time

Years pass as years do and the prince’s kingdom fell to ruin. The homes of his people toppled into ruin, their fields fallow, now overgrown with weeds breaking through the fence rows as creeping vines clung to everything.The once proud castle that stood in the center of his kingdom was bent and grey. Great beams jutted out of the ground to support slumping spires and flocks of screeching crows circled above it all. It was a miserable sight for all to see and a curse fulfilled.

Setting in the throne room amid a pile of garbage sat an ogre. He was filthy and miserable. As he sat, he slowly poked through the piles of baubles and rotting finery. From time to time he would pick up something and stare at it longingly. Sniffing bits of cloth as tears ran down his face.

Treasures of his life before his curse, the last possessions of his queen, his love, the woman that turned him into the monster that he had become. He had loved her the moment he saw her and they lived a tortured life until she showed her true form and he killed her for it.

He wailed at the thought of what he had done to her and his life before. The misery was complete and utterly devastating. He felt every moment of the pain for thirty years.

Thirty years he spent lamenting all the sweet things he had tossed aside with the swing of a blade. All the glory and warmth, all the horror and filth, his entire life and the memories that came with it served to bend him, contort him, twisting and spinning him about like a rusted top.

As it was for so long, he would grieve for hour on end until the strain of it all would fore him into a haunted restless sleep. He would collapse on the floor holding some dear thing in his hand dreaming of her and what she meant to him. Twitching and whimpering like a dog. And this was his life for thirty years. He accepted his fate for it was the last thing his queen wanted for him and so it was that his misery and filth, his sorrow and desecration had become comforting to him. He was a monster in the truest sense of the word and it was his lot and hearth, so it must be.