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Hastily, Molly pulled on her pink dress. It had been purchased for her to wear at her sixteenth birthday party. But she knew now that she would not live to see her birthday. It was a good dress to be buried in.
Molly sprinted across the drawbridge and ran towards the sound of the cannon. Soldiers lay dead or dying all around her as surgeons scrambled to operate on the ones who might yet survive. So preoccupied were they that they did not even look up to wonder why a pretty girl in a pink dress was running through such a scene of carnage.
The ogre had made its stand on a hilltop, knee-deep in the bodies of its victims. To her horror, Molly saw that it held the prince high in one hairy hand, his feet kicking at the air. The ogre opened its terrible maw and put the prince’s head in its mouth.
“No!” shouted Molly, running as fast as she could, “No! Take me instead!”
There was a shimmer of light and, for a moment, the world seemed to be frozen in place, as though Molly were running through an oil painting. Then the din of battle erupted again but, at its center, was not an ogre but a decrepit old man holding a handsome young man by the throat.
He let go of the prince and looked to his granddaughter.
“Oh, thank you, thank you!” he cried, “You’ve lifted the curse. Now I can die in peace.”
“Then die now,” said the prince, snatching up the sword that he had dropped and, with one stroke, decapitating the old man.
Molly threw herself into the arms of the prince and they hugged each other. Then the prince took up the head that he had promised Molly’s mother and they walked together to the castle to be married.
THE END
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