There was once a princess so beautiful, even her own father desired her. At first, common decency prevented him from claiming her, but as the years passed and the girl grew even more fair and lovely, the king became quite mad with lust.

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Finally, and on her seventeenth birthday, he issued an ultimatum: if she was not married before her next birthday, he would take her for himself and make his daughter queen. The girl was sickened by this prospect, but like everyone else at court, too afraid of the king’s cruel temper to complain.

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She might have hoped that a potential husband would not be too difficult to find, but the king’s scheming was not yet at an end. He commissioned twelve marble statues of his daughter – twelve perfect replicas of her sleeping form. Then he drugged his unsuspecting daughter with a poison so terrible, she appeared as lifeless as the twelve statues. Satisfied, the king placed his daughter and the statues in a chamber, each laid out on their own separate bed.

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“Now, let anyone who wishes to claim my daughter come forward. If they can identify which of these is the true princess, then they shall marry her. If they cannot, their lives will be forfeit.”

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Many princes and sons of the nobility came a-calling, eager to claim the beautiful princess as their own. However, the poison that was administered every night to that unfortunate young woman was of such potency, it was impossible to tell the difference between her and the statues. Her skin turned cold and hard; her hair lost its golden lustre, becoming indiscernible from the false hair fitted to the effigies. Her lips, which many a desperate prince pressed against his own, felt like porcelain, and not even a pulse could be detected beneath her deathly-white exterior.

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All the young men who tried to find the true princess were thus unable to, and they were put to death by the king in a series of cruel and painful methods.

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━━━━━━━━┓ ✠ ┏━━━━━━━━

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Finally, it was a month before the princess’s eighteenth birthday, and the king began to demand the marriage to his daughter be arranged. His horrified courtiers were too frightened to disobey, and so the ceremony was due the very day the princess turned eighteen.

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The day before the wedding, one final man arrived at the castle – not a prince, but a king in his own right. He was older than the previous candidates and a good deal wiser. When he was shown into the princess’s bedchamber and the door was closed behind him, he smiled wickedly at his task ahead.

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“The true princess will have one secret the sculptors would not think of including in their creations.”

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So saying, he took out his sword and set about delicately slashing the skirt of the first would-be princess laid out on her bed. When she was naked from the waist down, the king stepped out of his breeches. He took a firm hold of himself and, spreading the girl’s legs, thrust his way inside the cold, insensate body.

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When he had buried himself to the hilt without meeting any obstruction, he withdrew. With a grim smile, he moved to the next figure and repeated his motions.

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The first six figures proved to be made of marble, their vulvas as cold and smooth as glass. The king had still not found his release, and so he was breathing heavily when he stripped the seventh girl of her skirts, revealing a smooth mound and tender, inviting lips. Slipping his fingers inside, as he had done with the previous six, the king dared to wonder as he felt a barely-there warmth. He glanced up at her face, noting that this girl looked a little tired – her eyes were perhaps a little more sunken, her mouth very slightly sadder.

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The possibility that his search was at an end excited the king to an almost painful degree. He gathered the girl in his arms and kissed her, at the same time plunging himself deep inside her. Something tore within the girl – blood soaked his manhood in a wash of warmth – and the king came straight away, flooding her with his seed until both their thighs ran with a reddish liquid.

 

When he broke her maidenhead, the pain and shock were enough to drag the princess from her drugged sleep. With heavy eyes and an empty expression, she gazed up at the strange man looming over her. His breath hit her face in a series of short, hot pants, and she became aware of a strange, full feeling inside of her.

 

“Who…?” she managed to whisper before the man cut her off.

 

“I am the king of an island, far away over the ocean. I have come to claim you, my love,” he exulted. Already, he could feel himself begin to stiffen once more with the thrill of having awoken her. Unable to hold himself back, he began to shift his hips back and forth, eliciting a pained moan from the princess’s lips.

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Gradually, her whimpers turned to those of a pleasurable nature, matching the king’s own groans of desire, and before the morning of her eighteenth year dawned, she had utterly surrendered to his claim. For his own part, the king was equally in thrall to the exhausted princess, and he knew he would gladly kill all who tried to stop him from taking her.

 

As they held each other in the weak light of daybreak, the king began to plan. “Now, we must prepare. For your father will never let you go, even though I have solved his challenge.”

 

The king quickly stripped one of the untouched statues of her gown. The true princess put this on, and they proceeded to dress the marble figure in her own ruined clothes, placing the statue on the princess’s bed. Then the princess laid down on the empty bed, taking the place of the stone figure.

 

Barely had they done this, the door to the chamber swept open and the princess’s father barged in. He was confident the foreign king would not have been able to find his daughter, and he was impatient to finally marry her.

 

He was therefore horrified to see the other king standing beside what he thought was the still-sleeping princess, both their clothes in a state of disarray and the evidence of the princess’s lost innocence clearly visible on the bedcovers. As he stared in dumbstruck silence, the foreign king walked forward with a tired yet triumphant smirk.

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“I have found and claimed your daughter. Although she did not wake, I assure you I have more right to her than anyone else.”

 

Upon hearing these words, the old king’s mind finally snapped. Unsheathing his sword and whirling it around his head, he screamed out, “If she is not mine, then she will belong to no-one!”

 

So saying, he lunged towards the marble figure and brought his sword down with all his might in the place where he thought her heart lay.

 

But of course, she was made of stone. The sword shattered with the force of his drive, sending a dozen or more deadly shards directly into the king’s face. He gave one piteous shriek before collapsing over the equally-lifeless body.

 

As for the other king, he had jumped back and flung himself over the body of the true princess lying in the next bed. They were both saved from the splintering of the sword, and when the princess was recovered from the shock and grief of her father’s death, the king took her back to his land, where they were at last married.

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