The beautiful princess was cursed by a wicked fairy to sleep for a hundred years. She slumbered in a bed of silk in the golden castle surrounded by tangles of briars and roses on the top of the hill. Nobody much cared.

Why should the villagers have felt bad for the magically slumbering princess? They themselves never got enough sleep. All day they blistered their fingers tilling the hard fields and at night they tossed and turned on even harder beds. The only magic they knew was ever-growing bills. How could they conjure the funds for a new wagon wheel? What enchantment would decrease their tax burden? Where was the spell to calm the newborn for one goddamn night?

But after a while, the villagers began to visit their slumbering ruler. They bribed the guards with baskets of cheese and salted meats to slip past the iron gates. Each plucked a single rose from the palace gardens before their pilgrimage to the sleeping beauty’s bedroom. The roses were not gifts. Instead, they used the thorns to prick the princess’s skin and collected the beads of enchanted blood. Each drop contained a fragment of the fairy’s sleeping spell.

An old wise woman had told the tired villagers they could mix a drop in their nighttime tea to ease them into sleep. The potion worked. The villagers began to remember rest. Youth returned to their overworked bones, and they awoke with energy for the day’s labor with some leftover for fellowship and hobbies beside. Although the fairy had meant to curse the realm, it became the most peaceful and happy around.

Then one day, the handsome prince arrived. He had spent years slashing his way through dark woods and slaying evil trolls, although that’s another story. The handsome prince found the object of his long quest still sleeping in her silken bed. She was as beautiful as a fairy tale. The handsome prince leaned down to kiss the sleeping beauty on her lovely lips yet, as his face grew close, he noticed the scabs spoiling her otherwise flawless skin.

He quickly set about to right the situation.

First, the prince had the guards thrown into the black dungeon and tortured to reveal the goings-on. He took control of the realm’s administration, reinforced the iron gates, and filed the necessary paperwork for the exclusive rights to bottle and sell the princess’s sleep-inducing blood at full market rate.

The villagers at this point were addicted to their evening tonic. Many went bankrupt buying the prince’s potion. They had their land seized for the construction of a warehouse and bottling facility. Other villagers simply returned to their tired, grueling days and cursed the prince and princess each night as they lay awake. In the dead of night, they hurled rocks at the warehouse windows and mud at the prince’s guards. The village was once again a realm of unrest.

This didn’t bother the handsome prince too much. He grew so rich he had to expand the palace’s vault. He used some of the profits to purchase taller gates and more guards with larger weapons to keep the groggy villagers at bay. He hired goblins to work the manufacturing center and signed distribution agreements with the lords of nearby realms. At night, he slept soundly with a belly filled with dark wine on his bed of soft gold.

Then at some point—no one quite knows how—the princess woke. Some say the prince was so excited at his fourth-quarter profits that he momentarily forgot himself, kissing her and breaking the curse. Others say a rival lord allied himself with the wicked fairy to initiate a hostile takeover of the sleep potion trade. But most assumed the one hundred years of sleep had been slowly siphoned away, prick by prick. The spell had run dry.

The princess sat up in her bed, surrounded by mountains of dried roses. She was withered herself. The fairy’s spell had kept her alive, but only just. Her arms were covered with scabs. Her skin was sallow. Her bones ached. The princess couldn’t remember anything of the preceding years except that every time she was having the most wonderful dream a great spike would appear in the sky and pop it like a bubble.

When the princess regained her strength, she kicked the handsome prince out of the realm. She destroyed the warehouse and returned the property to the serfs. The villagers were glad about that, but they were still overworked, taxed to penury, and never had enough time for a good night’s sleep. And now they didn’t even have a potion to buy. They came to the princess carrying baskets of roses, this time as tribute, and laid them at her feet as they petitioned for some or any relief.

The princess was a kind ruler, but she was still a ruler. She said no. She needed the taxes to improve the elegance of the palace and the splendor of her court. After all, one of her duties was to inspire the villagers with her noble majesty. So really it was for their own benefit. And that wasn’t even getting into the costs of hiring mercenaries to guard the realm against the handsome and disinherited prince who, rumor had it, was gathering troops for war.

Anyway, the princess felt little sympathy for the sleepless villagers. Their years of rose pricks had drained away her own slumber. Now she spent each night sitting in the tall tower of the golden castle, gazing out at the pale moon hanging above the restless village, dreaming of having dreams and of a magical world so unlike this one where everyone got what they needed and lived happily ever after.