Beauty is the only child of her parents for her mother left just after her birth. Beauty had been told that her mother had died. Until she reached her teens and was kicked out of her rooms by her forthcoming step-mother and moved into her mother's old tower room, she believed this story, but a chance find led to her heritage being exposed.
She also learns of the Curse and is understandably unhappy over the prospect of dying on her sixteenth birthday so she tricks her half-sister into taking her place for the birthday party. In fairness, she did not mean harm to come to her half sister but the curse was targeted on the daughter of her father and her half sister was as much the Duke of Westfaire's daughter as Beauty and the Curse falls on her and the rest of the inhabitants of the castle. Beauty only escapes because she had made a cloak of invisiblity that shielded her from the magic.
Outside the castle on a hill overlooking it, outside the rapidly growing thorn hedge, Beauty meets a group of people who took her to their home time.
The future is a bleak place committed to the basic feeding of the billions infesting a choking Earth with no room for beauty, joy or difference.
Eventually Beauty is able to escape from this dying place, first back to the Twentieth Century - not that much better! Then finally back into her current time where she finds herself with child. Once her daughter is born, she disappeared once again in an attempt to trace her fairy mother.
Elf-land is strange and Beauty is not happy there either and she escapes back to the real world to find her destiny.
Once in the real world, she finds that many years have passed and her daughter has grown up to despise her step-sisters.
As Beauty lives a long life, she finds her off-spring becoming the archetypes of the stories that were still known in the Dark Ages at the End of Time.
When she finds her life drawing to a close, she sees the Final Ride of Faery against the Dark Lord and learns what her Aunt Carabosse had really meant to achieve by her curse.
This is part of the Fantasy Masterworks series.
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