To Kill A Prince

    The banished witch Melissandre felt the sharp midnight air against her cheek as the December storm swirled overhead. Her toes were curled over the edge of the precipice, and she could feel the rampant darkness threaten to engulf her as the tyrannical wind choked the mountains.     "Oh darling," she smiled mockingly. "There's more storm inside me than there will ever be in you." As if to demonstrate, she raised her hand above her head, calling to the sky as if beckoning a nightingale, and felt a thunderbolt materialise in her grip.      "You know what to do," she whispered to it, a fanatical glint in her raven-black eyes.      "What to do to please me..." It writhed within her fist, and then she released it and smiled to see it flutter away so obediently. A few moments later, Melissandre watched as a nearby village went up in flames.      She looked around her. She was stood on a surface of rock and ice, and when she looked up at the sky she could see the ethereal lights, gold and emerald threads from tapestries belonging to another world. There would come a time when she would rule them all.      Melissandre murmured an incantation, and an image of the palace appeared in her palm. There it was, its silver spires dipping into the night's sky like feather quills into an inkwell, light seeping out through the slits. Melissandre lifted it closer to her. In the ballroom full of courtiers, with their elaborate gowns filling the room with lucid colours, there was a princess standing all alone. Her violet eyes were pricked open, and they followed the prince wherever he went. She reminded Melissandre of the deer she often used to hunt, with their wide, vulnerable eyes opening up like the petals of a blooming flower in a way which seemed to say, "take me. I will do nothing to fight you." But it was not her fault. She had been told from the day she was christened that the only way to be saved from eternal slumber was to be woken up by true love's kiss. Melissandre supposed she would also have been desperate for the prince's affections. For a moment, she gazed intently at the girl, almost remorseful, as she took in her lustrous sun-stroked hair and soft, satin lips, her dress of rose petals wrapping round her figure like a ribbon around a gift. Her gift, she remembered, and she smiled. Carefully, Melissandre dug a nail into the nape of the princess's neck and watched as the bead of red seeped into her fingertip. Melissandre felt the Arctic Magic oscillating around her as she performed this, drawing all the strength she could from it, and then she allowed the palace in her hand to dissipate into the night and fade like dust into the immense black velvet of the sky.      At sixteen, as the curse foretold, the princess would be helplessly drawn to a green light - a thread of the Northern lights that Melissandre could claim and use to entrance her - and when she followed it to the top of the turret, growing dizzier and more disoriented with every flight of stairs, she would find a spinning wheel and feel irresistibly compelled to reach out and touch it. From there, she would descend into a heavy slumber, only able to be awakened by the prince's kiss, and still affected by tonight's enchantment. And if the charming prince did come to save her, Fairyland's Rose would be hungry for blood.