Moonlight Desires: A Cinderella Retelling
Genre: A Dark Fantasy Fairy Tale
Universal Book Link: https://books2read.com/u/mYXvGp
Synopsis
Nineteen-year-old Aurelia’s escape from her cruel stepfamily begins with a spider-cursed princess whose moonlit webs are haunted by restless spirits.
Excerpt
On the porch hung a dress, woven from Kipira’s webs, held up by thin, glimmering strands. It was bathed in moonlight and glowed. Aurelia could hardly believe her eyes. She covered her mouth with her hand and stared at every detail of the delicate garment.
“What are those patterns? Is that…what I think it is?” she whispered.
Kipira’s voice was calm but proud. “Yes, dear. This is the Ingridelite Weave. Each part of the pattern is connected to all the rest, so that everything is in everything, even though each part is its own. It is the hardest weave to make in all the land. Some say that only the Royal House of Ingridel knows how to do it.”
Aurelia stood quietly, tracing the way each shape fit into the next.
“We can’t stay here all night,” said Kipira. “We have to get you to the festival.”
Aurelia nodded. “Yes, of course. Please help me put it on.”
Soon, she was looking at her reflection in the house’s front window. The threads of the spider-silk gown clung delicately to her like a second skin. Every strand seemed carefully placed, and she felt like a princess herself.
Then Aurelia noticed that as she moved, the patterns of the Ingridelite Weave shifted with her, the strands locked into a living machinery of dance.
Like someone atop a hill watching a town below, observing its citizens navigate the winding streets, so too did her eyes follow the threads as they slid fluidly through intricate circuits. No design returned to the same place, no motion repeated; each was entirely new. She felt that if she did not guard her attention, she could watch them forever, lost and hypnotized.
As Kipira held up two gossamer slippers with one of her front legs, she said, “Put these on.”
Aurelia obeyed. They fit perfectly, and felt firm, yet of silky cotton.
A Time to Dance
“Now dance, Aurelia,” Kipira said.
“But I don’t know how.”
“What did I tell you in the cemetery about obeying my every word?”
Her cheeks warmed with shame. She apologized, then began moving awkwardly about the porch. Soon the dress itself seemed to guide her. The webs slid and pressed with her steps, shaping them, and before long she danced her way onto the front yard, moving with skill and grace among the moonbeams. She was laughing aloud with joy.
“The moonlight works on the webs and fills them with a strange vitality,” said Kipira. “Don’t ask me how. It just does.”
“Whatever the moon is doing, it is wonderful!”
She danced a while longer until Kipira said she must be off to the festival.
The princess’s fanged appendages grated together, their bristled hairs rasping into a low, retching cry. The noise made Aurelia’s stomach twist. She clutched her ears and stumbled back.
From the darkness emerged a stagecoach, four horses, and a coachman, each formed entirely of webs. Moonlight glimmered on them as the horses tossed their heads and whinnied, moving with a lifelike grace. Yet the wheels and hooves made no sound upon the earth.
The coachman shouted a sharp “Hi-yah!” and the horses surged forward, galloping faster.
She understood. That awful sound had been a summons.
Aurelia cried out with delight and begged to touch them. Kipira raised a foreleg, the nearest gesture to a nod of assent she could give. Aurelia reached out, and the horses nuzzled against her. Their manes were soft under her fingers, yet their bodies were hollow and thin as mist.
Understanding Desires
“My webs come alive in the lesser light that rules the night,” said Kipira. “Yet no matter how dazzling or intricately woven they may be, they are hollow, empty, and they dissolve into nothing at dawn, when they are exposed to the greater light that rules the day, and the Desires that inhabit them return to the underworld.”
“What do you mean by ‘Desires’?” asked Aurelia.
“To desire is to long for something absent. The underworld is indeed a place of absence—of love, of light, of fellowship. And thus the spirits from that place who inhabit my woven forms are defined by their primary quality: their longing. These spirits of the underworld are called Desires, and these, indeed, are Moonlight Desires.”
“There was a time,” she continued, her voice catching, “when I was so lonely I made such creatures each night—different shapes, different faces—to speak with me, to befriend me. And every morning I wept as they dissolved into nothing beneath the rising sun. It was a bitter reminder of my curse, of my isolation.
“For that reason I ceased making them long ago. But for you, Aurelia, on this very night, I have made an exception.”
Aurelia understood, but sorrow touched her heart all the same.
“As long as you wear the slippers, the coachman will obey you,” said Princess Kipira. “Be sure to return home before dawn, for I have already warned you what sunrise will do. And remember this…speak your name to no man while you wear the dress at night, nor let any man discover your name, for if you do, all will vanish as though touched by the sun. Don’t ask why because I do not know. The power that binds me is strange and riddled with anomalies.”
Aurelia smiled and said, “You’re a strange animal, that’s what I know.”
“Duke Andrew is a good man, loyal to my mother and father, and I can think of no better match for his son than you. If you marry him, you will join my nobility, and we will see each other again when I return to human form. Now go!”
The door to the stagecoach opened, and webbed stairs unfolded beneath it. In awe, Aurelia climbed them, then settled into her seat within. Its webs conformed perfectly to her body, and there was a bit of a bounce. The steps folded back up and the door closed behind her.
“Where to, m’lady?” asked the coachman, turning to look at her.
“To the castle of Duke Andrew.”
“Yes, m’lady,” he replied, and with a crack of his whip and another sharp “Hi-yah!” the horses began their silent gallop across the ground.
Aurelia felt as though she were sitting in a strange boat that was rising and falling with the waves of a strange sea.
“Sir?” said Aurelia.
“Yes, m’lady?”
“I like to go fast. Can you go fast for me?”
The Coachman
The coachman turned his hollow, webbed head to look at her again. He was grinning, and Aurelia’s stomach sank when she saw the emptiness of the eyes and the mouth. They seemed like portals into a living darkness, where things existed that she did not want to imagine.
“There is a saying, m’ lady. It goes ‘Denn die Todten reiten schnell.’ Do you know what that means?”
“I do not, sir.”
He grinned again, the corners of his mouth stretching up to his ears, revealing double rows of pointed teeth, made of webs. Aurelia’s blood ran cold at the sight.
“Oh, you better hold on tight, dearie, because it means the Dead travel fast!”
And with that, he turned himself around and urged the horses to gallop faster.
She gripped the webbed walls of the stagecoach and held on as tight as she could, digging her feet into the floor’s sticky strands. The webs stretched and enveloped them but did not break. Then, as the horses quickened their pace along the dirt trail through the forest, their strides grew faster and faster, until Aurelia felt as though she were flying.
Past the evergreens they raced, over the trail—sometimes straight, sometimes winding—beneath an arch of moonlight and a sky spangled with stars. Whenever the coach veered sharply left or right, Aurelia’s body pitched the other way, flung sideways by the turn. Looking up through the translucent roof, she saw how the stars seemed to streak across the heavens like celestial lifeblood coursing through arteries of light.
With the air blowing back her hair and causing the webs of her dress to ripple against her body, Aurelia held on tighter and shouted, “This is amazing! I love being alive!”
Universal Book Link: https://books2read.com/u/mYXvGp
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