The Rose and the Judge: A Retelling of “Beauty and the Beast”

The Rose and the Judge: A Retelling of “Beauty and the Beast”

Minos × Albafica — A Retelling of “Beauty and the Beast”

✦ Introduction ✦

This is the English version of The Rose and the Judge, my retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in the world of Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas.

The story follows Minos of Griffon, a judge of the Underworld, broken by an unrelenting pain after the Holy War, and Albafica of Pisces, who returns from the frozen hell of the Eighth Prison stripped of his power, yet still carrying an unyielding gaze.

Enemies once bound by death, they are brought together again in the Palace of Tromea, where roses bloom even in the land of the dead.
Here, defeat turns inward, cruelty gives way to creation, and love is asked not as mercy, but as a wager against annihilation.

This English translation was produced with the assistance of ChatGPT, under my direct supervision, with careful attention paid to preserving the poetic tone, emotional restraint, and symbolic structure of the original Japanese text.

✦✦✦

Japanese version: Read the original text in Japanes

The Rose and the Judge: A Retelling of “Beauty and the Beast”

His chest seared with pain; his head felt on the verge of breaking apart.

Minos said only that—and withdrew into the Palace of Tromea, never to emerge again.

Was that, too, a kind of war trauma?
With a sigh, Lieutenant René muttered so to himself in the Hall of Judgment, the First Prison now silent without his superior, Minos.

The Holy War between Hades, the King of the Underworld, and the war goddess Athena had come to an end.
Yet the sealing of Hades did not mean the disappearance of the Underworld itself.
The Specters—wardens of Hell—continued, even after the deferred conclusion of that battle, to judge the souls of the dead and administer their punishments.

In being confined to the Underworld, the Specters were no different from the dead.
Yet their authority was like that of men given flesh within this realm: unlike the disembodied souls, their power and dominion were of an entirely different order.

Even while maintaining its overwhelming supremacy over the dead, the rule of the Underworld continued unbroken.
Thus Minos, judge of the infernal court, was expected—by the realm itself—to perform his appointed duty.
Yet Minos, citing afflictions of mind and body, persisted in abandoning his post.

A year had passed since the Holy War’s end.
Though sealed away, the blessing of Hades still reached across the Underworld.
The one hundred and eight Specters were, by then, healing the wounds of battle.
René, however, had already concluded that there was no remedy to be found.
He had long understood—it was not a wound of war.

✦

—Why did I lose.
—Why.

Night after night, tormented by a pain that clawed at his chest, Minos groaned in the dark.
For one of the three judges of the Underworld—the Heavenly Noble Star, the Griffin Specter—to let a sound of agony escape him was humiliation itself.
And yet, the pain was unbearable.

Even so, with sweat beading upon his brow and his fists clenched tight enough to tear the bedclothes, he forced composure the moment he was told a visitor had come.

The visitor was Zelos of the Terrestrial Frog Star—a messenger, he said, from Persephone herself.
It would not do to refuse him an audience.

“How pitiable. You seem much reduced,” murmured Zelos, prostrating himself upon the floor.
From that crawling posture he lifted his gaze toward Minos, who had raised himself halfway from the bed, and offered the words as a token of sympathy.
Minos looked down on him with the cold disdain reserved for the baseborn.

“No medicine can ease your suffering,” said Zelos. “So declares Lady Persephone.”

Even as he bowed low, he looked up again with a thin, knowing smile.
“—You must let yourself love. That is why you suffer, my lord. Because you cannot.”

At those words, blood rushed to Minos’s head.
The surge only deepened his agony.
Yet, holding his anger tight within him, he answered Zelos.

“How dare you mock me. Even if you speak in the name of the Queen of the Underworld, I will not forgive your insolence.”

Zelos laughed softly. Pardon me, my lord, he said with mock reverence.

The Queen, he explained, grieved over the long illness of the Griffin.
She wished for his swift recovery.
For that end, she would send him the source of his suffering.
Let him love, she had said, and he will be healed—just as Hades himself once was.

So spoke Persephone, through the mouth of her servant.

And so, on the following morning, the Palace of Tromea received a visitor.
Like a drop of dew descending upon the rose garden, a single soul—once confined to the frozen hell of the Eighth Prison—was given back the form of a living man and sent forth.

It was Albafica.
The Gold Saint of Pisces, warrior of the goddess Athena’s Sanctuary.
In the first battle of the Holy War, with his poisonous roses and the venom in his own blood, he had struck down Minos—and perished with him.

Albafica stood in the courtyard of the Palace of Tromea, his calm gaze veiling a quiet anger—an icy contempt for all that was base.
He had been left there, abandoned in silence.

The power he once held as a Gold Saint, the deadly poison that coursed through his blood—all that might harm the Underworld had been stripped away.
He remained now as nothing more than a powerless soul, clothed in human form.

“Minos. Do you hate me so deeply? Do you still bear that grudge?
You said my master, Lugonis, would be punished more harshly than in the frozen hell itself.
To spare him, I was told to come here—in his place.”

The voice, ringing high into the still heavens, stirred in Minos’s ears the memory of that day—of Albafica standing alone at the edge of the Sanctuary, waiting to face the advancing army of Hades.

—Why did I lose.
—In the very first battle, without achieving anything at all.

The courtyard of the Palace of Tromea had long been filled with roses.
Roses—nothing remarkable, he had thought.
Yet now, they seemed to answer Albafica’s presence, weaving together into a single, living tableau.

A sharp pain struck through Minos’s head once more.
He clenched his fist to hide it, fixing his darkened gaze upon Albafica standing before him.

Albafica spoke.
“Am I your enemy, then? Do you wish to torment us for the sin of striking you down?
Very well. Pain and humiliation—what are they, but trifles?”

Minos looked at Albafica’s neck: slender, pale, fragile.
A single touch, and it would snap—less than the time of a blink.
He thought, for a moment, that ending this agony might be as simple as that.

Yet he remembered.
The unseen threads that once crushed Albafica’s bones, the torrent of blood that had flooded around his fallen body, and the face—white as moonlight—he had left behind.
He did not wish to see it again.

Turning his back to Albafica, Minos pressed a hand quietly to his chest.
“How sound you are… how untouched.”
With those words left behind, he walked away.

✦

Under the false sun and the painted night sky of the Underworld, Albafica spent his first day in the Palace of Tromea tending to the roses.
There was no labor imposed upon him, no punishment decreed.
Minos rarely appeared; only at supper did he come, to sit at the far end of the long table.

“What is this,” Albafica called across the table that night, his voice echoing faintly through the vast hall.
“For what purpose did you summon me here?”

After a pause, Minos answered, his tone as calm as the dark between stars.
“Shall we make a wager?”

“What did you say?”

“Within one month,” said Minos, his tone unshaken, “if you can learn to love me, you may do as you please.”

Albafica stared at him, certain he had misheard.
Minos went on.

“If you cannot… then die.
Not merely return to a soul, but let even that soul be erased—forever.”

Albafica’s face contorted, his voice cutting with all the contempt he could muster.
“Are you mad? This is beyond insult.
Tell me, who in all the worlds could love one who makes such a demand?”

But Minos spoke as if it were nothing.
“If it cannot be fulfilled, then I too shall vanish—completely.”

Albafica looked at him again, taken aback, suspicion darkening his eyes.
“…You mean to say—it is you who are being punished?
For losing to me?
Is this some sentence passed upon you by the corrupt gods of the Underworld?”

At that, Minos laughed aloud.
“—I have long since been punished.
Only, not by Lord Hades.”

He rested his elbows on the table, fingers interlaced, his chin sinking lightly into his hands.

“Since the Holy War—since the day I was defeated by you and sealed within the Underworld—my head and my chest… my very heart, have ached without cease.
I can no longer endure it.
If this pain cannot be taken from me, then I would rather vanish before madness takes me.”

“How self-serving you are.”

Albafica was struck speechless.
Halfway through the meal, he rose from his seat and left the table.

✦

Even after returning to his chamber, Albafica found himself growing restless at the thought of Minos’s words.
It was a threat, not a confession of love—something that could never be mistaken for tenderness.
And yet, he could not grasp its purpose.
An incomprehensible bargain.
All he could do was be dragged along by it.

Yet Albafica thought to himself: Minos had said one month.
When that month passed, and if—as his words foretold—Albafica could not love him, his very soul would be destroyed.
That was all.
Nothing more, nothing less.

He thought of his master, Lugonis, left behind in the frozen hell.
A prison, yes—but one that held other Saints as well, condemned for rebellion against Hades.
And secretly, the goddess’s blessing still reached them there, softening the severity of their punishment.

If his beloved master could rest in peace, then his own fate was of no consequence.
That, Albafica thought, was enough.

The next morning, Albafica went out to the rose garden in the courtyard.
After tending to the flowers, he began sketching them in graphite on handmade paper—materials he had found in the drawer of the desk in his assigned chamber.

✦

At supper, Minos appeared again across the long table and asked,
“What were you doing this morning?”

“Drawing,” Albafica replied.

“You like painting, then?” Minos asked.

Albafica looked slightly embarrassed.
“It was my first time.
I’m not good at it.
I just wanted to try.
There happened to be some tools in my room.”

He swallowed the words that almost followed—that in a month, he would vanish anyway.

“Is there anything else you desire?”

The question came abruptly.
Yet Albafica answered, “Nothing.”

Minos fell silent, and the conversation ended there.

When Albafica returned to his chamber, the round table at its center was laden with art supplies—chalk, charcoal, canvases, and oils.
Even a wooden easel with three slender legs had been placed there.

If you can come to love me…
Minos’s words echoed in his mind.

What does it mean—to love someone?
Albafica sat before the paints in silence.

✦

The next day, Albafica carried his easel out into the courtyard to paint a landscape.
Looking at the tools laid before him, he simply wanted to use them. He sketched the same roses again, found their shapes more pleasing than yesterday’s, and drew several more. Then he decided to paint the entire rosebed and finish it in oils.
In the end, he kept working until the sun went down and the roses vanished into the dark.

“You spent quite a long time painting today,” Minos remarked over supper.
He had not shown himself, yet Albafica understood—the man had been watching him all along.

Day by day, Albafica began to paint new subjects.
Once he had grown accustomed to roses, he turned to peonies, then to delphiniums.
Lilacs, the tender green of young maples, and the horse chestnuts lining the outer garden followed in turn.
The span of his canvas widened little by little, as though the world itself were drawing breath.

At dusk, when Albafica ended his work for the day and made his way back to his chamber with his tools in hand, he encountered Minos.
It was the first time they had met outside the refectory since that initial day.
Minos stood in the cloister, his gaze directed toward another small courtyard.
As Albafica approached, an easel emerged from the shadow of the white columns.
He, too, was holding a brush—painting in oils.

Before he knew it, he had called out, “What are you painting?”

Minos turned toward the voice. “The fountain,” he said.

Albafica hurried closer and peered at the canvas—then fell silent. The oil painting was astonishingly well done. It was as though a miniature garden with a fountain had been conjured within the frame. Every line and color breathed precision.

His legs trembled in secret. For the past two weeks, he had devoted himself to painting, feeling his progress day by day, almost proud of how far he’d come. Yet before him stood a work incomparably superior to his own.

“You’ve been painting?”
Albafica asked, and Minos replied, “No.” Then he added,
“At first, I was only imitating you. But as I kept painting, I realized—when I do this, the pain in my head fades.”

Albafica was struck speechless. To learn that Minos had begun painting around the same time as himself stirred something sharp inside him—a bitterness, almost like regret.

“You’re strange,” Albafica said. “That painting could ease your pain… As for me, my head is always troubled. It doesn’t hurt—but it never rests.”

At those unguarded words, Minos replied softly,
“The burning in my chest has not changed. Yet now, it has faded a little.”

Albafica turned to him, questioning with his eyes.
Minos went on,
“Because you appeared.”

✦

“How can anyone paint like this…”

After dinner, Albafica sat alone in his room, taking up one of Minos’s oil paintings after another—glaring at each, sighing, setting them down only to reach for the next.

“Who knows. I merely painted what I saw,” came Minos’s voice.

The reply, though Albafica had spoken to no one, irritated him. To call such near-perfect renderings “merely” what he saw—so effortlessly, so lightly—was infuriating. Remembering how much effort his own work demanded, Albafica could not help but feel a rising, helpless vexation.

“But your paintings are fascinating,” Minos said, picking up one of Albafica’s works from the table.
“They look more real than reality itself. Quite unlike mine.”

“Is that so?”

Albafica answered before he could stop himself, almost pleased. He thought, for a moment, that this man might truly understand what he saw.

“What will you paint tomorrow?”

The critique ended as quickly as it began. Reluctantly, Albafica answered, “I was thinking it might be time to try a figure study.”

“There’s no one else here but you, is there?”
“No one.”
“You can’t possibly be my model.”
“I don’t mind,” Minos replied.
Minos replied without hesitation. “Then I would like to paint you as well.”
But Albafica shook his head.
“I can’t sit still for that long. —There’s only half a month left. I want to see how far I can improve before time runs out. Every moment matters.”

“Then I’ll paint you while you paint,” Minos said, smiling.
“Yes… I should have thought of that sooner. Perhaps then, my head and my chest would ache a little less.”

What a strange man, Albafica thought once again.

After a moment of silence, Minos murmured,
“I wonder… how one comes to be loved. I know very well how to be despised.”
“How should I know,” Albafica cut him off, pointing to the armchair beside the table.
“Sit there.”

He pulled the easel close and unfolded it.

“You said you would be my subject. Then start tonight. —You also said your head and chest ache, didn’t you? Sit however is easiest for you. Tell me if it hurts.”

And long into the night, until his strength was nearly gone, Albafica kept painting Minos’s portrait.

✦

From sunrise to sunset, while the light still touched the landscape, Albafica kept painting the courtyard.
The façade of the Palace of Tromea—Gothic in design, archaic yet embodying a solemn classical grandeur—soon began to find its way onto his canvas.

When the sun went down, he would finish his supper quickly and continue Minos’s portrait beneath the bright chandelier in his chamber.

Even in death, he realized, the body granted to him in the underworld tired and longed for sleep just as one on earth would. The thought made him want to click his tongue in irritation.

Again and again, Albafica had to tell himself it was only exhaustion—that was all.
He was merely deceived by fatigue. Yet, as he sketched Minos before him and let the image emerge upon the canvas, a deep unease began to stir within him. Was this truly the same Griffin, that cold and arrogant lord among the three judges of the underworld?

The Minos he had once faced, near the gates of the Sanctuary, had been every inch a monster worthy of Hades’s army—his cruel smile, his merciless blows against the weak, the way he reaped the living as if death itself were mercy.

Could this be that same creature?
Albafica found himself staring, again and again, at the Minos within the canvas. He no longer knew what he was painting—only that it was no lie. He could not deny it.

Your paintings, Minos had once said, seem more real than the real thing itself. The words came back to him.

✦

It was deep into the night.
A herald came riding hard, hooves striking the stones with a frantic clatter, and burst through the gates of the Palace of Tromea.

News had come from the Eighth Prison of Hell—the realm of ice—that something was amiss with the soul of Albafica’s master, Lugonis.
In the underworld, souls were not destroyed, but made to endure their punishment without end; that was the order of Hades’s domain.
Yet only Lugonis’s soul, it was said, had begun to weaken.

The herald’s argument was that it might be a scheme of the Saints—a plot to bring ruin upon the underworld.
But at the sound of his master’s name, Albafica listened more closely and understood at once.
My master has refused the goddess’s protection.

Without telling him, Albafica had already made his choice. The master must have sensed it. And now, he was blaming himself—grieving for the disciple who had taken his place.

Albafica pleaded with Minos.
“Send me back to the Eighth Prison. I will tell my master—it was my choice. Whatever becomes of me, he bears no blame. And I will never love you. You too shall vanish, and what loss is there for either of us? We were meant to strike each other down from the start.”

Minos replied, “Eight days remain until the promised day. If you return before then…”

“I will return,” said Albafica. “This painting is yet unfinished. —Ah, my master… even after he was spared from punishment…!”

✦

That night, Albafica set out for the Eighth Prison in a carriage from the Palace of Tromea.
The frozen hell was ringed by an unusually large number of Specters standing guard. He stepped from the carriage and ran, across the desolate plain of ice.

He called out to his master.
“Master Lugonis! It’s Albafica—I’m safe! Please, please, hold on—”

The soul of Lugonis had grown so faint that Albafica felt, for the first time, what it meant for even the dead to vanish.
Nor could he bring himself to leave his master’s side.

The days passed in a blink. Before he realized it, the promised eight days had slipped by—two days past already.
Albafica told his now-recovered master that he would return to the Palace of Tromea.

“Why do you go back?”

At Lugonis’s question, Albafica replied.

“I must tell him—tell him what I saw in that man.”
“Is this not an unjust imprisonment of the Griffin?”
“Master… how heartless I have been. I could not say it to you. I want to return to Tromea—that is my true wish. He understands my paintings. And that, to me…”

At Albafica’s words, Lugonis asked no more.
“Then go,” he said.

✦

When Albafica, having been seen off by his brethren of the frozen hell, returned by carriage to the Palace of Tromea, the place had fallen into ruin.
It looked as though it had perished long ago—its silence and the darkness of night rendering its spired silhouette all the more spectral.

Stepping down from the carriage, Albafica crossed into the courtyard and called Minos’s name.

Under the unanswering sky, he ran through the Palace of Tromea, searching for him.

Albafica had never truly explored the palace; he knew only his own chamber and the dining hall.
He doubted Minos would be in his room, yet he stepped inside.
The curtains were left open, the lamps unlit, and moonlight poured into the silence.
On the round table at the center lay a single canvas.

Albafica approached and lifted it in his hands.
When his eyes fell upon it, his breath caught.

It was unmistakably—a portrait of himself.

With eyes half-closed, the gentle smile in the portrait gazed downward, as though lost in quiet thought.
It was his own likeness—and yet Albafica found himself whispering, Beautiful… without realizing it.
Judging from the shape of the Palace of Tromea in the background, the figure must have been looking toward the rose garden.

A smile filled with love, as if to embrace everything that existed in this world—just as it was.
Have I ever looked upon the world that way, Albafica wondered. Upon everything, with such eyes?

He could not stop the tears that welled up.
For this was how Minos had seen him.

“How does one become loved?”—the voice of Minos returned to him, echoing softly in his mind.

No—Albafica thought.
He had already been loved.
If the portrait before him was truly of himself, then the figure painted there loved all things equally. Only that love was not meant for Minos alone.

Albafica wiped his tears.
Not wanting it to be found first by chance, he had hidden the nearly finished portrait of Minos deep within a chest of garments.
Taking it in his hands, Albafica left the room—to find him.

—Why did I lose.
—Why.

The familiar question struck Minos once again, this time as torment itself.
In the empty Palace of Tromea, with no one left to restrain him, he let out a groan and fell, clutching his chest.
A pain that seemed to scorch his heart consumed him—growing fiercer with every passing moment.

—Why?
—Because I was captivated by that beauty.

Minos understood it now. In the Sanctuary, he had once driven Albafica to the brink of death—believing he had killed him, believing it was over.
Yet when he learned that Albafica had survived, and that he had come after him to stop the destruction of the village—Minos had indeed felt joy.
Joy that Albafica still lived.

And so, under the pretext of insulting a Saint, he had said it—I shall let you go.
By then, the outcome had already been decided.
Minos had accepted Albafica’s existence in this world.
The moment he recognized that beauty as a pleasure to himself—and understood that its very essence lay in a gaze that affirmed even monsters as living beings—that was the moment of his defeat.

When he finished Albafica’s portrait and finally understood the reason for his defeat,
the searing headache that had tormented Minos as burning hatred vanished.

Yet the pain in his heart—like fire—remained.

Minos writhed upon the stone floor.
Albafica did not return. Not even on the eighth day.
The pain that had once eased began again that night, raging through him—burning his heart,
as if the last drop of Albafica’s poisonous blood were once more leading him to death.

The thought of ending his own life came to Minos.

Albafica did not return.
The pain only grew.
There was no longer any reason to remain here.

“Minos!”

Albafica’s voice rang out—like a phantom.

Minos no longer had the strength even to cry out his pain.
He merely moved a finger, ever so slightly, toward the sound of that voice.

“Minos—I’ve come back! I’m sorry… I was late.”

Albafica, breathless and hoarse, cried out as he ran to the corridor overlooking the small courtyard, where the fountain glimmered in the dark.
There lay Minos.

Kneeling beside him, Albafica took his hand.
“Ah—it’s my fault. I broke my promise…”

Albafica’s tears fell, one after another.
He pressed Minos’s cold hand against his cheek.
A faint warmth—like the breath of spring—reached his fingertips.

“Minos… you are not only the one who understands my paintings.
You are the one who understands me.
I… I love you.”

Albafica’s gaze drifted to the portrait of Minos resting beside his knees.
It seemed to him—yes, as if it were the face of a child weeping,
utterly alone.

✦

As dawn began to break, the Palace of Tromea seemed to draw a breath once more.
Wrapped in the blush of morning, its golden spires cast off the night’s darkness, one by one.

When the light grew full, Minos and Albafica stepped into the courtyard.
Side by side, they set their easels—
to capture the roses bathed in the first light of the sun.

✦ ✦ ✦

—The End

✦ About This Series ✦

This story is part of my ongoing body of works centered on Minos of Griffon × Albafica of Pisces, in which I explore themes of tragic beauty, inner ruin, artistic creation, and quiet redemption within The Lost Canvas universe.

Rather than focusing on spectacle or battle, these works dwell on what remains after destruction:
the body that still aches, the gaze that still sees beauty, and the question of whether love can exist without conquest.

You can find more of my work here: