Damn me and my cyclical endings/beginnings, right?

Anyway. Not really inspired by anything, no real reason for writing it, save the image of a girl dancing alone in a dim, dusty room.


In a dusty hall, Cinderella dances.

She dances alone, save for the disapproving stares of a hundred portraits. Lords and ladies all, their painted gaze follows the girl as she twirls and dips and curtseys to no-one.

Cinderella's stepmother watches from the door, sometimes, but there is nothing she can do for the child; instead, she turns her attentions to her own baby daughters. It is not that she does not want to help, but that she cannot find a way. The stepmother has been brought up as a lady. It is all she knows, all she understands, and Cinderella does not fit in the world of dresses and etiquette and tea-parties that are her stepmother's life.

They are nearly the same age, Cinderella and her stepmother.

Cinderella's father is never in the mansion to see her dance. He sees his daughter maybe once or twice a year, when he takes her silence for mute obedience and her refusal to look at him as girlish modesty. He is, after all, a busy man, as one of the king's trusted advisors. His lands are more important than his daughter; so too are his goods and his influence and a million things that he can directly affect and hold and see the effects of.

He leaves his daughter to the servants, as he himself was raised.

Cinderella's mother died in childbirth. She was never a strong woman, mentally or physically; it is a shame that she passed it down to her daughter, along with her beauty, the servants whisper.

Even if she had lived, would it have made a difference?

The servants mostly ignore her. She is harmless, in her madness, and she does not wander or put herself in danger, so the servants leave her to it, and accept wages for a job they do not do. Sometimes she wanders into the kitchen, late at night, and sits in the dead fireplace. The servants laugh at her, rich gown streaked with ash, before they take her to get changed.

They are the closest thing to a parent she has ever had.

When she marries, finally, to a prince whose mother wishes to stay on his throne, there is no real difference. She is mostly ignored, mostly forgotten, save for the brief moments when the prince remembers he requires an heir.

She finds herself a new room in the castle; there are no portraits here, only vast windows, draped in thick curtains.

Cinderella is the void they all revolve around, as she dances in a dusty hall.