The continuation- Rebekah

"Oof!" Katherine fell back catching herself with her hands. What she saw made her heart leap.
"So, we meet again!" said a gruff voice.
Katherine felt herself go limp and fall backwards in a faint.

When she woke up, she was lying on a bed in a dark room in the princess' tower. A bandage was on her arm and across from her sat the dark figure of a man. The man was covered in a thick shadow, so she could not see his face. she saw his head turning towards her and quickly closed her eyes.

A laugh resounded upon the cold stone walls. "are you afraid of me then?" The evil merchant said. "Probably a good thing. But I will not harm you, ugly one. I only ask that you tell me exactly why you were in this tower, and I will let you go." She opened her eyes again, only to see the figure staring at her. He smiled a huge smile when she looked at him. "I cleaned the wound Princess Fern gave you!" somehow he sounded like a child.

"Where is the princess?" Katherine asked, trying to sit up.

"The princess is in the other room, cooking us a meal," The evil man laughed again; it was not a pleasant laugh. "But you know she can't cook worth a rat's tail! So she just sits at the window of hers and waits for one of those blumming sevants to throw a meal up to her like," he used a high raspy voice, trying to sound like a woman " 'Princess Fern, Princess fern, let down your golden rope.' It's quite a laugh! You know why? " The man leaned his hideous face into the light and so close to Katherine she could feel his breath. "Because you're the only worm that had the guts to even feed the monster!" He laughed again, right in Katherine's face. She sat as still as possible, having spent all of her courage on the knife incident with Princess Fern. "You're being so loud dearie! You'll have to be quiet or she'll hear us and it will ruin everything." He smiled and leaned away. "Just tell me why you decided to come up here and talk to our little decrepit princess. Huh?"

"She is our future queen. When the king dies," The king is 98 years old, readers, "We will need someone to govern our people, and not from a tower." Said the brave, and shaking, Katherine.

"Ah, so you thought you'd just come up here and see if you can talk the crazy hag into some sense, didn't you." Slowly Katherine nodded. "Well," Said the merchant, "We can't have you ruining the opportunity I have been waiting years and years for, now can we? I will let you go now that you told me, but if you ever come up here again, I will kill you."

"Can I say something to the princess first?"

"No."

So Katherine left the sadly confused princess and the creepy old man alone, through a secret passage the merchant had shown her, only wanting to go home, hug her two wonderful parents, and leave the problem to God. Little did she know, her words had already done the damage on the evil man's plan. While Katherine walked home wondering why the scary merchant would bother to bandage her arm, Princess Fern longed for her beauty, but mostly for her home.

Fern lay on the hard floor crying, which (as you can tell) she had been doing a lot of lately and her tears had been slowly cleansing the hideous wound on her cheek. With no mirrors in huge tower, the princess only had a small bowl of water to see herself in. Fern got up, off the floor, and looked at the face in her mirror-bowl.

"How can I govern my people, if I am ugly? How can I make my mother happy?" she looked at the wound and slowly fingered the sensitive flesh around. "How am I to get married?" A tear distilled the water momentarily leaving the princess only her thoughts to look at. "What if that plain woman were correct? What if, though I dare not hope, this hideousness can be healed?" The water was still once more and the princess did not believe it the difference she saw in the reflection. For a moment, she saw her old beauty again, and only a flicker of her wound. Then the picture went back to her unkempt hair and huge, nasty wound.

"If she was right about my wound," The princess had decided to hope, "Then maybe other things she said were true. Didn't she say 'Beauty isn't everything'? could I be beautiful on the inside, as I was on the outside? Could I be a good queen, even if my face does not heal?" with these thoughts, the princess made a decision with someone else in mind, for the first time in her life.

Meanwhile, a very happy merchant twisted through a dark corridor. as he traveled passed dark room by dark, scary room, he rubbed his boney hands together. The only sounds were the patter-patter of his sandals as the small man shuffled to his destination and a faint, constant dripping, which came from a drain leading out of the grand palace above. Finally he made it to his designated door, it was considerably larger than all the rest. The merchant knocked on the door and the sound bounced off down the hall.

A tall guard opened the door and lead the merchant in, placing him in front of a large, black throne, "WHAT IS IT, GYLIE?" a huge voice boomed over the momentary silence.



Celina---GO!