King Ludwig XIV — once a dazzling, gallant beauty — inherited his fairy-tale curse and turned into an amphibian driven by the instincts of a predator. Ludwig is a were-frog; most of the time he prefers to stay in the skin of a common toad, but sometimes he takes on a form that vaguely resembles a human. He latches onto each of his princesses with a death grip, waiting for a love that might break the curse — and the bones of the princesses who failed to overcome the spell pile up year by year at the bottom of the swamp. Ludwig doesn't realize it: to him, anything that doesn't move simply doesn't exist (frogs, after all, can only see moving objects). But he doesn't care either, for the decades spent in amphibian form have stripped away nearly everything human in him.
