Rumpelstiltskin - Part.1

This was written in hard copy scribble one insomniac night. I had an idea, and this is what spilled out. "What is the Rumpelstiltskin story from the faery perspective?" Part 1.


My Brother, Ilias Rumpelstiltskin, was a fool, that much is true. To hear the humans tell the tale, it appears that his actions were cruel, but it was the humans who instigated our retribution.

It all began one fine summer afternoon, when Ilias was returning from a journey to the northern Realm. He spotted an ancient castle, and made towards its vine covered walls. As he neared the fortress, he heard a sound of weeping from a tower window.

Curiosity was one of my brother's weaknesses; he nimbly climbed the vine to investigate the sufferer. Alighting upon the sill of the tower, Ilias found a girl, inconsolably weeping. She lay prostrate on an straw strewn floor, exhausted from grief.

Being the nosy idiot he was, Ilias made his first mistake - he talked to the girl. She was startled to see him, and drew back, afraid of the tales of the faery kind. Here my brother committed his second blunder - he promised not to cause her any harm. A quick and thoughtless promise, but it was binding nonetheless.

The girl gained some backbone here, seeing her advantage, and told haltingly the woeful tale. Her father, James Reabnor, was in serious debt to the lord of this castle - in his desperation, the father had pledged his daughter, Raisley, to serve in the King's court until restitution could be made.

Ilias took pity upon the lady, his heart strings tugged by the girl's plight. My brother's most fatal errors were these - he was gullible enough to believe the tale at face value, and blindly eager enough to pledge his help.

By this point, he had ridden roughshod over the faery protocol of "keeping your mouth tight and your abilities discreet." He had the absurd notion of spinning the straw into gold. It would have been a simple matter to glamour the grain into the appearance of wealth, but he felt generous and actually used "All Chemist's Breath" to perform the transformation in reality.

Ilias left the tower with a lightness of mind and heart. The enormity of the price for the Breath would wear out any faery. But he departed with the idea that he had done a good turn for humanity. Posterity did not return the favor, casting the legacy of his deed in a harsher light.