The Beast stirs at first light, as he has done every morning for the past three thousand years.
His chamber is grey – apart from a single golden beam, spilling through a gap in the curtains he cannot move. It cuts like a knife through the gloom. The Beast, fixed into his position by the rose that buds, blooms and withers every single day, turns to face the view.
Three millennia ago, when he was first confined to this small patch of scrubland overlooking the grand valley, it was coated in forests, as far as the eye could see. Wild boars and wolves roamed freely; the people huddled in frightened knots around their fires.
The Beast saw this begin to change, little by little, as the years rolled by. First came the small clearings in the forest. Then fields, mushrooming in number as the centuries rolled on: they confined the woodland to small thickets of trees here and there, drove out the boars, the wolves, the four-legged. Farmhouses. Fences. And at last, the village, arranged in small, regular lines on either side of the riverbanks.
The people did not always fare well, even as their reach expanded. Famines, floods, disease: the Beast has seen these things come and go. The people have waged countless battles across this valley – not for the past hundred years, but before then, there were too many for the Beast to name. The waste. The killings. The brother turned against brother. Friend against friend. He saw these things and grieved.
He saw, too, the burgeoning of the great mills, and the concrete slabs laid down, as the old village ballooned in size. How the horse was reined and put to work, before being discarded, over the last century, in favour of metallic contraptions that have conveyed the people through increasingly gnarled, choked streets. Railways. Tower blocks. Plumes of smoke. The hum and buzz of electrical lines.
Homes stretch across the entire valley now. The old forests have vanished, though the people have replaced them, in certain spots, with 'parks' where they stroll and dine.
But his home – contained behind walls invisible to mortal eyes, under the conditions of Morrigan's curse – remains where it has always been. Hill walkers pass through on occasion, but the Beast remains unseen.
Beauty is a never-ending source of torment.
He has seen beauty, so many times, in the people who have lived and died beneath his silent gaze. As newborns, their beauty is in the innocence and wonder they display, how entranced they are by all that they see. When they are young, it is in the carefree glint in their eyes, their easy laughter – by this stage of their lives, they know they will one day die, but still, they relish the chance to fully live. The elders, too. There is a grace and dignity they possess as they come to the end of a life well-lived – a boon the Beast will never know.
Beauty is, by its nature, a fragile thing – he has come to know this well. The people's beauty is born of transience, of poignancy: the simple twist of fate that has seen them exist here, just for a little while, able to feel the sun against their skin. They are born. They change. They die. For three thousand years, he has watched from afar.
But what would he not give, for one moment, simply to be close to it? For a bearer of such beauty to see him, just once, and acknowledge that he is here?
He has reached for it many times – a spectral hand outstretched, through that one immovable gap in his curtains, for the occasional bird who happens to perch close to a bush or plant nearby. Like water, they pass through his hands. They flit away without ever becoming aware of his presence.
Never his to know. Never his to possess. He will meet beauty only when it seeks him out ... and there is no way for the mortals to know that there is anything to seek, here in this remote scrubland at the very top of the hill. This fate was laid down by Morrigan's curse.
Morrigan herself has largely been forgotten. A far cry from her strong and vibrant form of old, she and her kin have now withered into the weakness of near-oblivion, as the people have abandoned old ways, embraced new gods. They have fought, killed and died over these gods – many of the battles the Beast has seen were started in this way.
The hours pass, dreary as before. The ray of light shifts from gold, to white, to red, and finally the silver tones of the moon.
The Beast feels his eyes close, as they have done every night for the past three thousand years.
Time to repose again.
Until the withered bloom returns to verdant bud.
A response to this visual prompt by @freewritehouse.
