[ WATTYS '18 LONG-LISTED ]
❝ I have slit throats far more beautiful than yours.❞
In which a thousand brides have fallen, and she is the last, so she spins a tale as old as time to live the dawn.
| an arabian nights x beauty and the beast crossover...
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WHEN SHE AWAKES, LALEH IS PARTING THE carved wooden shutters, allowing daylight to seep through the gaps. It kisses the polished marble flooring, dancing like ribbons of gold. "Aren't you causing a commotion, Shahrazad."
The storyteller traces the designs inking the bowl of her palm, endless patterns completing a seemingly beautiful whole. She does not know what happened last night, when for the briefest of moments, she was inclining towards her captor, but it makes her feel sick. "Why?"
"You survived the dawn again," she answers curtly. "And that is an unusual event."
She runs an ivory comb through Shahrazad's cascading hair, lathering cool rose water into her scalp. After decking her in accessories befitting an empress, she is dressed in an emerald attire of silk, smooth to the calloused touch. "Do you know why he murders them? All the women."
Laleh flinches, fingers spinning coarse fibres of dark as night hair into a fabric of midnight. "The King is a killer. Insanity doesn't have a justification."
"There has to be more to it," she states, tearing the pita bread to dip it into silver bowls of goat cheese and hummus sitting atop the table. The deliciously prepared lunch assaults her mouth. "What turned Shahryar into this monster?"
"Nobody knows for sure, but rumour goes that he is the child of the former Queen with a servant," Laleh says in the sliver of a whisper, "Some people say that she couldn't conceive with the Caliph, who abused her because of her inability to produce an heir."
"How is that her fault?"
Laleh smiles sadly. "We are women born in a man's world, Malika. Everything worth blaming is pinned on us."
The ornate pieces of jewellery weigh her down, fresh fears settling on her shoulders like a tightly wrapped shawl. "What happened to her?"
"That which happens to every unfaithful woman in our land," she breathes, emitting a soft prayer, a distant calling, "She was punished, throat slit until she bled dry. The Caliph made her child kill his own mother."
"Shahryar was forced to kill his mother?" Shahrazad's confused heart feels an inkling of sympathy for a second. She conjures the image of a boy with striking sand-dune eyes abjected to horror. Then the visual is stained, the edges of the boy turning into a man, features hardening with years of battle, scars running along the length of taut arms. "But it has nothing to do with this massacre. It doesn't make him any less a murderer."
"I know," Laleh says, applying kohl with the practiced expertise, "But perhaps it has something to do with his backstory."
Killer, killer, killer. "Inexcusable either way."
"I don't doubt that," she says, resting at the edge of the bedding, wiping her tired brow. "Would you like to visit the rose gardens today?"
Shahrazad's mind wanders, pinpointing to the locked door, the odd behaviour, but she decides that revelations come in pieces, so she smiles softly instead. "I would love to."
