Scent Notes:  A wild blooming garden of roses, lily of the valley, and jasmine, dragon’s blood, black oud, an underlying whiff of rot courtesy of indole and animalic musk.

Once upon a time, Isabelle was unhappy. Yet again, her two beautiful older sisters were teasing her for being more “brains” than “looks,” and we all know that, in fairy tale world, it meant she really was beautiful, but nobody had realized it yet. Her sisters, Kelly and Katie, were tall, blonde, and buxom. They caught the eye of every man in their small village, yet they both wanted only one man: the repugnant Gerald, who for some reason, only had eyes for Isabelle. “He’s all yours,” she repeatedly told them whenever he tried to worm his way into Izzy’s good graces, which he was never able to do, as Izzy found him to be pig-headed and chauvinistic. Who eats dozens of eggs every day when eggs are so expensive? Who tries to woo a girl whose nose is often found in a book by bench pressing random objects in front of her? It made no sense, and yet, this was her life.

True, she stuck out in the village herself, for being bookish and brassy when all the other women her age were more concerned with attracting husbands. Izzy read books and kept mostly to herself, plotting ways to leave her small, provincial village and go out into the world and explore. However, it was extremely difficult to do that when she was basically running their entire household on her own. Her mother had passed when Izzy was young, and instead of getting a wicked stepmother like most fairy tale heroines, she was left with a sweet, bumbling, slightly inept father, who was so consumed with his own passion projects he left his daughters to mostly fend for themselves. Kelly and Katie were never natural cooks, nor cleaners, so it fell to Izzy to be as domestic as possible while also working at the local library. She spent what little free time she had (and, weirdly, every time she walked around her village) with her nose stuck in a book. She’d already read through the library’s contents several times, and had begun writing her own romance stories at night. She dreamed of a rough, hirsute, rugged, yet secretly tender man who lived in a castle and was the proud owner of an absolutely gigantic … library. To her, that was the dream, and the more she wrote about it, the more real it became in her mind. This man was absolutely out there, and she was determined to find him, if only so she could stop basically parenting her entire family while a man roughly the size of a barge did rude things to try to impress her.

Her father’s current obsession was inventing things. He was working on a more efficient trebuchet for local lords, though no one had used a trebuchet in decades, and nobody had commissioned her father to make such a thing. “They haven’t used them because they stopped being EFFECTIVE!” her father told her more than once when she gently suggested that perhaps he could go back to work at the local mechanics shop? So instead, every morning on her way to work, she dropped some bread and butter at his garage door, so he would possibly eat a little something before hyperfixating. Months went by this way, until one wintery morning, Izzy woke up and couldn’t find her father. Kelly and Katie were, shockingly, not any help at all. “He left last night to meet someone about some bucket? I don’t know, leave me alone,” was all the information she got out of Kelly before hurriedly leaving the house, severely underdressed for the weather, but too scared for her father to consider anything but finding him.
She ran down to the village and checked every store that was open, both bars, the only restaurant and bakery, to no avail. Nobody had seen him. So she set off on foot to try and walk to the next village over where she knew her father had gone in the past for supplies. It wasn’t far; she had been there before, but she had never walked, let alone through so much snow, with wind blowing straight to the bone. She wasn’t too far outside of her village when she noticed odd shapes on the side of the road. She hurried up and found her father trapped under an upturned wagon. “Father!” She cried out, struggling through the snow to help. With a great amount of determination, she was able to lift up part of the wagon enough to free her father, though his leg appeared badly broken. “Stay here. I think I see a building in the distance. I’ll get help!” Just on the horizon there was the beginning of a dense forest, through which she could see a stream of smoke as if from a fireplace. She trudged forward through sheer adrenaline, her feet freezing, her teeth chattering, fearing she might die from the cold in the pursuit of rescuing her father.

She made it to the trees, the road getting rockier under the snow. Not knowing exactly where she was heading, she followed a small pathway of sorts through the trees intuitively, hoping she was right and there was some kind of house there. Indeed, she hit a clearing and her breath left her chest. It was not a house; it was a grand manse in a state of incredible decay. She wasn’t sure how it was standing, and she would have taken it as abandoned if not for the stream of smoke and the lights on inside. She ran up to the mansion, too cold and exhausted to be frightened. Grasping a large brass door knocker, she knocked as hard and fast as she could. No response. She knocked again. Shivering, scared, she peered through the closest window to the front door. Nothing. She walked around the side of the mansion, where she found a gigantic greenhouse absolutely full of blooming, incredible roses. “Help, please!” she cried out, running toward the greenhouse. “My father has been injured, I need help moving him and bringing him in somewhere warm!” She peered into the greenhouse, aghast. The roses were shades of red and pink she’d never seen anywhere, let alone in a rose. Though she could not get inside, the aroma of hundreds of roses flooded her nose and gave her the briefest moment of comfort … until a musky animal smell cut through her nostrils. She turned nervously and found herself face-to-face with a beastly man who looked shockingly familiar to her. Before she could think too much, she cried out. “Please help! My father is lying with a broken leg just down the road to the west, and I can’t move him, and I’ve been out in the cold and I … I….” She looked up into those beastly eyes and passed out cold.

To be continued….