[ 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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HE SPARED HER. HESPARED her, and called her his Queen. She's not sure whether this is a dream, or a nightmare anymore. His interest in her is starting to terrify Shahrazad, but what scares her more is the rapid fluttering in her chest.
It isn't right.
It shouldn't be.
"You look pretty harmless for a girl who survived Khalifa," the eunuch says, assessing her with a sharp gaze. "I'm Farha, your secondary handmaiden."
Shahrazad nods, still breathing erratically. The air rushes from her lungs in fiery pants, burning her throat. "Why is he doing this to me?"
"Well, do you want to die instead?"
"No, but--"
The familiar clinking of anklets fills the void of her croaking, ringing in her ears. Laleh pushes into the room, face flushed, hair sticking to her sweaty forehead. "Malika, are you okay? I was so worried."
She sweeps into the chambers hurriedly, clutching Shahrazad's robes in her delicate fists. "I heard from the servant's quarters that the executioner is arriving, and I-- I'm so glad you're alive."
"How sentimental," Farha remarks. She proceeds to place neatly cut pieces of fruit on the table, picking an orange cautiously. "Have some, Malika."
It seems to her that Farha's dry humour contains bitter apathy, the kind she uses to conceal the sadness in her eyes, so the Queen shakes her head. "I'm not hungry."
Her body convulses. She's sick, sick of everything. The palace is an illusion behind which madness reigns, and it's killing her slowly.
"Listen to me, leave before he kills you. Run away, I'll arrange something," Laleh says softly, eyes fearful. "Before the rebellion escalates."
Shahrazad leans against the shutters, allowing the sunlight to whip her clothed back, to lash the sanity from her bones. "And then what? Wait until he digs the deserts to find me? Watch the palace burn?"
"Fair point," Farha concludes, biting through the orange that she had initially peeled for the Queen. The corrugated metal jewellery clings to the eunuch's arms, sweltering heat causing the coarse cloth of her robes to scrape her calloused skin. "You both can be tried for treason for talking behind his back, you know."
"Treason?" Laleh scoffs. "He'll simply slit our throats without hesitation."
The storyteller fists her hands tightly, fingernails carving crescents into her palms, bleeding a thin stream down the lines.
She is sick of his mind games.
And she's going to unearth the skeletons he has buried in the sands, every single one of them, beginning from the locked door.
She dresses herself, grimly staring at the glaring evidence of insanity on her face. The deep kohl lining her eyes can barely mask the outline of bags underneath, her cheekbones jutting sharply from frail bronze skin.
