Beauty Makes A Beast

By Tami Veldura

 The Manor is haunted. A creature stalks the woods around its walls and the staff know not to leave the house at night. They say a Beast hunts here. Theta wakes up bloodied in the dark forest. She can't remember why she's here or what she was running from, but this Manor looks familiar. And there's a note waiting for her on the table just inside: Welcome home, Miss Theda. The house is just as you left it. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Story Prism Studios
• Release date: Oct 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223961628

Tami Veldura

Tami Veldura is an enby/aro/ace author of queer fiction. They have published short stories in anthologies Fresh Starts, Hauntings, Love Among The Thorns, Love Is Like A Box Of Chocolates, the magazine Galaxy’s Edge, and they are a contributing member of the scifi magazine Boundary Shock Quarterly. They publish new work every month, crossing every genre, but always featuring queer characters and found families.As S.T. Lynn, they write uplifting, sweet, and tropey fantasy fiction, featuring women front and center. Including fairy tales, elves, magic, and happy endings for young adults and young-at-heart.

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Book Description

The Manor is haunted. A creature stalks the woods around its walls and the staff know not to leave the house at night. They say a Beast hunts here. Theta wakes up bloodied in the dark forest. She can't remember why she's here or what she was running from, but this Manor looks familiar. And there's a note waiting for her on the table just inside: Welcome home, Miss Theda. The house is just as you left it.

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Beauty Makes A Beast

Theda woke slowly. Awkwardly. Painfully. Her head throbbed and her fingers felt raw. Her knees were scraped. Her left side ached deeply and she panted shallow breaths to avoid aggravating it. She shifted and the ground beneath her crinkled like old leaves.

The woods were dark. Old, bent trees, half-faded in the gloom, spread a thick canopy overhead. The leaves she crushed smelled dusty and stale. Theda stumbled to her bare feet and caught herself on the side of an ancient trunk. The tattered, stained edges of her dress tickled her knees. It had been blue once, maybe. It was darker now. Bloody.

She squinted into the darkness, unafraid, but confused. She didn't know this place, but it felt familiar in the way an old home from childhood is always familiar. These trees, like old hallways, decorated her past. She knew somehow that this was the direction she needed to travel.

Why were her feet bare? The woods didn't answer.

She came suddenly to an iron gate. It stood tucked inside a stone wall that seemed to spring from the forest ground like magic. The woods had not eased. In fact, the trees were thicker here at the man-made border, as if nature intended to tear it down stone by stone. The wall was not ready to fall, though, and when Theda touched the ice-cold iron, the gate swung open on oiled hinges.

Theda knew this gate. She recognized the crushed stone drive just beyond, and the climbing roses that choked the trees inside, defenders against the encroaching wild. She had kinship with these thorny sentinels.

The forest of roses fell away in the face of a towering home at the end of the drive. It perched like a raven at the peak of a small hill, it's black roof and dark walls as imposing as the forest it sat within.

Theda followed the brick steps like a bridge through a lawn moat. She opened the door. Like the gate, the latch was open and the hinges had been recently oiled. The door swung in gently to an open reception with a large staircase curving up the left side. A circular table crouched in the center of the room, a single pedestal with four claw-feet. On the table was a hand-written note.

Welcome home, Miss Theda. The house is just as you left it.

She knew this place, but it didn't belong to her. The message was right, though, she considered this home. Under the note was a small hand-bound book. It had a green cover and the pages inside were empty. A clever pen that held its own ink sat beside the book. She took both impulsively, leaving the note, and climbed directly up the curving stairs.

Her toes crushed plush red velvet. She found no hint of dust on the table below or the stair rail. A single oil lamp lit the hallway above, but Theda found she knew how many steps would take her to the end of the hall, to the door on the left. Her door.

Theda stepped into a small