“So who imprisoned you in the Schloss? Was it Night Sorrow? Did he finally catch you?”
Snow White tried her best not to tremble. She looked away from Loki’s questioning eyes, through the window in her room, overlooking the wonderful meadows and rivers outside. “It wasn’t Night Sorrow who imprisoned me in the Schloss,” she said with her back to Loki.
“Then who?”
“Will you believe me if I tell you?”
“Of course, I will,” Loki stood up, wondering why she wouldn’t look at him. “What kind of question is that?”
“It was Carmilla,” she said, her voice was low as if she were embarrassed.
“What?” Loki stepped forward.
“Carmilla, my mother, trapped me in the Schloss,” Snow White said.
Loki tried to touch her shoulders, but she didn’t let him. She turned around, her eyes full of tears. “Why would she do that? I thought she was a great woman, mother, and lover. The sacrifices she made, her love for your father. She fought the world to bring you into it. How could your mother end up imprisoning you? I thought the one who wanted to hurt you was the Wicked Stepmother. Did Carmilla die, and did your father remarry, maybe?”
“No, my father didn’t remarry,” Snow White said.
“That’s unbelievable,” Loki said. “How could she trap you for all these years?”
“Well, in many ways, she wasn’t my mother anymore. It’s really hard to explain,” Snow White said. “Just for the record, the Grimm’s wrote the first version of my story in 1812, when I was sixteen. In this version, they mentioned the queen was my mother. This text is available to the world.”
“Really?” Loki wondered how Axel missed that part.
“They rewrote most of their tales again in 1857, and they changed her from being my mother to a Wicked Stepmother, claiming they did it to tone down the tale so it’d be suitable for children. They changed it to hide the truth.”
“What are you implying?”
“That the gruesome things she would do to me later would sound less horrifying if you think of her as my stepmother,” she buried her face in her hands then turned back to the window, then she used her powers to turn it into a portal seeing into her memories…
In consecutive flashes, Loki saw Angel and Carmilla cuddling their adorable infant, Snow White. When she smiled, wiggling her small feet in the air while on her back, the world of the Sorrows was filled with joy. Angel and Carmilla hugged each other; the servants sent their blessings, the trees outside the house danced and the branches tangled with mirth. Snowflakes decorated the days, and tiny purple-glowing faeries lit up the night. Most of all, Snow White kept wiggling her small feet.
Later, Carmilla went to look into the mirror, and saw that she had aged unexpectedly fast. It was if she’d grown ten years older in a day. She touched her face with the tips of her fingers, wondering what happened to her skin; it used to be smooth and baby-like, now there were many wrinkles and even her hands aged. Avoiding an inevitable panic attack, and out of wishful thinking, Carmilla tried another mirror, hoping it would show her otherwise.
“Mirrors were made of copper or obsidian stones in those days,” Snow White began. “The reflective and silvered ones people use nowadays weren’t invented yet. Still, no matter how many mirrors she tried my mother had aged all of a sudden. After she’d bravely given birth to me; her years turned into sand falling unapologetically through the hourglass of time. I don’t know how, but no matter how many mirrors reflected her sudden decay, she couldn’t believe it was true and thought it was some kind of a curse bestowed on her. In her denial, Carmilla became addicted to mirrors, sending her messengers over to Europe to buy the latest mirrors invented by the most prestigious scientists. It was an odd thing to do, but it was as if she thought that all these mirrors were wrong, and that there was this one mirror that would show her real beauty. On the other hand, my father hated mirrors, because sometimes they reflected his darker soul when he hadn’t fed enough. But he didn’t stop Carmilla from buying the most expensive mirrors in the world, even if he knew they weren’t going to change a thing about her unexplainable aging,” Snow White spoke fast while the images flashed in the window. “My mother started to grow ill and tired, complaining of continued fatigue and feeling as though her bones were breaking in her body. She fainted repeatedly, became dehydrated frequently, and needed more servants to take of her as if she were elderly and not a young and beautiful queen.”