LA FÉE VERTE - I. LA DERNIÈRE DES FÉES PUISSANTES

La Fée Verte

Une nouvelle en cinq chapitres

Then, addicted to a perfumed poison,

betrayed by its aftertaste,

we shall lose the wonder and find nothing in return.

Many are the substitutes

but they're powerless on their own.

Genesis, "Heathaze"

Chapitre premier

La dernière des fées puissantes

Once upon a time –

No, wait.

This is not a story that has happened once. It has unfolded over and over in many ways across the years. Parents have told it at their children’s bedsides; travellers have recounted it by firelight; and witches have whispered it on dark nights when there was no moon. This is but one version of that same story, the one I tell you now.

Dearest reader, if you truly are a free and clever person, with a heart within your chest and a soul within that heart, and surely a high ambition and/or a creative inspiration, as the former statements entail: Come on now -- look! Pay attention! Allons-y donc! Right then! Time to start. Voyons, let us begin, we're going to, starting as we must at the start, and when we have reached the end of this story, when the story is done, we shall certainly know so much more than we already do know now, for it has to do with the fact that we have among our characters, and furthermore in the leading cast, one of the most sinister faeries that there have ever been! Now then, here's where we begin. The story really begins not at the beginning, but several years before that, in the eighteenth century in many places across Europe; in fact, it was all started by the storming of a keep which was a prison of the Crown, and whose fall was very wicked indeed.

Can the sound of laughter waft along with a breeze? Curl and twist on clouds? Travel through frozen gray fog? Tumble through empty caverns, slip down slippery rock precipices, ooze into sucking mud, and seep up through the crack of an iron or granite fortress? Perhaps. Perhaps laughter is so powerful that it penetrates rock and metal. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, dearest reader. Towers rise and towers fall, struck as if by lightning with the flag of freedom. Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé...

I do not need to tell you, my dear young readers, that the creatures of the night really do exist and that there once was a time when faeries, elementals, and other supernatural beings, the so-called Long-Lived Ones, pervaded the whole Earth, not only in the wide open spaces of nature and the countryside, but also on the streets of the towns and even at the royal courts, living in more peaceful communion, or at least coexistence, with all of mortalkind. Even inspiring the people who were inclined towards visual art, literature, music, fashion, and performance to the greatest heights of creative achievement.

Long ago, when our living world was still young and fresh, so recent that most things lacked a name and one had to point quietly at those things to refer to them; and humans were only just beginning to develop artifice, to shape and create and form things (spears and bows and quivers and pots and baskets and a million other things); then, the Fair Folk looked up at humanity creating their wonders, and they envied humanity. They envied humanity's seemingly boundless capacity for invention and creativity and artifice. For decoration and for beauty and for art. Their own dependence on nature had made all the fey creatively barren. And being consumed with both awe and envy, the Fair Folk wanted to create something of their own. And so they gathered together, and they worked and they worked and they worked, drawing upon their many skills and their magic; for years they laboured upon the task... And the thing they determined to create, after much violent and brutal argument, in which a great deal of fey blood was shed, was an agreement with their mortal counterparts, to interact and discuss with humanity when it came to creative and artistic productivity; and lend them inspiration for their future endeavours in aesthetic development. And thus, soon the tables turned, and the mortal men and women who were touched by that inspiration were the ones who stood in awe of the Fair Folk and worshipped them, as the ancient gods and good spirits of yore.

The rise of the Church and of science marked the end of that quid pro quo and the beginning of the decadence, with the frightened powers that be trying every now and then, time after time, to fight those unpredictable fey disturbances, if not by brute force, at least through ruse and deception, and it seemed that the human species did not know of anything else to invent to bring about the loss of all kinds of the Fair Folk; but the killing blow came suddenly and surreptitiously with the dawn of the nineteenth century. Before you reached the age of eighteen or twenty years, you have most surely read in your history textbooks that, ever since one fateful day in 1789 and throughout the decades thereafter, old kingdoms were toppled by the rage of the common folk, and dark clouds of steam smoke and gunsmoke clouded the skies both night and day; of course, the modus operandi which the champions of those revolutions employed in that incessant antagonism was none other than that both industrialists and revolutionaries went about to tell everyone everywhere that an enormous, incalculable, unfathomable progress had been accomplished at last, and all of their followers told all around of the properties of what they called the Truth and Reason, even though, contrariwise, it often proved untruthful and unreasonable.

Voilà qui va être on ne peut plus récréatif, had more than one Enlightened freethinker said to himself upon finishing his tract. 

Thus, in the name of progress and revolution, they burned traditions at the stake and trampled honour underfoot, barring the sun from its right to shine in the day sky with the grinding of those dark Satanic mills and the roaring of those railway trains, which, in turn, led to the dwindling population of those blithe spirits that poisoned their perfect world, set right according to the decrees of order and of rationality, that displayed the internal workings of everything to the viewer; beautiful gardens of flowers became a mere collection of stamens, petals, and pollen; great works of music, a bare progression of notes; and people, nothing so much as masses of organs and bone and assorted squishy bits.
The Enlightened thinkers all hailed this worldview as a great success, for by seeing everything reduced to bits and pieces, the viewer lost sight of the whole, and forgot to appreciate the beauty they might otherwise have perceived. For a work of art reduced to its components is nothing but an assembly of paints on canvas or ink on paper, without a soul.
Their purpose, with those ways of destroying nature and tradition, seemed to be that of changing the face of each and every thing in this brave new world, thereby reducing everything to dry, empty logic, and depriving all of creation of its sense of wonder. And thus, the champions of Truth and Reason thus set forth on a Grand Tour of the western world with their mirror-books and steam engines, and it is impossible to say all evil that they had wrought in each and every place through which they passed. The disciples that followed at the thinkers' heels were indeed most impressed with this wonderful creation, and worked to spread the fame of their philosophies far and wide. They said that for the first time, the world and its inhabitants could be seen as they really were, and in time they carried their teaching to nearly every corner of the literate world, so that there was hardly a person or place that had not been reflected and represented in it.

Thus the realm where that fortress prison lay, its crowned heads left without anywhere to wear their crowns, had fallen into the hands of patriots and philanthropists, who, advocating the rights of an abstract humanity, and vowing that the institutions of the country should no longer be for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many... had set up the scarlet mob-cap of Liberty, declaring that the laws of Nature should be repealed, and that the genius and the insane, the vagabond and the banker, should henceforth be equal. And as there are two things that everyone fancies they can do themself better than another --viz. mix a salad and govern a country, the whole population now sought to have a finger in the national pie, and the nouveau régime was put under the management of a Convention, composed of the benevolent-minded, the fine-spirited, the deep-thinking, and the heroic, overflowing with the milk of human kindness, who, though voting the love of power a low thing, still were ready to make any sacrifice rather than see their fellow countrymen and countrywomen crushed between the chariot-wheels of a juggernaut oligarchy (the term "juggernaut" being derived from the Sanskrit Jagannatha, an epithet of Vishnu whose image, during the Rathayatra festival, stars in a procession aboard a chariot that crushes whatever is in its path); while meetings where held by the young in every household, and it was unanimously resolved that each family should be declared a republic as well, and that the supremacy of patriarchy should henceforth be numbered among the follies of the past (such as royalty and divinity).
Though each of the patriots scorned the filthy dross attached to the highest office of state, and had an innate hatred of authority, yet there were so many candidates who were ready to sacrifice everything to become the humble instrument of benefiting their fellow creatures, that the fraternal love which was to reign throughout the capital, the provinces, and the colonies began to change into the contentions of parties within the red-hot fire of Republicanism, or rather of Ideologies taken to the extreme. The leftists while in power persecuted the rightists, and then the rightists deposed the leftists and began to persecute them in retaliation for the friends and relatives they had lost...

Those stupid mortals, those prodigious wonders of nature who called themselves people or humans, were changing the face of everything in the world. The loveliest sun-drenched green landscapes, the most beautiful countrysides, would be turned --even the most glorious of them all-- by the end of the century into little more than vast barren wastelands of decay, or so said those of the Fair Folk who had the gift of foresight. If one were to look at a beautiful landscape they would only see doom and death and decay. The magic and wonder of old times were leaving the world; as the forests and other dark places were explored, charted, and settled, there were fewer places for magical creatures to hide. Some left for distant realms, others fell in among the humans hiding in plain sight, others simply accepted the changing world and lived in what bit of yesterday remained, until they breathed their last. And thus, by the decade of the 1830s, when France was once more a kingdom and the ancien régime naïvely thought that there was no more resistance seething against their rule, when the people, ostensibly "glad to be freed from the thralldom of Liberty," instantly proceeded to welcome the Bourbon monarchs back with every sign of public rejoicing... most of the faeries and elementals across Western Europe had become extinct. They did not know of what else to invent in order to lead the human species into downfall. 

With this mindset, the brokenhearted survivors entered the magical realm, the place where the time flows differently and wondrous things happened on a daily basis. Their home became a different land: the Kingdom East of the Sun and West of the Moon. It was a place that no light touched, shielded from the outside world by dark magic. The Kingdom East of the Sun and West of the Moon was high up in the sky, unreachable except by spirits and humans with magic. East of the Sun and West of the Moon, all was dark. Finally, one came upon a castle that appeared to be made of midnight, indistinguishable from the sky around it. The throne room... It was a cavernous hall that resembled the inside of a cave. 

Those who spoke of the Fair Folk did so in hushed voices and/or fervent whispers. There were some who considered them myths -- fearsome but fictional characters in cautionary tales, made up to frighten children and make them behave themselves.

But still the Fair Folk were no myths, and some of the rumours had small hints of truth to them; there were those who survived, and even thrived, in that brave new world that had such people in it. And the most powerful of those who thrived was known simply as the Green Faery, one of the most terrible and fearsome beings in all worlds; once the goddess of love, she had become the spirit of perverted love. They said that her beauty was so grand that it took one's breath away, and that her kisses took one's wits away as well. Many had fallen by her bloodless wounds early or late in life. And her talents and delights of terrorising the good people of the Living World were hardly exaggerated. Victims of her 'amusements' were rarely heard of again. Piercing and green were the eyes of this very clever regal damsel, green as poison, as were the veins through her translucent lilywhite skin, and the blood that coursed through those veins. Her dwelling lay high above the Living World in a towering fortress, on the coast of the coldest part of the land of France, but also in the purlieus of the Land of Night and Silence. The large stone throne was where she spent all her time, when not down on Earth to satisfy her thirst for entertainment. This sorceress bore the mark of her charms on her wrist and went by many names, and it was her intrigue which fostered everything that happened after.

Unlike other nature spirits who had either for evermore entered the magical realm, the place where the time flows differently and wondrous things happened on a daily basis, or retreated for evermore into the most barren and darkest of pristine unsullied wastelands, shunning humankind altogether, the Green Faery did not shy away from contact with mortals, trying every now and then, time after time, to fight her vanquishers, if not by brute force, at least through ruse and deception. Like many others of her supernatural kith and kin, she used seductive charms to trap her victims and rob them of their life substance.
The favourite modus operandi which she employed in that incessant antagonism was none other than that, when down on Earth to satisfy her thirst for entertainment, on the direst and stormiest of the bleak autumn and winter midnights, most frequently around the witching hour, she would wander the streets of the larger towns, even those of the capitals, and sought up wayward young people, who crossed her path by sheer chance; then, she breathed a vein on her wrist and poured out her sickly-green blood for those striplings and maidens to drink from her crystal cup, one draught from which, as she averred, would make the drinker cease to love and cease to feel such sorrow for any shade of heartbreak from disappointment to despair; yet, at the end of the day, cease to feel anything at all. This precious liquor would take away all sense of toil and pain... yet take away all sense of true affection and happiness along with it. Better still, she knew, sometimes there were single drops of that draught that descended all the way down into the hearts of certain people, someone might get a sip of the chartreuse-coloured elixir in their heart, and this would be a terrible, fatal, wonderful thing... The unluckiest person would personally intake at least one drop of the green liquid to their own body, by means of swallowing; through that body even a single drop would travel, it would spread inside the person descending all the way down and then absorbed into the bloodstream until it had the chance to find its way into the warm beating heart of its joyful owner, and lodge within that heart... That would prove the worst, the most fearsome evil that could come out of that, especially for those people themselves, upon which the unfortunate victims all became realists at their best and cynics at their worst; for the victim's heart, once a shrine for the most noble feelings and passions, would freeze over, grow cold and harden and become insensitive, turning at last similar to a lump of ice; or rather to a crazy diamond; nevermore to feel joy or love or hope or emotional warmth again. They were forevermore black hearts, which in turn turned them into a cold and hateful person. If one were to drink this, the highly-concentrated liquid would flow freely through their veins and arteries, turning the very marrow of their bones to black, utterly crushing their will; the darkness chipping away their inner self slowly and unstoppably, changing them forever. 

And that was when things began to look dire, and what even brought the purest of hearts to despair, for whoever drank the blood of the Green Faery would be seized with a burning thirst for more of her blood, that nothing else would quench and that more of that green blood would kindle hotter, so that the drinker would not think, not even dream, of love for friends, family, or the motherland, and they were cold and indifferent to others, lost sight of the whole, and forgot to appreciate the beauty they might otherwise have perceived. For a work of art reduced to its components is nothing but an assembly of paints on canvas or ink on paper, without a soul. Not only that, but they would even do anything, even kill or torture, for more of that cursed draught: of course that was gruesome indeed... Not only were those hearts bereft of a place within for any affection, but whoever drank of that intoxicating draught became at first furious, then helpless and feeble, an easy prey to dark forces, and from that moment they would see everything through a distorted lens, only able to see only the worst side of what they looked at, for even the smallest drop of fey blood retained the same power which belonged to her whole self; the drink searing the vocal chords within a person’s throat and colouring their words with hidden hatred. Some of them gave up on life and simply sat there and waited to die... Instead of seeing the people they loved as the people they loved, they would see them as demanding, grasping, bitter, twisted, horrible people, and they would come to hate them and resent them. Everything that those individuals had loved in life they would come to despise in life. Consumed by the drug that affected their whole selves. The sorceress found this vastly entertaining, and chuckled with pleasure at her clever schemes. In that manner, She of the Green Kirtle was gathering wayward young people left and right into her lair, whose location was still unknown, to share her heart with them, to avenge the loss of her kith and kin, and to claim the influence and the worldly power that were hers by right- oh, it was such a wonderful feeling to see a person’s whole body freeze over from their heart outwards! But you had to find the right kind of heart to turn to ice, or to a crazy diamond; it had to have love inside it, but love abandoned and shunned. For a heart with attentive love burned hot and melted the ice straight away.

People cannot imagine being happy. They have never been happy. How do they know what it is like? They know only desire. And desire is, at least, a familiar thing. How frightened they must be, to think they will lose it, to stretch out their hands... If someone forsook both the world and oneself, then, that person was gone, she had realised. When a person loses confidence in the world and their self, it is all over with them. And each and every person was condemned to be free, and thus to experience, in their lifetime, at least a single moment of weakness. That instant in which their emotions or the stress of a situation goes past critical and causes a thoughtless reaction that they would never have if they were thinking clearly. This action almost always causes damage of some kind, most commonly to someone or something they care about.

The same free will that made those paltry humans destroy the environment for profit also made them unfortunate victims, vulnerable and easy to prey upon. As long as there was free will, there would be darkness in people's hearts, and the spirits who preyed upon that darkness would never die. Humans were and are weak that way; it was a two-edged sword. And that was the reason why she and her equals in approach loved free will so much, as much as they loathed it: because, at the end of the day, humans use it to follow their hearts. And who would not gladly take advantage of that?

This intrigue had for an aim, as you dear readers may see, to change the face of each and every person, and of each and every thing, in this brave new world, thereby reducing everyone and everything to chaotic, twisted unreason, and and stifling all of creation with excess in its sense of wonder. 

Evening by evening, the older generations warned their children about anyone who has at least a drop of the fey blood, which gives them some ability to charm a man or woman if they so desire. Whoever drank of that strong, intoxicating liquid became at first furious, then helpless and feeble, an easy prey to her; it was like honey to the throat but poison in the blood, stain for the heart, and shade for the soul; upon which the unfortunate victims all became realists at their best and cynics at their worst. Up till now, she'd used her talent only to coax the young lieutenants and captains who had been left for dead upon sunset battlefields to her side when necessary. But her talent was enough to keep any and every young person she had found under pressure, and keep them she would. Now in these restless times of armed peace, as young people moved away into the large towns, science and the fine arts made wuthering progress at the universities, and revolutions were brewing in every nation, the young people eager to topple the ancien régime in favour of something more righteous, the wise upbraidings of the elders were soon lost and forgotten, and many forgot about the tale of the shimmering draught.

Voilà qui va être on ne peut plus récréatif, quoth she, delighted, in response to this.
"'Tis only from today, from this date zero on," she assured, hailing her intrigue as a great success, "that we will be able to see, just as they are at heart, these marvels of nature who call themselves humans or people."

So she started all on her own on a grand tour of the western world, causing unhappiness in every land, and it would be impossible to relate all the evil that she wrought in all the lands she passed through. To cut a long story short, her blood suscited a great deal of chaos and disorder and even despair throughout mortalkind. 

For all of these changes to human society, in turn, gave her, during those decades, even more of an advantage than she'd ever had before; free berth and full powers to cajole and keep any person who had caught her attention. There was not a being in the Living World who could not fall to their knees from her power. Of course she knew that this spell would last until sometime, somewhere, someone afflicted by her blood could overcome it, and cast the draught from them. Until then, more and more people would fall under the influence of her wistful charms, about which few to no one knew anything... for, when she had already surveyed all of those changes – à cette époque, my dear young readers, all the revolutions had just begun to unfurl– when she had already surveyed all of those changes that the times had brought to the lives of humans, for she wished to change the course of history, and realign those who rebelled against the vision of yore. Thus, she resolved to take advantage of the circumstances of this new century to try or essay to suscite among the humans the same disorder, the same chaos, even the same despair, that the humans themselves had wrought among the fey. 

Thus, a great tragedy arrived, the damage having become far worse than ever before, because all her chaotic power expanded throughout the atmosphere and she soared to wherever she found a broken heart. And thus, some people received even a single drop of her blood not only in the throat, but even in the heart as well; a little drop of that liquid landed in the hearts of some people, and, for those people themselves especially, this was something fatal, for their hearts froze cold and hard, and became similar to crazy diamonds, as we have already said, the sinister draught having created sorrow, misery, hopelessness, and despair in her victims before their cruel and untimely deaths. And thus, throughout the nineteenth century, she caused even more misfortunes than ever before, and plunged the promise of the coming age into a spiralling abyss of degradation. A dark mood spread across the continent. Pickpockets became highwaymen; jealous lovers turned to murder those they adored; petty squabbles over land turned to open wars.

Eventually the liquid achieved its aim, and while the bruises faded, and the cuts healed, the subject was irrevocably changed. No longer was the person a rebel, someone who spoke against their ruler or leader. Now, they were submissive and tolerant, a perfect specimen.

Time passed, and as time passed, incidents began to occur. Those who were changed grew mean, grew hateful, saw nothing but evil, and could do nought but bad deeds. Every slightly cruel whim in the individual was magnified until it turned to vicious sadism. Every little bit of spite, every little bit of jealousy, anger... every craving and urge they might have possessed was magnified and magnified... until they saw all of the worst in themselves distilled down to its purest poison. The darkness chipping away their inner self slowly and unstoppably, changing them forever. And the heart-freezing liquid was bled and gushed and spun until it shimmered like liquid sunlight on ice.

They knew nothing different, only knew a blackness beginning to coat their heart and dim their view of the world. All their thoughts were clouded and quenched, and all their good wishes turned into one single wicked wish. Gone were the richness and fulfillment in their life, and in its place hatred and a life empty of love- oh, it was such a wonderful feeling to see a person’s whole body freeze over from their heart outwards! But you had to find the right kind of heart to turn to ice, or to a crazy diamond; it had to have love inside it, but love abandoned and shunned.  For a heart with attentive love burned hot and melted the ice straight away.

And thus, as she saw the consequences of all her cajoling, and this change in the people whose lives she had entered, ruining countless human lives, the chaos she discovered everywhere that flattered and agreeably tickled her twisted fancy, tickling her pink indeed, and she laughed till she almost choked, till she nearly split her sides, and her face turned temporarily blue... she laughed so heartily that not only did it hurt her false ribs till her sides shook, but even that her bosom bounced all the way down to her knees and then all the way up to her chin; thus she kept on laughing and laughing, for it tickled her so to see the mischief she had done and to think of what might become of the many little uncertainties that still floated about, carried by the air and water hither and yon across the globe. The Lady laughed: the richest, most musical laugh you can imagine... she was so tickled by the entire thing, by all the misrule that she had wrought among all orders of society, that she laughed until both her sides hurt, till she nearly split her sides, completely relishing in the chaos she had created. She was cruel and felt no remorse for what had happened, not regretting anything at all.

Even she couldn't have predicted what would happen to one of them.

And it is to that recipient of this draught that we move in our story. It is about one of those victims that our story shall concern itself, and that is where we begin.

There are many, many stories about each shed droplet of her blood, and what troubles they caused. But this story focuses on some specific droplets that changed the lives of two students who lived in a capital town that doubled as a seat of learning, in revolutionary times, while the patriots and philanthropists, whose elders, scarcely half a century back, had vowed death to the King and Queen and all their retainers, shouted themselves hoarse with "Vive la Révolution! Allons, enfants de la Patrie!"

This is the tale of a young man who was taken by the Green Faery.

And that of the lover who walked through fire and ice to set him free.

It would have been better if she had never torn the two of them apart, yet by chance there was declenched a chain of events in which at first one of those lethal drops of green blood wound up where it should nevermore have wound up in the first place, and that led, in turn, to their violent separation and to the subsequent quest.

For one day, a few droplets of that heart-freezing draught landed in the throat, and then in the heart, of a selfless young man, and his heart was overtaken by hate and rage and fear. But it was the wrong heart to overtake, because it was loved just as selflessly, by a lad who would not let him go.

Now let's hear what happened next; pay heed and listen to how it all occurred!

And it is to a recipient of this draught that we move in our story. This is the story of Grantaire and Enjolras.

Upon all of this we rely, dear readers, and thus, our story proper begins to unfurl... Now gather round, readers, and I shall tell you their tale and that of the Green Faery...

COMMENTARIES: 

Somebody's already claimed the Snow Queen on some Enjoltaire fairytale drabble post, but since I got the plotbunny and wrote the outline a year ago and wrote the first two segments of the revised version this morning before I realized that we were supposed to sign up for things, I'm posting it anyway. But here, instead of on the comm. I'll link if she says I can share the prompt.

Edit: Since not everyone's as familiar with the original text of the Snow Queen as I had blythely assumed, a belated heads up that some of this is paraphrased from Hans Christian Andersen's original, and several lines are direct quotations.

I adore this tale since I was a little child and loved the animated 1957 film by Lev Atamanov. It is in Russian language, you can watch it with good subs here. I also loved the Swedish version by Ingrid Warne. It is in Swedish language but I translated it into English; you can read it here.
I am inspired by that version, but will add elements from the original tale/book, various screen adaptations, and my own spin.

I noticed a startling lack of Snow Queen AUs in this fandom, and I believe that I can help fix that. At first, Enjolras always seemed like Kai in The Snow Queen. But the more I think about it, the more I see R as Kai and the more I want to see this flipped on its head. I hope I have represented the characters to the best of my ability.

Enjolras in this story plays the role of Gerda and Grantaire is Kai. Both are roommates and classmates studying in Paris. There will be other characters and the Snow Queen is a little bit of a surprise and a secret at the same time.

Warning: I will mention these at the end of the chapter in end notes to avoid spoiling you the story.

Hello all <3 This is my pet project. I started this last Christmas, worked on it on and off between my studies and just finished it. I'm quite pleased with it. The Snow Queen (or rather its prince-and-princess subplot) is my favourite Hans Christian Andersen story by far and yet very few people seem to know about it! Shame, shame. This is overall a fairly loyal adaptation of the original, but I have added things in from Les Mis, switched up a few things (Made it a little more gay) I think that's about it. It's all complete and will be five installments, not seven like the original story (I pruned away most of the irrelevant things Andersen put; what would be the third and sixth chapters are out). I hope you enjoy!

The Snow Queen's always a good fairytale to adapt ensemble casts to, because Gerda runs into so many different characters while she searches for Kai. I had the bunny for a Snow Queen Enjoltaire AU just like this one since long ago. Including whom to cast as the prince and princess, and the robber maiden (you will see, as the story unfurls, whom in the cast of Les Mis I got to play each of these roles!). But something seemed to be amiss. It took yet another year to realise that the original Andersenian Snow Queen was not the right villainess for the story.
After re-reading/re-watching Les Misérables and re-watching Moulin Rouge that winter 2017, and then a subsequent re-read of The Silver Chair, it suddenly clicked. It just said click when I thought of the Green Faery of Absinthe, as a Lady of the Green Kirtle - click, like that - and the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. It all suddenly made sense. Furthermore, Revelation 8:11 (the third trumpet, the one that affects the freshwaters) speaks of a shooting star that poisons one third of the springs of freshwater, turning them into absinthe, which leads to many poisoning casualties. Ever since my childhood, the imagery of that verse has haunted my daydreams, nightmares, and creative productions, and so has another Revelation imagery of intoxication and druglore: the wine of immorality or fornication in 17, which metaphorically intoxicated, or made drunk, all the nations (in the sense of ethnic groups) and common inhabitants of the Earth! The shard of the shattered mirror of truth was, in consequence, replaced with absinthe - the green blood of the temptress - as the catalyst for Grand'R's downfall.
I also got inspired a lot by existentialism (the whole bit that we humans are condemned to be free, which leads in turn to our moments of weakness) and by anime and tokusatsu series that employ The Heartless trope; ie villains of the week born out of people's negative emotions. They can be a convenient henchperson for the right villain, since they are an unlimited resource; there always seem to be plenty of victims loaded with problems and angst for The Heartless to feed on.

Occasionally, a victim who is Fighting from the Inside can resist The Heartless' control.

Depending on the context, this trope is a subtrope of Abstract Apotheosis. This is because nearly every series that this trope is used in presents these critters as An Aesop about them being in everyone's hearts. 

But first, dear readers, I must clarify that Enj is Gerda and R is Kai, and not the other way around, in this fusion, knowing who was the most feminine and the most masculine of the two (and, the icing on the cake: Enj is a blond in scarlet, while R has this addiction...). This classic adventure story fits this pairing, just like it fits Jaimienne, like a glove. And I figured out how to fit most of the Les Mis characters into it, fto begin. Et voilà, it became my first Enjoltaire, and my first Mizzie, story EVER!!
Furthermore, the Biedermeier style in which the original tale is written unfurled in the 1820s-1830s that are the most popular choice of setting for illustrators, theatre groups, and filmmakers when it comes to adapting Andersenian tales. The same historical setting of Les Misérables, long story short.


Well, gee, thanks for giving me such an easy act to follow. Only, you know, not. (I kid. Mostly. At least the part where I am bitter instead of admiring is kidding.)

I could start copying favorite lines, but then I'd be here all day. I really love the voice you've got down for this.


I thought it was more of a plot bunny dealie, so I started writing a Sleeping Beauty Grantaire after someone wrote Sleeping Beauty Enjolras.
Well, there's always room for multiple versions of fairy tales ^_^.

Sleeping beauty Grand'R is kind of obvious (that, and Snow White), what with Enj canonically being the knight in shining armour (or rather, a shining waistcoat) who woke him up from an enchanted ethyl-induced sleep.
Oh yeah, the shining armour-waistcoat! I only remembered the R asleep part. (Canon was so awesome!)

I liked to explore the other option, because I can see Enjolras fitting the role of a prince more easily, though I can totally see Prince Grantaire as well, in a very small and homely kingdom. And you picked the latter because poor guy gets sick or injured a lot, and him in a coma is not surprising.

This is approximately the only Hans Christian Andersen fairytale with a happy ending, so you're in luck! (okay, they don't all end in death and depressingness -- but I was scarred by The Little Matchgirl and the Ugly Duckling at a young and impressionable age).

This made me lol: even if a single drop had the chance to descend all the way down into the heart of a certain person, and lodge within that heart, that would prove the worst, the most fearsome evil that could come out of that, especially for those people themselves, upon which the unfortunate victims all became realists at their best and cynics at their worst: is dat some foreshadowing?

Nope --it's my own personal dislike of realism, cynicism, et al. showing through (they occasionally have some useful points, but mostly it seems to essentially consist of making things up in order to sound pompous). Though there is also foreshadowing here, indeed...


There's really no way to write this story and not make R be Kai, is there? It's just a Thing Which Is So.

Well, gee, thanks for giving me such an easy act to follow. Only, you know, not. (I kid. Mostly. At least the part where I am bitter instead of admiring is kidding.)

I could start copying favourite lines, but then I'd be here all day. I really love the voice you've got down for this.

Thanks so much! (and I hope I'm not unintentionally stealing anything you were planning on doing with the story, aside from the inevitable "Enj is Gerda & R is Kai"). I don't think I can really take credit for the voice, though, since it mostly consists of copying the style from original and a lot of other fairytales. With occasional condescending Victorian-childrens-book-style asides to the reader, just because they're so much fun when Lemony Snicket does them.



There's really no way to write this story and not make Grand'R be Kai, is there? It's just a Thing Which Is So.

I guess you could draw a parallel between Kai being rescued from the Snow Queen's palace and Enj being detached and aloof, like frozen in ice, but yeah, R = Kai is just so perfect that it's hard to think of how to do a role reversal -- not like something like Sleeping Beauty, where either one of them 
could be the sleeping "princess" just as easily as the other.


Last year, I had the Fairytale Tarot by Lisa Hunt given to myself as an encouragement gift, right before Christmas (Spanish edition, published by Editorial Sirio). And I had the idea to let 2017's Advent Calendar, Once Upon 24 Times, be based upon the premise of drawing a card of the day from that deck and retelling the tale as a fic, a story with original characters of mine, or a poem. Long story short, I used the card of each day as a prompt. The only thing that had to remain was the spirit of the old tale; otherwise I had full powers, being completely free to retell each story as I pleased. Thus, Rapunzel became an acrostic, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus a counterpoint in switching points of view, Cinderelliott traded the ballroom for the battlefield, Tyrion got to star as the clever imp who helped Sansa spin the copper of her hair into gold, and the river troll wound up telling the police or the jury of his encounter with the Three Billy Goats, while the Little Mermaid's prince confided in his pregnant wife for all his feelings of guilt while hoping that their unborn child would be a girl and the reincarnation of that little mute castaway...
It turned out to be a most pleasant surprise. Many bunnies from my old bunny farm came back, all of them pêle-mêle, thanks to that impetus. 
Including the one for an Enjoltaire Snow Queen AU. An open love letter to my coming of age, to the fairytales and songs of my adolescence (mostly Andersen and symphonic rock, respectively), to CLAMP anime, and to the world of Les Misérables. It's basically the Hans Christian Andersen story told with Enjolras as Gerda, Grantaire as Kai, the Green Faery of Absinthe as the Snow Queen, and various other familiar faces of the Les Mis cast as all the supporting characters (several of whom don't appear in the original story, but fit perfectly into the original story's various settings). It's written in a very authentic, fairy-tale-ish style similar to Andersen's, and it's actually quite a serious and angsty story, even though it's crammed full of delightful in-jokes, and Mizzie fans will take great delight in recognizing these Easter eggs, as well as in recognizing which supporting characters in the fairytale the Les Mis supporting characters are supposed to be.
However, the story "La Fée Verte" I have published for Once Upon 24 Times was sentenced to be but a Director's Cut, due to the constraints of the size limits of blog posts. It wound up being faaaaaar longer than its Westerosi counterpart and spiritual predecessor, The Queen Beyond the Wall, because there is so much more lore (knowledge, culture...) to nineteenth-century France, and to nineteenth-century Europe as a whole, than to Westeros!
It seems that La Fée Verte is exceeding the length allowed by the size limits -I have had this problem before with other fics-. So I cut out most of the commentaries -and the epilogue- from the original document in order to make it fit. I hope I can write as much as I want about this world and these characters... I wish I could, indeed. XOXO
As mentioned earlier, if your one post already exceeds the 1MB limit, there is little you can do except to split that article into separate posts.
"Your readers might be happy, if you were to segment your narrative..." I heard that advice and resolved to pay heed to it.
There is autopagination. So there is nothing to do but surrender, and leave this as but a draft-first version-director's cut of the integral story (ditto for the Baratheon Saga, I must say).
So this is the complete and UNCUT version, chapter-by-chapter. There was SO MUCH I wanted to say in this version... Not War and Peace-length, but still a decent novella, I promise. This first introductory chapter is only the tip of the iceberg...