Summary: When King Anzai sends his valiant sons to look for the petrified prince of an age-old legend, they each find themselves faced with fantastic situations pushing them all down a wayward track. Who is determined enough to break the curse in time? Who gets to live happily ever after with the legendary Prince Kaede? An SD Yaoi Fairy Tale...

Disclaimer: They belong to each other ^-^

TWISTED
maple freya
Genre: Yaoi / General / Alternate Universe
Pairing: Yaoi overload / Rukawa-uke galore

PROLOGUE: THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL

Once upon a time, in medieval Kanagawa, there lived a beauteous, divine creation vested with the name Prince Kaede of the royal family of Rukawa. With eyes as clear as the deepest sea, hair as dark as the blackest night, and skin as smooth as the softest silk, he was as fair as one could ever be. Albeit, even more so than most of the girls flocking, groveling, and drooling all over his godly existence from afar.

They never were able to get within a half-mile radius of him, what more lay their decadent hands upon his precious flesh. All they could do was ogle at the unresponsive magnate from a distance while imagining a royal nuptial spawned by their intensely despondent affection for him.

Such irrevocable fervor bound to everlasting ignorance and rejection long before it could even be hinted.

For the dainty prince, young and reticent as he was, already had his heart wrapped around somebody else's passionate fingers. Valiant Sir Mitsuyoshi D'Anzai of the King's royal army was the sole, blessed being who won the prince's love and adoration, which was as hard to get by as fruit on a barren tree.

But, though divinely vehement their devotion was to each other, these two fine gents chose to share their romance in secrecy for fear of infusing stigma and persecution should the extremely stereotyped public got wind of it.

So while Sir D'Anzai wove out strategies for victorious battles, Prince Kaede took care of planning means to actualize their surreptitious nocturnal trysts as often as possible. Every fortunate, love-filled night they would talk and kiss and comfort each other's fears and anxieties as they find satisfaction for their carnal exigencies in each other's arms. All went smooth and well for the lovestruck pair until the King suddenly decided to re-marry.

And it was his young royal spouse, Queen Eri, who found out about the prince's deviant love affair. She did so accidentally when she thought of using her dark arts--for she did know a lot, having come from a bloodline of witches--to spy on her stepson, with whom she was piously attracted more than she really ever was with the patriarchal King.

One night, having felt the overwhelming need to get a glimpse of her beloved, the perfidious Queen left her snoring spouse in bed and sneaked down the dungeon, straight into an arcane bower where she practiced her witchcraft regularly in peace and concealment. She pulled off the black cloth covering the oval mirror bordered by an intricately designed body of a two-headed snake done on pure gold. The snake's heads curved outward in opposite directions at the top of the mirror, making them look like horns upon a demon with a reflective face.

Having gotten tired of asking the spirits of her magic mirror who was fairest in the whole kingdom--for she knew very well whose name they would cry out, being themselves crazed admirers of that deity--Queen Eri decided on a new line of inquiry...

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, tell me of the affairs of Prince Kaede, fairest of them all!"

And, lo! The shock that smeared the Queen's face could never be described in words nor drawn upon a mundane canvass, at the raw sight of her beloved Prince Kaede sharing his royal bed with the highly revered leader of the King's army. The equally repulsed and disgruntled spirits let out an unearthly scream that shattered the magic mirror into a million, irretrievable pieces.

Bits of the wayward crystals scathed the Queen's ashen physique, causing tiny cataracts of blood on her face down to the upper side of her bare feet. But it wasn't until seconds later that she finally got enough of her strength back to instigate an appropriate reaction.

She raised her arms up above her head and howled out in unsuppressed anger, simultaneously unleashing bolts of her magic, which flew thread by deadly thread in all directions, zapping crumbs of dust and stones off the dungeon walls and ceiling. She went about this drill until a much better idea finally made it to her noxious mind.

Having totally lost her cool, composure, sanity--basically everything about her aside from a fever-driven desire for revenge, Queen Eri stormed toward the castle's eastern wing, to the Prince's royal chamber. With her deadly craft, the absolutely enraged witch forced the tightly bolted double doors open just in time to see the Prince in his royal red robe helping the gallant knight out of the window.

They seemed to have tied up every single blanket in the room just to make a rope to guide Sir D'Anzai's descent to the ground. But it proved to be inefficient with the sudden appearance of the ferocious Queen Eri.

For startled almost out of his wits, Prince Kaede accidentally pushed Sir D'Anzai off the window, sending the equally startled knight bellowing all his guts out while plunging headfirst toward the ground.

Finding him now an easy target, the Queen began chanting a sort of spell in a tongue that the still very much astounded Prince had not yet encountered or perhaps had slept through during his grueling language lessons. This being the case, he perceived its effect upon him a little too late. He thought his bones could never get any frozen than they already were but he was wrong. He felt like everything about him, from his feet up, was gradually getting heavy, ossifying. He was literally being turned to stone!

The horrified Prince could only look on just as the petrifaction made its leisurely cruise from his limbs to his chest and higher still.

"If I can't have you, nobody will!" The deranged Queen consort announced in her drawling, witchy voice as the fossilization spell began to engulf the whole kingdom, everything and everyone inside and that which surrounded it... Everyone, including herself.

Queen Eri was laughing madly, maniacally as she watched the last strand of the Prince's hair turn to stone. She closed the open window and fossilized it just as she did to all the portals of entrance into the castle a quarter of a second before the transformation upon her was completed.

Unbeknownst to her, one mortal breath remained unharmed... The mortal breath hanging upside down from a sakura tree saw the sudden transformation of the castle from one beautiful, lively structure into an eerie, petrified sight of doom.

And it was upon this magical tree, which had saved his life, that he vowed to free the kingdom from the evil curse that had come upon it--whatever it may be.

It was upon this magical endowment of nature that the valiant Sir D'Anzai made a covenant to get his beloved prince back at all cost.

May it bring him harm... May it bring him death, he didn't care at all. The prince was all that mattered to him, and giving him back his life was everything he would ever work hard for... For as long as he breathed, for as long as he lived...

For as long as he loved...

Note: I've always loved fairy tales! I grew up reading them over and over and over… I never got tired of them! My favorite fairy tale has got to be the story of The Little Mermaid. It doesn't exactly end happily like all the others--in the version of it that I watched before Disney, the little mermaid died in the end, having failed to win her prince's love--but I like it just the same. When it comes to Disney adaptations, it's got to be Aladdin--great animation, great soundtrack, great everything!

I hope you enjoyed this initial offering of my desperate attempt to create a fairy tale of my own. I'll try to incorporate as much fairy tale elements that I know of into this story, while at the same time delivering it in the most original way possible.

I would really appreciate it very much if you could tell me what you think ^____^

Ciao for now!