I came awake that night.

The night the enchantress paid her strange and merciless visit, she woke the stones of my foundation, binding me to her cursed flower. She wrapped my spires in thorns, she buried all my colors under a coat of ice. The enchantress bent the architecture of my sublime body into a behemoth to match the shape of its wayward prince.

I came awake that night, and I have been watching.

You haven't been here long, so let me tell you what I have seen. I am an old castle, heavy with memories and crumbling with dust, but you may borrow my eyes.

You did not see him before the wolves turned wild, but I did.

After the enchantress left, the guests had fled—and, upon fleeing, forgot they had ever been here at all. The transformed bodies of the servants found their own ways to weep, and the prince—our cherished child, our selfish master—disappeared for weeks into his room.

The rest did not see him there, but I did.

The servants, cursed though they were, had not lost hope. "True love," they whispered to each other, "is not such a hard thing. A girl will come to him. They have always come to him."

A few of the more enterprising young maids took to cautiously approaching the prince's locked door. They whispered their undying devotions into the keyhole in hopes of breaking the spell on their own. The horrifying growls that came in response put a quick end to those efforts.

But the servants only heard the roars.

I saw him claw at himself, ripping at the tough flesh of the creature he had become, trying to find his human self underneath the hungry teeth and matted hair. I saw him sink to his huge knees. I heard the low, rough sound of his monster's tears. I saw him grip his huge head with misshapen hands, rocking, moaning, bleeding, begging. He did not come out of that room until the wounds closed again.

When he did, he was not our wayward prince anymore. The wolves were howling.

You did not see him when the rose dropped its first petal, but I did.

I felt it in my roots first. It passed through like a shudder, shaking snow off the top of my roofs, groaning in every rafter like ghosts, tightening the thorns around the turrets. Life leeched from every transformed human, and, though no one dared ask the question, they all knew it was the first of many miserable cuts in their long death.

The monster stood alone in his tower. He bent over the rose in its tomb of glass, as though his warmth and attention could force its life to extend. But the petals still drooped, and withered, and finally dissolved like sugar.

The monster did not weep, but part of his selfish, stern, unloving heart dissolved along with it.

You did not see him during those ten years, but I did.

Self-loathing chiseled his grief into the worst torture of its kind. He never left the grounds, but paced tightly through every garden path, every secret passage, every unlit room.

He closed the library. It was his self-imposed punishment. To see the humans who were under his care quietly slip more and more into their roles as trinkets and tools—how could he escape into books, when none of them were allowed the luxury?

The way he would talk to the cursed flower: that was the worst. Each withered petal was a knife in him, but still he guarded it. You did not see him cradle the glass case in his crooked arms and pray for the enchantress to at least return them.

I will be a monster forever, he said. Let them go back.

But nothing changed. A thousand prayers, and nothing ever changed.

You did not see him when your father arrived, but I did.

I have witnessed my share of refugees and wanderers in these ten years, when a vagrant would sometimes stumble through the doors, dripping and muttering with fever. The monster always acted invisibly. He had food set out for the poor soul, provided them with a warm room, had their wounds treated, a package of supplies laid by the door for their departure. Trust me when I say this: he would have done the same for your father.

So if you must cast blame, then blame the rose.

You did not see him when he first saw you, but I did.

His reaction to beautiful things has been, for so many years, a poisonous mixture of obsession and resentment. He was a beautiful thing too, once. For you to stand there and shout at him—so lovely and strange and surrounded by light—he forgot how to react properly.

How much can you blame him?

He had been a monster long enough to forget how humans behaved—and to be so thoroughly scolded by a schoolgirl, a child…it unchained the snarling ugliness of the beast he had truly learned to become. It was his own twisted form of protecting himself. I know it would not seem that way to you.

He did not know how to react to beautiful things. After all, they had a habit of turning hideous after time.

You did not see the first changes, but I did.

They were very small, but I am old and made of eyes. I am good at watching him by now. And he is good—very good—at watching you.

You were the warm wind of spring to his snowbound soul, and when the wolves tore at him (as he had torn at himself so many years ago), you did not leave. It would have been so easy to leave. When you bandaged his wounds, he learned a shocking lesson about your kind of beauty.

Unlike most, it thrives in winter.

You did not see him fall in love, but I did.

He opened the library for you, my dear. It was as simple as that.

You did not see him when you left again, but I did.

He climbed for you. He climbed out of his lonely, aching prison and into your sunlight. He climbed the broken steps of the old tower to watch you disappear. He climbed, and climbed, until he stood at the top of his dark, empty house, and when he could not climb, he reached.

That was a night of noise: shouting, and gunfire, and curses. It was a night of chaos, but you found your way back to him. Of course you did. This was his coldest night.

But you thrive in winter.