You know the story. Or at least the beginning of it. A King and Queen are without child. They try all proven methods but all fail. Until suddenly, one day -no one knows how, or is allowed to say so- the Queen does become pregnant. Naturally, a large feast is given in the Palace. When setting the table for the Fairies -whom the King and Queen expect to become to Godmothers of the newly born-, it turns out that they are one golden plate short. And Fairies, as you know, only eat from golden plates. The King decides not to invite the eighth Fairy. She leads a secluded existence far away from the Palace. She will probably never find out. And she's an old nag anyway.

At the height of the festivities, the Fairies offer the newly born child the talents that will make her into the perfect princess. The oldest fairy gives her the gift of Beauty. The second donates Virtue. The third gives her a wonderful singing voice. And so on. Just when the last Fairy is about to conclude the series, the disgruntled eighth Fairy bursts in. She had found out. And she was furious. Without much ado, she curses the young Princess to die at age sixteen. By a prick in the finger while spinning flax, no less.
She leaves the court, all are filled with panic and fear. But before desparation is able to turn everyone into a crying mess, the youngest fairy, timidly asks for some attention. She is not powerful enough to completely undo the spell that her more experienced sister had cast. But she can, however, convert this curse of death into sleep, 100 years of blissful sleep.
Only partially relieved and unwilling to rely solely on magic, the King makes the spinning industry illegal throughout the land and has all spinning wheels burnt to cinders.

The Princess grows up a virtuous, singing and dancing beauty in a Palace prosperous thanks to the benevolence of the good Fairies. When her sixteenth birthday is near, it is decided that a grand feast will be organized to celebrate the victory over the curse. Friends and collegues from far and wide are invited. In the chaos of the preparations for the feast, the young Princess finds a mysterious old lady in a tower thought abandoned, offering to teach her how to spin...

When the King finds his daughter seemingly dead, he has a Mausoleum erected in the middle of the Royal Garden as her resting place. The Fairies swoop in and make everyone in the Palace fall asleep, including the guests that had arrived to attend the celebrations. The seven Fairies build a magical device in the mausoleum that will keep everyone safe for the next century. Then they grow a forest around the palace thick enough to protect it from the outside world. In one hundred years, the Princess will wake up and so wll the whole court. And life will continue where it left off.

If it were not for the Wicked Fairy!... She is not one bit pleased about this 100 years of sleep nonsense. But her sisters' combined magic prevents her from intervening directly. As the years go by, the story of the Sleeping Princess turns into a legend of which no one remembers which parts were true and which are fantasy. The Wicked Fairy finds an easy prey in a vain prince with poet ambitions. She tells him exactly where to find this mysterious sleeping beauty and helps him get through the protective forest. The poet finds the princess but does not succeed in waking her up with a kiss. Trapped in the palace, he leads a frustrating life amidst a court of sleepers until he hangs himself from strange looking branches that have started to enter the palace from all sides.

Over the next five hundred years, the Wicked Fairy finds seven more princes to send into the palace and open the path for her incarnation as parasite branches to enter the palace and undo this folly of sleep. First the Brother of the Princess is sent in, then a Tailor Prince, a Hunter, an Actor, a Traveler, an Engineer and as crowning jewel a Priest, lured in with the idea that he could exorcise whatever is keeping the Princess dormant. They all die unhappily, and now the power of the Wicked Fairy is such that she can crush the Palace and deliver her final gift of Mortality to the Princess and her Court.

Epilogue. There's a young deaf-mute girl in a pretty white dress playing with her mother in the park. It's a peaceful Sunday afternoon. She misses the ball and runs after it into some odd looking bushes. She cannot find the ball nor a way out of this thick forest. She looks up at a presence that she feels to be looking at her. It's You! She cannot say it but you can read it in her eyes. Help me. Please.