Bewitching beauty - a short story

“A beauty so bewitching,
the world falls into ruin.”
 
“Its colours so vivid, all else pales in comparison. All who learns of its existence become slaves to her beauty. For it preys on man´s weakest of blemishes; desire.”
When grandmother first told me the tale of the Bewitching beauty, I had asked her what the beauty in question was supposed to represent. At that, she smiled, a smile which I today can see only as the all-knowing conceit of an elder, and said: “Do you really think it´s possible for us to imagine something as beautiful as that?” And true enough, the hundreds upon thousands of conjectures conceived from this old folktale, no matter how creatively grand, were ultimately ugly in comparison. A flower, a goddess, an angel, even a dragon… Me personally, I always saw her as a bird. A golden pheasant, perhaps, or an elegant peacock, radiating the colours of the rainbow. A child´s dream, truly. Nor could I, at the time, grasp the idea of a being so wonderful bringing ruin upon man. Neither could anyone else, it seems, not until it was too late, anyhow. As the rumour of its supposed location began spreading from noblemen to commoners to finally, me, the world was already doomed. It was strange, too, how this particular rumour came to be. Usually, they are dismissed entirely or stay within the castle walls, then quickly forgotten. This time, it was as if everyone knew, myself included, that the rumour was nothing but the absolute truth that would lead us straight to her. Within short, people could virtually smell their way to her, smell the entrancing fragrance only belonging to a being ethereal, or hear her calling, her voice equally enchanting, or see her in dreams, in all of her lovely shapes and sizes. Where the rumour originated, is unclear too. Supposedly, someone heard it first from one of the traveling merchants, which is also usually the case, as they amass an impressive collection of stories and gossip over the course of their travels. The whispers reached the king´s ears unusually late this time around. Once he did find out, it did not take long for the entire capital to bustle into life with shouting soldiers and waving flyers and cattle hurriedly running from place to place, with the order of bringing the Bewitching beauty to him in the name of the kingdom itself. Nobody, not even the royal soldiers who swore their lives to this cause, ever had the intention of doing so, of course. If his grotesquely obese majesty wasn´t unable to leave his throne, he´d probably have taken the mission upon himself in a heartbeat to ensure victory. With the determined march of the thousands of soldiers, I, along with the majority of the rest of the townspeople, made our way in large hustling groups to the mountaintop where the Bewitching beauty supposedly resided. The sun rested high up in the sky this eventful day, on a bed of clouds, shining from behind the very mountaintop we were marching towards, which made it light up in a brilliant manner, and was surely a good omen. Already, a few of the travellers stopped, realizing the sun itself may be this rumoured Bewitching beauty, and disappointingly turned back. The rest of us with our resolve still intact pressed forward. The blazing good omen in the sky soon turned out to be the very opposite, however, as many dozens of us began fainting from heatstroke, the horde quickly leaving trails of unconscious people after it. The rest of us, still with stamina left in our sweaty bodies, pressed forward. Anyone who would be foolish enough to stay behind and help the fainted would lose their ticket to the Bewitching beauty, after all. As the groups reached the mountain-path and lost even more people to exhaustion and unresolve, we were still only about 100 man short. That all changed when the actual mountain-climbing began. Men slipped, soldiers pushed civilians, women cried, people splattered unto the rocks beneath like fruit. I just kept to myself. One could even argue that, while disturbing, the chaos was to my advantage. I could slip past unnoticed, get further ahead, without people´s climbing slowing me down. The old especially. I say good riddance. Compared to her… to her, a stranger or two´s death mean nothing. From this point on, with the sun beginning to set, it´s hard to say how many of us there were left. We´d gotten separated into even smaller groups after the tumultuous start, and my group was particularly small, as we were among the ones in the lead. Our determination did not waver. By this point, there was no longer a shadow of a doubt whether the Bewitching beauty awaited us at the top. Her presence wafted through the mountain, rejuvenating those of us still on our legs, bright eyed and hungry, calling our names. The red bodies at the bottom of the spiralling mountain only motivated us further to succeed.
“I knew it, I knew it” one of the travellers mumbled next to my ear, his expression ecstatic, “I´ve looked forever, my love. Finally, I´ve found you..!”
“With this, I…” another began, trance-like, with her lips twisting unnaturally into a wide smile, “I´ll finally be happy, won´t I? No more hurting from broken hearts…” 
A reason or not, pure human instinct was really at work here. For me, no, maybe for all of us, our thirsting hearts could no longer imagine a life she wasn’t a part of. For those with twisted hearts, it was the contrary. An existence so much greater than oneself… “simply must be destroyed!”
“What are all of you fools smiling about?” One such twisted individual spoke, “You´re content with second-place? Besides, I don´t feel no damn “angelic” presence…”
Finally, the remaining, 200 or so, travellers reached high enough to catch a glimpse of the mountaintop´s grass. Havoc creeped back again, knocking even more people dead than the last time. Humans rained from the mountaintop in the moonlight, stars and planets staring down as they do. Even I could not elude the fighting this time, and I would´ve fallen the same, if it weren´t for a stroke of luck. The man charging at me in the dark with only the blade of his dagger gleaming, tripped in the very last second on the leg of a corpse at his feet, and became the one tumbling down the mountainside instead. With our aggression intensifying, and our hunger and our lust, so did our desire, our love. Whether this Bewitching beauty turned out to be a flower or a dragon, it mattered not in the slightest. Were it a flower, we´d tear up her roots and love her savagely, preserving her eternally, and were it a dragon, we´d imprison her, put her on display for only oneself to admire, and bask in her encapsulated beauty, never to part with her love. And were it the bird of my dreams, a lovely golden pheasant, I´d put her in a birdcage where I could hear her chirp just for me, and gaze day in and day out at her rainbow feathers gleam in the sun… There would be no need to clip her bewitching wings, for she´d love me all the same. I thought my dream would be realized, too. That I at least would get to see her beauty first-hand, like grandmother had described to me long ago…  Failure struck in an instant. Enveloping all of the men and women fighting amongst themselves, the cowards crawling away, even the handful making their terrified retreat down the mountain-slope, and me, was flashing thunder raining down from above, in what could only be described as divine retribution. Suddenly no different from the splashed humans on the ground below us, we´d been reduced to sizzling corpses, our desires, snatched, snuffed out, together with our lives. Sure enough, I remember thinking, as the light left my eyes in that instant, this Bewitching beauty brought me nothing but ruin. Ah… I wish I could’ve at least seen her. Even if I died the second after, I… I wish I could’ve seen her.