The Reflection in the Looking Glass
She had never wanted it. Not from the beginning. Not in the end. Never.
The mirror was were it started. The mirror was where it would end.
The woman stepped up to it and stared into the cold depths. A little girl of adulthood stared back from behind the glass with shattered eyes and sunken cheeks. Her fingers worn to the bone and her ribs showing through her shirt. Blood dripped from her wrists, where obsidian shackles encircled them, embedded to the bone. Obsidian chains surrounded her, pooling around her feet. She made no movement, no expression. It was too late.
The woman stared at the little girl, a raindrop falling down her pale cheek.
There was nothing else left.
“Looking glass upon the wall, who is fairest of us all?” She spoke the words. Words she had spoken a thousand times. Words that had added a thousand links to her chains. Words that when first spoken, had sealed her wrists in black bracelets.
The little girl vanished, replaced by a towering queen. A tall crown stood atop her head, and her beauty was unquestionable with full red lips, fair skin, high cheekbones, and black hair set in delicate curls. But it was a transparent beauty. Beneath it, the queen bore cracked lips, shriveled skin, sagging cheeks, and scraggly greying hair.
She smiled evilly, “You know what to do?” The voice of a queen. The voice of a hag.
The woman bowed her head.
The queen laughed and said, “Good, good! After all, we must uphold this,” she gestured to herself, “mustn’t we?”
“Please no! Please!” The woman begged suddenly, another tear sliding down her cheek.
“Oh, no, no no no!” Tittered the queen, “We mustn’t be challenged!”
“You’re a monster!”
The queen only smirked, “I’m not the one who killed the girls mother, now am I?”
The woman only trembled in response.
The queen smiled cruelly knowing that there was nothing that the woman could do.
“Do you have it?” she asked. “Show it to me!”
The woman had to obey, and through a force of will that was not her own she held up a blood red apple.