I would spend most of my days with my friends who are the sons and mainly the daughters of noble families. My life was not like that of Georgie Porgie and other citizens as well as villagers of the Kingdom of Brangomar that lived in villages, caverns and lairs of Meru Mountains. My father always believed I should not be involved in politics until I was at least ten and I was seven years old at this time. My father and I would often spend our time together while I could never adjust to my new step-mother, something he knew too well.
“Careful now, careful…”, my father had me crouched down over the magic carpet that levitated. “My daughter means everything to me. No cut corners, no fast turns, no ballsy little moves. I want you to fly her around the trophy room, slowly and gently.”, he instructed the flying carpet that levitated upwards and did exactly as my father instructed him to do so.
It flew past, around and between the many columns within the room and besides the many layers of separate levels where more objects were kept behind glass. My father looked on as I giggled.
“Keep your head down, Svetlana, you don’t want to hit your head in the ceiling now, do you?”, I lowered myself down cautiously and grabbed hold of the carpet that flew around the area.
My step-mother walked into the room in the company of two Golden Guards that stood at the door and waited for her while she went to talk with my father. Upon her seeing her approach, he raised his head and said out loud to the magic carpet.
“Do not drop her, but show off a little, will you?”, the carpet did as he commanded and often flew upward, dropping me before it would snatch me mid air. “Didn’t those strange visitors from beyond the stars concern you even a little tiny bit?”, asked my step-mother.
“I do not wish to speak off such matters while I am spending time with my daughter, Rose.”, my father replied only for my step-mother to sigh. “She’s levitating on top of a magic carpet. If anything, she is spending time with a rug.”, my step-mother gave her opinion and father sighed.
“The trio gave me the creeps, sure, but not as much as the pale lady did and if what the magic mirror says is true, then she is not a threat to us and therefore none of my concern.”, he explained much to my mother’s annoyance for she believed that the strangers were dangerous.
“And you trust in this magic mirror? You trust in these strangers that have left it behind for us? You trust that there is evil intention for what they left it behind? You just…”, my step-mother paused. “Just blindly trust?”, she was right to question my father, but he knew too well…
“I do not trust in the strangers and I do not know whether or not they have any intentions for our Kingdom of Brangomar or not, nor do I blindly trust in anything they say. I do, however, trust in the magic mirror.”, he explained. “And I also believe that information, knowledge, is a power that can both corrupt and be used for good.”, he explained while observing the carpet fly before turning finally to face my step-mother, staring deep into her eyes.
“The pale lady was telling the truth from the start, which both intrigued and scared me about her. She left behind the mirror in the palm of our hands and I believe it is to test us, which is why it shall be left here and used only when necessary. We shall not abuse its power for both you and I know that magic is capable of shaping the individual who uses it, do we not?”, my step-mother looked aside in thought and then turned to face him. “So you truly believe the mirror is telling us the truth?”, she asked and my father replied. “It is not what I believe. It is what I know.”
“Now excuse me, I need to spend some time with our daughter.”, my father said to her before whistling for the carpet to come down and she left in that moment, leaving us alone.
“This is the best!”, I said out loud to my father, who looked upon me with a smile and then climbed on top of the magic carpet along with me. “Well, I still have much to show you.”, he then patted the magic carpet before whistling and pulling on it as we flew outside of the window.
As the magic carpet flew, I gazed from above down towards the Mountains of Meru below and saw the many flashing lights of our glorious kingdom and the many tree houses they’ve made. At night time, they often had campfires and bonfires that gave bright lights below. As I looked to my father excitedly, he just nodded his head and held onto the carpet while he directed through the region’s many cold and even frozen rivers, and it was very cold up here as my face froze due to how cold it was. My nose was so cold that I could not even feel how stuffy my nose is. My step-mother walked back into the trophy room after we left and carefully observed the magic mirror that she gazed upon in thought, and as she planned to leave she was distracted yet again.
“Magic mirror on the wall…”, she called for the mirror as she approached it with grace. “Who is the fairest one of all?”, she asked the question that the magic mirror would answer to as it took on the form one of the one who is fairest and it was me, Svetlana Brangomar, and no answer was given as my mother observed carefully, wondering why it did not talk.
“What is the matter, are you broken? Is it that you only speak with the Golden King?”, she questioned the mirror and the image of myself smiled to her before replying. “Isn’t it obvious?”, the mirror asked a simple question and my mother’s worst fears at the time came true.
“Snow White…”, she said with realization and looked over on the side. “But this cannot be.”, my mother added. “How can she be the fairest one of all? She’s a little girl, merely seven years old.”, my step-mother questioned the mirror that focused its eyes on my mother.
“Beauty is not everything, my Queen.”, said the mirror and my step-mother gazed upon it in disgust. “Lips red as blood…”, the image that was me placed its right hand over its lips before it would proceed touching its hair. “Hair black as ebony…”, as the mirror went onto explain before lifting its head and dragging its left hand over its neck, grazing its finger tips there.
“Skin white as snow…”, the mirror explained before it would tell her something that not even my father and I knew. “Just like her mother wished when the wishing star fell from the skies on that very faithful day.”, the mirror revealed and my step-mother just had to know.
“Magic mirror on the wall…”, she said. “Show me that very faithful day that Snow White, daughter of Leonid and Irina Brangomar, was born.”, the magic mirror then smiled before the image of myself disappeared only to be replaced by that of the castle in which we lived.
My step-mother could see my own mother, Irina Brangomar, sitting near an open window and sowing during a winter snowfall. My mother had short white hair, light blue eyes and wore a winter coat at the time she sat beside the window where she would accidentally prick her finger on her needle. She dropped her needle to the ground and three drops of red blood dripped onto the freshly fallen white snow on the black windowsill before she placed her finger in her mouth to lick her wound. My step-mother gazed in awe at the reflection of the past before my mother gazed upon the skies to see a star that fell from the skies and in her eyes there was hope as she saw it swoosh by. In that moment, she lowered her hand and placed her finger in the snow on the black windowsill. She then leaned her body forth and said…
“Star light, star bright, first star that I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight. I wish that I have a daughter with skin white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair black as ebony.”, my mother wished only for my father to reach out for her with his arms and hug her that made her smile so much as she turned her head to face him before they both kissed.
“And one day…”, my father said. “We will.”, he smiled towards her and kissed her again before lifting her from the black windowsill and the vision ended.
“That is how much your mother loved you.”, my father and I happened to ask the magic mirror to show us the same vision, although my father asked it to do so out of love for me. “You were her last wish before she died and mine. I never wished for anything ever again.”, he explained.
“Not even for mother to come back?”, I gazed at the mirror that was a reflection of myself as I asked that question and my father sighed, kneeling down and placing his arms around me. “Of course I wished for that. I wished for that many, many times, my beloved Svetlana, and I wish there was a star like the one that gave birth to you that day, every day, deep down in my own thoughts and my own mind, but there isn’t one. I wish you could have met her, gotten to know her, to have spent time with her, to have grown alongside her as I have.”, he gazed into the mirror as I did and we both saw our own reflections while my step-mother looked on in secret.
“One thing is for sure, Svetlana, she loved you and if she was still around, she would still love you and none of that would ever change. Her love for you was as powerful as the wish she made on that faithful night.”, he explained and I sniffled, tears formed in my eyes. “The kind of wish and love that killed her.”, I wiped the tears in my eyes before he turned me around.
“No, no, no, Svetlana, don’t you ever say that.”, my father added. “But it’s true.”, I replied. “No, Svetlana, it is not. I do not know why your mother died that day, but it wasn’t because of you because you gave her strength as you give me strength with every passing day, okay?”, he wiped my tears with both of his thumbs of both of his hands as he looked deep into my eyes.
“Your mother loved you, Svetlana, as your father loves you. Don’t you ever forget that, okay?”, tears formed in his eyes and I nodded my head as we both hugged in front of the mirror that night and my step-mother observed carefully, and she concluded that my father would never love her.
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That my father would never love her as he loved my mother and that was abundantly clear to her. She lowered her head down and turned around, leaving the room and many things clicked in for her from that day onward. She found herself standing in front of the mirror, alone, on nights that no one was there and her only companion was the magic mirror and carpet that the trio gifted upon her as well as the magical phoenix she kept within a magical cage in her possession.
“He never loved someone like he loved her.”, she said to herself. “Of course.”, the magic mirror replied and the Queen of Roses turned, facing the magic mirror that confirmed what she said.
“She was his first love and they are always the most powerful.”, the mirror took on the appearance of Irina and used her voice to describe the burning passion that once lived back then.
“And yet, unlike most couples, their love never ended, it grew and sprouted into something beautiful. Most couples just break up and part ways, leaving behind a seed that withers away, old and alone, in their hearts and closes them off to others, and the Golden King’s seed started to wither when his love died.”, the magic mirror explained and Rose Brangomar listened carefully, thinking off her own past relationships and what it means to love…
“But he is my first…”, said the Queen. “By chance or by arranged marriage?”, the mirror asked and Rose Brangomar raised her head in realization. “There is another, remember?”, the mirror continued to speak. “Another by the name of Snow White.”, this caught the Queen’s attention.
“Yes, my sister…”, said Rose Brangomar and then the mirror showed a vision of two children playing in front of a cottage with a spinning wheel by a creek in the woods. “Your sister was quiet and shy; she preferred spending her time indoors, reading and doing housework. You, on the other hand, Rose Red…”, the mirror continued to explain and Rose Brangomar turned to see herself in the mirror that knew the truth off her past all along.
“You were quite outspoken, lively and cheerful. You preferred to be outside and yet…”, the image looked around inside of the room at all corners. “You now spend most of your time indoors, quiet and unspoken, even to your husband while in bed.”, Rose Red then raised her head in anger. “That is enough!”, she raised her voice to the magic mirror that then went silent.
That night, Rose Red returned to her chamber along with her husband and he lay with her in bed, lying over the bed with his back facing her and even if she reached around him with her arms he would move aside or simply not even acknowledge that she wanted his attention. It felt like that every night and the queen consistently thought about the magic mirror. In fact, she thought about it so much that it kept her up at night and the less she slept, the more her thoughts consumed her. She returned to the trophy room in the middle of midnight and approached it. The magic mirror did not react at all and the magic carpet rose up from one side, spying on the Queen of Roses that looked back to the carpet that immediately laid flat over the ground.
“I’m half frozen and I merely want to warm up a little at your place.”, said the Queen of Roses. “That is what he said when he came to our door on that very faithful day and we let him in.”, Red Rose described to the mirror about her past, gazing into it to see her own reflection.
“We let the bear in and he lay beside the fire as we beat the snow off of him, and we spoke with him and became quite friendly with him. We played with the bear, rolled him around playfully, and let him spend the night until our mother woke the next morning, scaring him and chasing him off as he trotted out into the woods. He came back every night for a rest that winter and eventually even our own mother grew used to him.”, she described as she kept staring into the mirror. “When summer came, the bear told us he must go away for a while to guard his treasure from a wicked dwarf, a dwarf we had never seen before until…”, she paused in thought.
“You wandered through the forest and happened to find a dwarf whose bears was stuck in a tree.”, the magic mirror spoke in her voice and her image, and the Queen of Roses stared back. “Yes…”, she confirmed what the mirror said. “We rescued him by cutting his beard free, but he was ungrateful and yelled at us for cutting his beautiful beard.”, she remembered those days.
“You encountered the dwarf several times that summer and rescued him from some peril each time, for which he was ungrateful as well, wasn’t he?”, the magic mirror asked and Rose Red nodded her head. “Then one day, we came across the dwarf again. This time, he was terrified because there was the bear who was about to kill him and the dwarf had the gall to plead with the bear and beg for him to eat us. Instead, the bear paid no heed to his plea and killed the dwarf with one single swipe of his paw and the bear transformed into a prince before our eyes, a little boy equally as old as we were at the time.”, Red Rose continued to tell the tale before the mirror would once more continue it for her, further revealing it knew the truth all along.
“The dwarf had previously put a spell on the prince by stealing his precious stones and turning him into a bear, and the curse was broken with the death of the dwarf. Your sister married the prince and when your mother became too old...”, “the mirror would then be interrupted by Rose Red who raised her head and said. “I cared for her!”, in a firm statement of anger.
“Snow White left me behind to watch our mother deteriorate, slowly lose her mind and wither away in front of me while she was off living a wealthy life with a prince that loves her.”, Rose Red would never forgive her sister for what she had done and looked down in thought. “Then years later, after our mother’s passing, she comes to her funeral and offers me the hand of the prince’s brother, now a widower, not because she missed me or because she took pity on me but because it was the best for the Twin Kingdoms of Brangomar.”, explained Rose Red to the mirror that stood in observation, giving her time to recollect her thoughts as the queen closed her eyes.
“She would become the Snow Queen and I the Queen of Roses. She would marry one who loves her and I would marry one who would forever love another, and now his daughter is called her name. It is as if the very fabric of the universe is mocking me.”, explained Rose Red before a thought came to her mind and then she turned to the mirror with a thought in mind.
“Magic mirror on the wall, tell me about Georgie Porgie…”, she asked and the mirror replied. “Which Georgie Porgie?”, the Queen of Roses sighed before she would smack her own face with the palm of her hand and then she would go into details about whom she truly meant.
“Svetlana?”, my father would knock on my door that night. “Come in, daddy!”, I said to him as he would open the door into my room and walk in with a box. “I’ve brought you a gift.”, he said as he approached me with a jewelry box in hand and I wondered what it is.
“What is it?”, I asked and he sat on the corner of my bed, opening the box in front of me and from it he pulled a necklace with four tiny pebbles of runic stones with the fifth taking the shape of a star in the middle that he presented to me and I took hold of it, observing them carefully.
“They are beautiful.”, my eyes were mesmerized by the stone shaped like a heart for stars had an important meaning for me from that night onward for the rest of my life. “Do you remember the tale I told you about your step-mother and her sister?”, my father asked and I chuckled.
“Yes, and… ohh!”, I said with realization. “These four stones, they are, they are…!”, I repeated in excitement and my father nodded his head. “Yes, the very four pebbles that the dwarf stole from my brother and used to transform us into bears. Your uncle gifted them to me and now I pass it onto you, my little Snow White, so that you may hold onto them as I have once upon a time.”, my father explained before he kissed my forehead, petted me and smiled at me.
“This stone here, however, was your mothers.”, my father pointed to the star. “She told me to pass it onto you when you come of age.”, he stated and I turned to him with confusion.
“But I am only seven?”, he smirked to my question. “But far wiser than most girls your age. That is why I believe you are ready to receive it earlier.”, he explained and I smiled to my father.
“Really?”, he then snuggled my nose and felt my cheek. “Yes, Svetlana.”, he said in confidence to me and this warmed my heart so much. “Your mother always said that when things seem most dark that this star will show you the light to guide your path.”, he felt the star in his hand.
“On the day I first met your mother, this star shinned bright and therefore it is without a doubt that it will perhaps, one day, illuminate your path when you need to find your way as well.”, my father explained and I touched the star with my hand, observing it in the palm of my hand.
“Now sweet dreams, my beloved Svetlana, and good night.”, he said as he kissed my forehead.
After my father left, my step-mother would leave him to lay in his bed alone and he didn’t even notice, and how could he? He did not bother to feel her warmth in days. The Queen of Roses would walk towards the Imperial Chamber where the Golden Guard lied in wait and she walked past them in between as she thrust the doors open as the huntsman turned to see her.
“What do I owe to the honor of these summons, your grace?”, the huntsman asked the Queen of Roses who just walked past him without saying a word. “I find it amusing that you think this summoning of yours is honorable, traitor.”, this confused the huntsman that remained where he stood although his look shifted first left and then right towards the Golden Guard.
“I am afraid I do not understand, my queen.”, said the huntsman. “I am perfectly sure that you perfectly understand what I am trying to convey, huntsman, and since I can no longer afford delay, allow me to make it clear to you. You are an agent from beyond the stars, servant of the famed Dragon Empire, are you not?”, she questioned the huntsman who shook his head.
He could not believe what the Queen of Roses was telling him as he stared at her with disbelief.
“Today, we received a couple of visitors from the Dragonlands and they left behind a magic mirror that tells no lies.”, the Queen explained to the huntsman that smirked. “I believe the one who gifted it upon us was called the pale lady…”, upon the Queen saying those words, the eyes of the huntsman had widened and Rose Red sat upon her throne, crossing her legs together.
“The mirror told me you would not confess unless you knew off her hear real name and it is Elina Frostclaw, the elven gorgon of the Black Lotus Tribe. She was the one that thrust this gift upon our us.”, and the huntsman would only confess upon hearing her name as he sighed deeply.
“Gift?”, asked the huntsman. “More like a curse.”, he added. “The pale lady is death incarnate, Lady Red, and death does not lie nor can we lie to death.”, the huntsman explained and the Queen was intrigued by just how much even the huntsman feared the very thought of her.
“So…”, he said before he knelt down on one knee. “I guess this is the end for Gorgie Porgie. If little Snow White asks, could you at least tell her I said goodbye?”, he said with a smile.
“Oh, don’t worry.”, said my step-mother. “You will be able to say good-bye to her yourself.”, this confused Georgie Porgie, who looked up to her with a focused gaze on his face.
“I shall reward you with your weight in gold for doing so and more importantly; by not telling the Golden King of your true origins.”, she revealed to him much to his astonishment. “That’s it? You just want me to say good-bye to the little girl and leave forever?”, the huntsman asked.
“Well, you got it half right.”, this now confused the huntsman even more. “Huh?”, he did not know what to say until my step-mother added. “For you are not the one who shall be leaving this plane of existence, she is.”, the Queen of Roses said that to the huntsman and he grew even more astonished for he knew now exactly what she was implying…