Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 74631 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 299(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74631 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 299(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
The walk back to my room is lit with similar candles, but it feels darker without Elle.
When I am back in my room, I go to the window and look out. It is true that Elle is safer with me in another part of the castle because of the beast’s urges.
I peer up at the sky, wishing times were different. The sky is dark except for the stars. There’s a new moon tonight. The new moon…pitch black. The beast craves the full moon. He nearly howls for it.
ELLE
The beast’s castle is indeed a gilded cage for a prisoner such as me.
It nearly feels wrong to call it a cage when I have roamed far and wide inside it, exploring every place but the one tower I have been forbidden to enter. I’ve had fresh air brought in by the windows and the walls cleaned of their years of dust. I have had floors that seem like they haven’t been walked on in years polished to a high shine, and as far as I can tell, there are no more dark corners begging for attention.
Of course, my father’s house was much smaller than the castle. I’m not sure how many of my father’s cottage could fit inside the beast’s castle, but it must be at least a hundred, if not many more. This place is a village of its own. I could walk the halls for hours at a time, taking different paths and rarely passing the same room twice. I know, because I have done so, methodically moving from hall to hall, keeping a list on a scrap of paper in my pocket so that I knew where I had already gone to coax the castle back to its rightful state. I could make a lifelong project of cataloging the artwork here, or rearranging the books in the library, or redecorating any number of rooms or suites or hallways.
I could change the beast’s castle, if I had the will. I do not think the magic would stop me. I think, in fact, that the magic would enjoy the fresh energy of a newly redecorated room, or a hallway that had been someone’s sole focus for a week or a month or a year.
Thinking of spending years in the castle never fails to remind me that I cannot leave, which is what makes this place a prison. It appears to me to be a cage, no matter how much peace I feel here. No matter how blatant a prison this is. I can’t bring myself to long for my old life in the village.
I argue with myself over and over as I move through this new, lonely life. A gilded cage is special because it is made from gold. It is luxurious. I cannot help that merely thinking the word cage brings to mind something dirty and rusted, and none of the castle is dirty anymore. It’s not even dusty. I have given it as much of my attention as I could, though I am only one person and there are countless rooms. The space is lighter even as the weather gets colder. The castle brightens despite the sun setting earlier every day, because it knows that I prefer it to be brighter. Living with so much dark and gloom around me as the beast has done for these many years—that would be a cage.
The fact at the heart of everything is that I am not free to leave. If I leave, the beast will not guarantee that my father will remain unharmed.
If I owe the man who raised me anything, it must be his safety. It’s true that he could not keep me entirely safe after my mother died. I know he feared the day that he let the cold sink too deeply into my bones, or a cold, hard winter left us without food. I was more than aware that he could not stand up against the world alone and could not protect me.
I wonder if that eats him up inside. By now, he must have realized that I’m not going to return. He must have come to understand that his only daughter is gone. I cannot return the daughter I used to be to my father, because I am no longer the same. I have seen the inside of the beast’s castle and the magic that dwells there, and even if I could walk out the doors and go back to the village, I would never be able to forget it. I would long for the castle but mostly for the beast.
One thought does meddle at the back of my mind… What I can do is remove the burden of survival from his shoulders. I know how heavy a weight my own survival must have been, because he could not think beyond giving me to Crawe in order to absolve himself of it.