Beauty (Princess) is born a prisoner. She gains freedom by befriending a magic carpet that swoops her to realms beyond her walls. But outside, she discovers, are more walls; more obstacles. The central friendship is also beset by challenges. Not only has the carpet freed her and offered to take her ‘to a place where all the world turns to gold’, but he himself has born her to the dark places. He’s not the friend she thought he was – that beastly carpet! But there is magic in the places they go, and most profoundly, between them The denouement of their relationship is the revealing of Beauty.