Page 1 of Beast’s Surrender, Beauty’s Revenge

CHAPTER ONE

PROLOGUE

Once upon a time, two kingdoms had a disagreement.

No one today remembers what it was about—even the names of the kingdoms were lost to time—but as is the way of men, they decided that the only way to settle the matter was by going to war.

The strongest knight in the northern kingdom, Percival, led their armies to a dozen victories, and the southern kingdom was in danger of not only losing the war, but being wiped from the map of the world.

With the help of dark magics, they executed a plan to stop Percival: they sent a berserk beast to murder his family, from his parents to his cousins to his tiny nieces and nephews, as they slept in their beds.

Percival heard of the dark deed and rushed home, but too late to stop the beast from running amok and murdering half the people in his town as well. Eventually, he managed to stop the monster, shackling it and trapping it in a tower in the middle of the Black Forest, but only by use of more dark magics, and at the cost of his own life.

Who won the war, you ask? What came of the men who made the monster and murdered Percival’s family?

No one knows.

No one cares, either.

Both kingdoms have long since fallen off the map of the world, and now, there’s only the kingdom of Bellara, on the edge of the Black Forest.

The people still warn, though, not to go into the woods. The monster Percival stopped is still out there, shackled in a tower in the woods, waiting to extract revenge for his long imprisonment.