No idea where this came from. Sorry if it’s a little confusing.

kill the lights

They let you go after three days of dancing in hot iron shoes: because you can’t dance anymore; because when they reheat the shoes the last time you started screaming and broke a stained glass mirror with the pitch of your voice; because you grabbed a piece of glass and threatened to slit your throat in their precious sainted halls.

You know the bloodstains wouldn’t come out, and they know it too, and they don’t want your blood on their floors, as if you’re not worthy to die in their presence.

You don’t mind. They’re not fit to live in yours.

So they send you on your way, shrieking with every step; they catch a stag and tie you to it, so you are forced to run behind it. The beast seems to run forever, terrified of the creature that follows it against both of their wills, and you run with it until it falls down dead, heart spent. You collapse next to it; all too aware of the crisp raw agony screaming up your spine, and every step you have taken has taken you further away from who you once were. And then you get up and walk.

The shoes are swollen onto your feet; blisters burst and reform against the cooling sides of your feet. You discover one day when the swelling goes down that your skin is melted to the iron; you blink, sniff the burnt flesh, and as you know these shoes are never going to come off. As the years go by, it matters less and less.

You set off to wander, because the rule of a fallen heroine’s existence means you must wander until you have a reason not to. So you start walking and your feet begin to hurt less and eventually it doesn’t take as much effort to lift them from the ground. But you are ugly, bound by the final curse you wrought to change your own appearance to trick the child – your own spell come back to bind you. You find it matters less and less as time goes by; you stop combing your hair but you bathe in every stream you see to cool your perpetually warm feet, in their little iron cages. No one looks at you anymore, they know what you are, and you think you might be fading.

At first, you’re angry. You bring down a million petty evils on those who have what you do not – beauty, happiness. You use your talents for the malicious and the cruel to create spoiled milk, broken china, dead livestock. Little things. But eventually you realise that out of the twelve there are few commandments you have not violated, and you figure that you might as well not even leave one unsullied with your sin. So by and by there are the worse things, the girl with the golden hair, and the brother and sister, and the cottage you conjured out of magic and the bones of your victims to look like sweets. You walk beneath the ocean and curse the mermaids. The soldier down the mine, the girl who slept a hundred years, and even as you cause so much hurt you forget most of it, you remember, from so long ago, the little girl who you could not kill.

You find it all matters less and less as time goes by, and you cease your transgressions, not making reparations instead travelling the world in search of the horizon and the answers, which have so long eluded you. You are well aware they talk about you, in the many forms you have been in: you have been the Sea Witch and Maleficent and the crone that chained Rapunzel. But you can remember, when you were something else, the dread Witch Queen who ruled with an iron fist and a spell book, back when you were you. It all matters less and less of late, anyway; you hear your name less on the lips of the mortals, and occasionally you wonder why.

For so long, nothing changes except the world.

One day, too long after they burned the shoes to your feet for you to remember, the age falls from your face like the mask it was and the spell is undone. You know why it has happened; no one believes in it anymore. The new world you have been dragged into does not believe in it or you, as the old one did. Queens who are witches and girls who die and then live again do not belong now. And you know that by all rights you should be dead too but you are used to this mockery that is your half-life and you no longer need others to survive.

But you are beautiful. You are as beautiful as you ever were with your twisted, broken, ironclad feet, and it does not matter. You are still alone, ancient Witch Queen in a world you does not belong to. The answers you have lived without for so long no longer seem relevant, in this new world with its modern conveniences. Carriages that move on their own, strange metal birds, cylinders of metal that shoot fire… men who kill other men for the pleasure of killing – so like you, so long ago. You watch them all with the knowledge that they, too, will pass, and you wonder if you will ever die.

Occasionally you stumble across the girl and her prince, in one form or another; their souls meet and fall in love once or twice every hundred years and you do not do them harm. They are reborn again and again as other people and they would not understand if you told them how they were the ones that destroyed you. It has been so long since that half-forgotten time that even you have lost count of how long it has been since you were truly alive. Not that you’re concerned. It all matters less and less lately.

Perhaps you will die when the iron cages themselves turn to dust around your feet; you wonder, and your questions go unanswered, as they always have. But the road stretches long before you; you have not yet met the horizon and asked it where the sun goes when it dies, and so you pick up your feet, and wander the world like a restless ghost.