Ariel "LaLa" Lagrimas, also known as The Unwed Bride, is a Fate. She has disguised herself as a common-born young woman in the Magnificent North.
Appearance[]
LaLa is incredibly pretty, almost always the prettiest girl in the room. She appears to be the same age as Evangeline, about seventeen. Lala has smooth brown skin. She wears bold clothing that shows off the dragon flame tattoos covering her arms like vibrant inked gloves. She has a surprisingly diabolical grin. LaLa is several inches shorter than Evangeline.
Personality[]
LaLa likes being in the papers. In Once Upon a Broken Heart, she admits to Evangeline that she knows she has no real chance of marrying Prince Apollo, but she enjoys being part of the fun. LaLa is the boldest girl at any party, unafraid to dance by herself. She has magic and confidence.
LaLa makes life seem like an adventure, "as if every moment were the start of a story with endless possibilities."[1] As a Fate, LaLa is cursed. Her curse is the urge to feel loved. She wants it so badly that she cries poison tears, even though she knows that every time she finds someone to love her, it never lasts.[2]To combat these urges, Lala sews dresses. She is a dressmaker too.
Plot[]
Once-there was someone Lala loved more than anyone else. He could shift into a large dragon. Dragons like hoarding treasures, and she always liked wearing sparkling things, and that was why he found Lala. He was flying in his dragon form, and he plucked Lala from the ground, thinking she was treasure.
Her first love is the true reason she’s the Unwed Bride. Lala's grooms never leave her. She always call things off with them because she’s never been able to let go of her love. Lala chose to become a Fate because Fates aren't supposed to be able to love, and she wanted to stop loving him, to let him go. But she can't.
She tries to fall for others, but no matter how close she comes to falling in love, there's still only one person that she wants to give her heart to. And there's only one way for that to happen, by opening the Valory.
Once Upon a Broken Heart[]
Evangeline meets LaLa at the private dinner held the night before the start of Nocte Neverending.
When Evangeline is poisoned by the tears of the Unwed Bride, Jacks takes her to LaLa's flat for the antidote. After curing her, LaLa reveals that she is the Unwed Bride. When Evangeline accuses her of trying to kill her and Prince Apollo, LaLa says she would never do that. She had sold some vials of her poisonous tears a long time ago, and the attempted killer must have used those. She has not hurt anyone since coming to the North. Like most of the Fates, she fled to the North to start over after Jacks' actions with Princess Donatella got them exiled from Valenda.
LaLa helps Evangeline dress for going to visit Chaos's lair. While finding her the perfect outfit, Evangeline is amazed by the hundreds of beautiful dresses LaLa has. LaLa tells Evangeline that she makes dresses to sell. It provides her with money and helps with her urges from her curse. Instead of finding someone to love her, which will only end with her being abandoned at the altar, she sews. Helping a bride with her wedding feeds some of the urge to have a marriage of her own.
After changing her clothes, Evangeline sees Jacks reading the same magical cookbook that Marisol has. LaLa is concerned when Evangeline reveals this. She says that it is not actually a cookbook, but is instead an incredibly dangerous spell book. After the Valors were killed, most magic was banned in the North. To protect the spell books, people changed their names and appearance. LaLa agrees with Jacks, that if Marisol has this book, she is not helpless and is probably up to something no good. With that, LaLa sends Evangeline and Jacks off to see Chaos.
The Ballad of Never After[]
Lala is engaged to Lord Robin Slaughterwood as another attempt of finding love and letting go of her first lover, the dragon shifter. She tells Evangeline that she is moving away from the Spires and going to live with him instead. Jacks heavily disapproves of this union because of the violent history of the Slaughterwoods. (An ancestor, Vengeance Slaughterwood, killed Jacks' best friend, Lyric Merrywood, who is also later revealed to be Lala's brother.)
In celebration of her new engagement, she holds a costume ball in Slaughterwood Castle. She gives Evangeline a fox costume to wear to the ball. One day, in Slaughterwood Castle, Evangeline overhears a conversation between Lala and Jacks. Lala is revealed to be the one who cast the Archer's Curse on Apollo, as well as the mirror curse on him and Evangeline. This means that if Apollo gets hurt, Evangeline gets hurt too and vice versa. Lala cast these spells/curses as a misguided way to get Evangeline motivated to open the Valory Arch (Evangeline believed the cure to Apollo's curses was inside the arch.)
Inside Eva's dreams (Fates can manipulate dreams), Lala later apologizes for this and explains to Evangeline that she is unable to truly let go of her first love. She called off the engagement with Lord Robin. Eva forgives Lala. Still in the dream, Lala warns Evangeline that she must get away from Jacks because he is dangerous. She encourages her to look for the mirth stone, which she believes is clouding Eva's good judgment. She disappears from the dream as Evangeline is about to wake up.
A Curse for True Love[]
In A Curse of True Love, Lala helped rescue Evangeline from Apollo when they were in the camps. It was revealed that the dragon shifter was Dane Valor—her first and true love. When Evangeline asked Lala about him, she said she thought her feelings might still be the same, but they weren’t. She no longer felt that way about him and was unsure. When Lala came to meet Evangeline in the forest, she found her with Chaos. Lala showed irritation and disliked him being there, while Chaos's vampire senses seemed heightened. He said something that made Lala blush, their interaction insinuating that Chaos’s feelings for Lala might be one-sided.
Powers[]
As the Unwed Bride, LaLa cries poisoned tears with the power to kill someone by breaking their heart. The Unwed Bride is able to make the cure for her poison. The victim needs close physical contact for at least a full day for the cure to take though.
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ Once Upon a Broken Heart: page 260
- ↑ Once Upon a Broken Heart: page 270