The young girl ran out into the dark and forbidding night, her black hair cloaked with a thin shine of moonlight. Ravaged and scarred, she ran desperately. Her white dress had spots of blood-red, and the bottom hems trailed through the mud-filled streets. No lamps, nor torches, nor even the glimmer of candlelight lit her way. The houses were firmly shut to block out the thieves and the scavenging hands of the orphans. Seeing nowhere to go, and nobody to turn to, she escaped into the woods.
In the woods of nightmares, the winds howled. The trees waved back and forth, forming a black, black sea. The figures frightened the girl, but she kept running. Away from the even darker city streets. Where more blood-thirsty beasts prowled, and the hearts were empty.
The dark suited her, she thought. Her hair camouflaged and melded in with the blackness, as she became swallowed by the black sea. The only brightness inside this sea was her pure white bridal dress.
Her dress caught on a gnarly branch of an old yew tree. Panting for breath, she untangled herself from the branches and collapsed. She noticed the red on her dress for the first time. She hated that dress. So she ripped off the whiteness from herself and discarded it on the yew tree as she kept running into the dark forest.
The morning revealed a small woman in black rags, woven from the darkness of the nightmare forest. She hunched over the silted stream, plunging her face into the icy water. Then she sat up, combed her hair, gazing into her beautiful reflection in mock vanity.
For the loss of innocence, the sun cried.
Gothel was old, and she knew it. When she was young, she used to go to the river first thing in the morning, and combed her dark, silky hair. However, as her face grew more wrinkled, her skin more pale, and her weak bones more bulging and apparent, she started to avoid the river. When she went, it was always because she had to. And she always, always went under the cover of the night.
Tonight was one of those nights. Gothel had been experimenting with herbs all day in her cave, seeking to find the legendary Potion of Eternal Youth so she would no longer have to hide beneath the black rags anymore. But she knew it was in vain, as Eternal Youth only comes through luck and chance, not experiments. And heaven knows that she had none of those!
However, she kept trying, day after laboriously day, a slave to her age, her desperation, her regrets.
Today, she made a new potion, with main ingredient of yew wood and oleander flowers. Both extremely poisonous.
But who cares? She sneered demeaningly at herself. A little poison never harmed her. Not much, anyway.
In any case, it was a small price to pay for Eternal Youth.
She needed water.
As she hiked down to the stream, the darkness enveloped her, so that she was just a menacing shadow moving among the trees.
It had been such a long time since she was a young girl, she thought to herself. She used to move through these woods with such ease. She was friends with the night owls, the bats. The trees bowed to her in all her beauty. The flowers of the night grew under the darkness which she called home.
And then, one night, he had come.
Or, technically speaking, she had come to him.
She remembered it exactly, the way he stood on the doorsteps of pharmacy, smiling cheerfully at her, as if she was an angel, sent from the heavens. Even if she was only a nameless orphan, begging for food. An orphan, whom he took in as an "apprentice" the next day.
She remembered the way his five-year-old daughter with blond hair hugged her around her thin waist, greeting her new best friend. What a smile she had!
And too precisely, she remembered the way he had robbed her of the thing she held most precious, then threw his own daughter against the wall for trying to defend her. And how he had sliced Gothel with shame from top to bottom.
That shame, she remembered only too well. The hatred and regret that she had harbored all these years, caused by that one time when childhood died.
Gothel demanded herself to stop thinking. That was a long time ago.
Not nearly long enough, her smaller self chimed in shyly.
Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up! She ordered her smaller self to go back under the rock, where she belonged. And then she composed herself. See? This is what she gets for remembering too much. She had not needed to compose herself for years.
In her now-organized mind, she registered a soft humming sound.
Her joints creaked as her knuckles tightened against her staff. She peered to her left, where a mysterious golden light sparkled in the midst of a bush. Curious, her wrinkled hands parted the thorny branches, and she climbed through.
When she emerged, it was a new landscape she had never seen. No, wait, she had seen it before! It was the east side of the mountain! But the hillside was completely transformed with light, emerging from…
Her weak eyes turned toward the source of the light. She squinted, and made out a flower.
The flower hummed with sunlight. For the first time since her young years, Gothel felt afraid. Her knees trembled against each other. Something in the song made the darkness in her heart scream in pain and agony. She felt a great and terrifying awe toward the light.
Tentatively, her small self crawled out, bringing herself slowly towards the flower.
Her bones cracked. Gothel fell on her knees. Her back collapsed from some great weight she knew not what. So her small self reached out, and touched a petal of the flower.
A tingling on her fingertips. And then, all of a sudden, the light evaporated, saving a small glow, right next to her finger.
A song flowed into her then.
Flower, gleam and glow
Let your power shine
Make the clock reverse
Bring back what once was mine
Heal what has been hurt
Change the Fates' design
Save what has been lost
Bring back what once was mine
What once was mine
And the clock turned backwards. Her fate changed.
From her fingertips, to her palm, her wrist, her arm, her shoulders, her legs, her feet, the wrinkles faded. Her vision cleared, and she beheld in her eyes that single, golden flower.
Gothel grinned hugely. A teardrop from the sun. It was waiting here all along for her, whom the sun had cried for, to appear. Of course it was for her. Of course, of course.
She belonged to the night, after all. And the sun loved the night.