Mega congrats, Remedy!! A good win and thoroughly deserved!
As soon as I saw this quarter's photo I wanted to write a folk/fairy tale type story, as it was such an obviously SF image and I believe in trying to confound expectations (ie being awkward and bloody-minded). Sleeping Beauty was the natural start, but it would have to be subverted, and for some bizarre reason I wanted Bluebeard in there (shades of Angela Carter). Nothing came, though, so at the last minute I had to scrabble around for something else.
The reason I was unhappy with what I produced is that the point of the story is that the daughter is herself a creation of the silversmith just as the bees and birds are, but no one realises. (His fear is that her secret will be discovered by her admirers whereupon they will take fright and destroy her as being unnatural, hence his wish to protect her by hiding her away, only to realise that that would itself destroy her, only more slowly.) I didn't want to give the game away immediately, so I only gave clues, eg by referring to her being "silvery" in confinement and "creating" her own children, though the biggest clue was in her name and the title -- eglantine is another name for the wild rose, which is also known as sweetbriar, so Eglantine = the Silver Sweetbriar. But having come up with the idea so late, I didn't have the time and spare word count to create more clues and avoid things which seemed utterly unambiguous (eg if I'd had more words to play with, I'd have avoided the word "daughter" and simply had her call him "Father", or if I'd thought about it just made her his "adopted" daughter *hits head against wall at being so stupid as to not see that sooner*), plus I might have produced a proper ending which made the twist clear. My fault for leaving it so late.
Judging from the comments people so kindly left, the whole twist went completely unnoticed because I'd done such a bad job with it, so all in all, I'm inordinately pleased that the story received so much very gratifying attention. As to which, more silvered thanks to Mad Alice and Ursa for the listing and very welcome vote respectively.
NB VB the %ages are based on the number of people voting, not the number of votes cast.
