Prince Handsome

There once was a woman who stayed young and lived forever by draining the life of the land around her. She lived in a large beautiful castle but around it was a dead barren bleak landscape and even the people who lived on the land grew old quickly and died as the life was sucked from them by the vampire’s evil spell.

 

Nature pleaded with her.

 

“Give your life back to life; be part of life continuing; be part of rebirth”.

 

“Grow old and die, you mean”, she scoffed, “But I’m not ready to grow old and I’m certainly not ready to die. I have so much still to do with my life”.

 

“But you deny that chance to others”, said nature, “You are like a single sun that keeps burning by robbing the night of stars; like a single rose that stays red by making all around it a desert”.

 

“But I’m beautiful”, said the vampire, looking in her mirror, “I wouldn’t want that beauty to fade”.

 

“The land round about you was beautiful too”, sighed Nature, “But it has faded because you took the life from it”.

 

One day, however, a young handsome man came riding towards the castle.

 

He had ignored all the people who had warned him, “Don’t go there. That is just a place of death” because, as so many young men are, he was adventurous and attracted to danger.

 

As he approached the castle, however, he saw the vampire standing at her window and thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

 

“How strange that in such a barren place one should find so fair a flower”, he said.

 

“Oh”, said the vampire, flattered, “You think me beautiful?”.

 

“I thought I knew beauty until I looked upon your face. There is no rose upon this earth that can bloom as fair; no star in the heavens that shines as bright as the beauty I now behold”, said the young man.

 

“Oh, you hear that, Nature”, said the Vampire, “No beauty in this world, he says, to compare with me”.

 

Then, using her powers, the vampire lowered the drawbridge of her castle and then appearing in the archway like entrance of the castle welcomed him inside.

 

Then, leading the man into a great hall, with one wave of her hand she conjured a table covered with a brightly embroidered table cloth and with another wave of her hand conjured up a banquet upon it with wine and flickering candles and then she conjured up some musical instruments and made them play themselves like a quartet.

 

“Come”, she said to the young man, “Come and sit with me and tell me more”.

 

And so the young man sat down at her banquet and he told her how deeply he had fallen in love with her and how his whole life would be wasted if he could not spend it loving her.

 

But then, during the banquet, the man begged the vampire to allow him one kiss and, happily, the vampire took hold of the young man and they kissed passionately.

 

However, as the vampire was kissing the man, she drained the life from him so that, in only the space of a moment, his skin wrinkled and his hair turned grey then his heart grew weak and stopped beating and his eyes closed; then his skin turned to dust and, suddenly, the vampire realised that she was kissing a skeleton.

 

“Oh no”, she said, starting to cry, “That’s not fair. He loved me”.

 

“You cannot have love; not a husband; not a child; not a friend”, said Nature, “For all who you touch, you drain of life”.

 

“No, you are wrong”, she said, “I will have love. I’ll make someone to love me. Someone who won’t die”.

 

And so the vampire set to work, weaving spells and reciting incantations; trying to conjur up a man who could love her without dying.

 

Time and time again, she tried and each time she conjured up a young man she would test him by kissing him upon the lips but each time she did this he would die and crumble to dust in her arms.

 

However, the Vampire would not give up and, one day, a young man was born from her cauldron who, when she kissed him upon the lips, did not die.

 

Oh, the vampire was overjoyed and, shaking her fist at the sky, she said,

 

“See, Nature what I have done. I have defeated you. This one will not die and he will love me forever”.

 

And she called the young man Prince Handsome for she wanted him to be like the handsome prince in a fairytale.

 

And Prince Handsome was happy living with the vampire, at first; however, as the years passed by the young man realised that the vampire didn’t really love him.

 

“She wants to be loved but there is no love inside her at all”, he said, “It is as if she was as dead inside as the barren land around her castle”.

 

And, as more years went by, Prince Handsome became sadder and more lonely living with the vampire.

 

“Oh give me a normal girl to love”, he thought, “One who may grow old and die but who is capable of real love”.

 

One day, however, a thick fog swaddled the land and a young peasant girl, named Cedrica, lost in the fog wandered up to the castle and fell into the castles deep moat.

 

“Help me, please, someone”, she cried, “I can’t swim”.

 

Then, hearing her crying out of the fog, Prince Handsome leapt from a parapet of the castle where he had been unhappily brooding over his lonely life, and dived into the moat, rescuing the young woman.

 

Then, he spoke a spell which lowered the castle drawbridge and carried her inside.

 

“That was such a brave thing you did, rescuing me like that”, she said.

 

“Oh it was not brave”, replied the man, “I cannot die as easily as other men, so I have no fear”.

 

But then Cedrica looked into his eyes and saw how sad he was.

 

“Why is a man without fear so sad?”, she asked.

 

And so Prince Handsome told Cedrica all about how the vampire had created him to love her but how she had no love in her heart and how lonely his life was.

 

“All I want is a woman who will love me as much as I love her. I would do anything for a woman like that”, he said.

 

“Oh there surely must be a thousand women or more who would love a kind, gentle man like you”, she said.

 

It made the prince happy to hear this and he wondered, looking at Cedrica, if she might be one of those thousand or more women and he was about to ask her when the vampire appeared.

 

“So that’s how you repay me for giving you life; eternal life and all the wealth and luxury that my power can bestow upon you”, she said to him.

 

“My flesh may not grow old”, he replied, “But my heart and my soul wither living this lonely life here with you and I would rather have love than all the luxuries in the world”.

 

But then the jealous vampire seized hold of Cedrica.

 

“You will not like her so much once I have drained all the youth and life from her”, she said, cackling.

 

But then, fearing for Cedricas life, Prince Handsome seized the Vampire round the throat and squeezed and though the vampire tried to use all her dark powers she could not kill him, for she had made him invulnerable to her but then she fell, lifeless to the floor.

 

“She’s dead”, said Cedrica, horrified.

 

“Don’t be afraid. I did it to protect you. She would have killed you as she’s drained the life out of countless others”, he explained.

 

It was just as Nature had planned and then, Nature made another miracle happen; she made Cedrica fall in love with Prince Handsome and, shortly afterwards, the two were married and Cedrica became a princess and lived in the castle and, because the Vampire was no longer draining the life out of the land; the land became fertile again and life started to flourish upon it. Then they lived a long and happy life together and when Cedrica grew old and finally died, Prince Handsome threw himself into the vampires cauldron; the thing which had given birth to him and the only thing which could kill him, because he loved Cedrica so much that he did not wish to live without her.

But then their souls, bound together in love, ascended to the Heaven of all Lovers that is built upon the shining evening star and there they dwelt together for all eternity.