"There was once a gigantic pestilential toad, who was peppered all over with greenish warts like an ancient leathery pincushion. Deep, deep underground she sat squalidly and ruminated vastly on the flawed nature of existence, her yellowish eyes glowing like ominous lanterns in the gloom. 300 years ago she had clawed her way down, down into the depths beneath the great castle, slithering slowly past great clotted hanks of roots and foetid earth - like hairy curtains, down down, past ruins and ancient forgotten relics, crumbled and sunken into the rich primordial loam like petrified fallen stars. In the deep, dark, dank silence she was all alone. Sullen, forgotten and sunken dejectedly into eternal solitude.
For she had not always been a toad, not always confined to this subterranean squalor. Once, 300 years ago she had been Grizelda - a beautiful princess admired far and wide for her long, long silvered hair, her wonderful singing voice, skill with needlework and sword, and collection of rare jewels. That was before she had been banished in disgrace, for the princess had a secret - she had fallen in love with her chambermaid and the two girls had been plotting their escape when they had both been discovered by the wizard Grizmuth, who had bewitched her into her present form, and imprisoned the distraught and now long dead chambermaid in the chill ridden dungeons to waste away to nothingness.
In her cavern, she sat festering, a frightful amphibious vision consumed with hatred and malice, poison twisting and writhing through her mind like stormclouds gathering at dusk. She had been plotting for centuries, and now it was time to clamber forth from the abyss. In the velvet blackness her tongue flickered, tasting the mildewey stale air, breathing deeply of silver fingered rot and decay in the putrid bowels of the earth; a great stenching hulking mass of filigreed flesh intent upon her revenge."
from Grizmuth and Grizelda and other Queer Tales
...unwritten fairytales by xphaiea
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