes of the old foxes.
What's more, for some reason, she never conceived a child—another chip knocked off her standing.
Fortunately, she still had her peerless beauty, enough to keep the king's loving gaze upon her.
That was enough. The queen felt she had nothing to complain about. What she had chosen was love alone.
And she also loved the infant girl left behind by the previous queen, who was still babbling in her cradle. The child was extraordinarily beautiful, with skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. When the queen held her, the little girl would smile as radiantly as sunshine. The queen loved this child as her own.
Before girls her age had stopped clinging to their parents, the queen had already taken on the responsibilities of a mother.
But the title of stepmother was not an easy one to bear.
Even biological mothers make mistakes, let alone a young woman who had never been taught how to raise a child. Every misstep became evidence of guilt, every explanation sounded like excuse-making. The rumor that "the queen is a wicked stepmother" spread like an infectious disease—flying from the flapping mouths of maidservants, drifting to the ears of guards pressed against walls, then carried by young noblewomen who had once coveted the queen's position, giggling and gossiping until every noble's face darkened with scheming smiles.
With no allies, the queen pretended to hear nothing, see nothing. She devoted herself entirely to caring for the previous queen's little daughter—braiding her hair in the morning, tucking her in at night, and on sunny afternoons, taking her to the rose garden to sing and dance.
The daughter's dependence made the queen feel loved.
But the little girl she had raised with her own hands would also, at every royal ball where every attendee harbored ulterior motives, resolutely release the queen's hand and walk toward the crowd on the other side of the hall—the breeding ground for rumors and mockery.
The queen tasted despair for the first time.
"But I still have my husband's love," she reassured herself, turning—only to see the king dancing tenderly with another neighboring princess, a smile on his face, while the young princess laughed merrily.
She had been drawn by that same charm once, looking just like that girl.
The queen clapped a hand over her mouth, nauseous.
No one noticed when the queen slipped away before the ball ended. She fled back to her empty bedroom and, before the vanity mirror, broke down in tears at the first fine lines appearing at the corners of her eyes. All she could see in her mind's eye were the envious yet pitying smiles those older women had given her when she was still a radiant young girl.
She hadn't understood then. Now she did.
The envy was because they had already lost their beauty. The pity was because they knew she would inevitably end up just like them.
The queen shot to her feet and rushed toward the garden deep within the palace, wiping her tears as she fiercely kissed the most beautiful rosebud beneath the moonlight.
"Oh my, my princess." The demon still looked half-asleep, rubbing his eyes lazily. "At your service. What is your request?"
"I want to make a trade with you." The queen, no longer afraid of him, stated her demand directly.
The demon smiled. "And what do you want?"
" Eternal beauty." She answered.
"Oh?" The demon's eyes gained a glint of interest. "That won't come cheap either."
A woman in the grip of anger lacks no courage: "Name your price."
The demon pretended to consider for a moment, then extended one long, slender finger. "A child."
The queen froze. "What?"
"Exchange your firstborn child." The demon explained slowly, pulling his finger back and pressing it against the sharp teeth that peeked from his widening smile. "Consider this a loyalty discount for a returning customer."
Dark clouds obscured the moon. The queen's chest heaved violently. After a long time, she hid her expression in the shadows of night and answered softly: "Fine."
The demon chuckled softly and vanished behind a wisp of mist. And on the wall hidden behind layers of rose branches and thorns, a flawless magic mirror appeared. The queen stepped before it, and saw in the reflection the face of a perfectly unblemished young woman.
The queen smiled in satisfaction, lifted her skirts, and turned to leave—but her hem caught on the vines scattered across the floor, and she tumbled down a stone staircase. Dark red blood pooled around her like wilting rose petals.
The beautiful queen had miscarried.
She had lost her first child.
And the second would never come.
---
Every subject in the kingdom knew their queen was the most beautiful woman in the world.
But they also knew she had neither her family's power nor the ability to bear children.
"What a pity," every country farmer would sigh, pretending there wasn't a trace of schadenfreude in their sympathetic tone.
As for the queen herself, she rarely had the opportunity to hear such words. She had grown accustomed to dismissing her maidservants and guards, sitting alone in the rose garden behind the palace for hours at a time.
Her only companion was the magic mirror.
As long as she looked into it each day, the enchantment of beauty would not fade.
And this mirror could speak, keep her company, and reportedly answer all questions truthfully.
This feature was a bonus the demon had thrown in as a discount for the second transaction, a small, inconsequential freebie.
But the queen didn't ask it many questions.
What could she ask? Whether the king had stopped visiting her long ago? What the rumors about that neighboring princess were really about? Whether his passionate pursuit of her had truly been about the political backing of her powerful family? Whether, after all this, he still loved her?
The questions she truly wanted answers to were the ones she dared not ask aloud.
Gradually, new rumors began circulating through the palace. A terrifying witch lived in the palace garden, muttering the most sinister and evil spells every midnight, casting harmful black magic.
But in truth, the lonely queen was only asking the mirror, over and over: "Magic mirror, magic mirror, tell me, who is the fairest of them all?"
Such an answer was the safest.
As long as her beauty remained, her husband's past infatuation could not fade entirely, and she could continue living in self-deception.
---
The queen's stepdaughter, the new generation's princess, was growing up day by day, and gradually came to possess extraordinary beauty of her own.
People began calling her Snow White.
Busybodies started privately debating whether the princess or the queen was more beautiful.
The queen hadn't particularly cared about these comparisons at first.
Even though Snow White had grown distant from her over the years, she was still a child the queen had raised with her own hands—her daughter, her family. The queen didn't think there was any need to compare herself with her.
But gossip is a mischievous little sprite that loves to fan flames, and even the slow-to-realize queen eventually learned from the whispers that Snow White looked very much like the previous queen, the late queen consort.
And according to rumor, the king and the previous queen had been famously devoted to each other.
The queen still dismissed these rumors—until she noticed the king's protectiveness over Snow White had clearly exceeded what a father should show. He indulged her every unreasonable whim as if doting on a young lover, yet flew into a rage when a neighboring prince so much as glanced at her at a ball.
The unsavory rumors spread even wider.
Finally, the queen saw something in her husband's gaze toward Snow White that stabbed her heart.