A/N: Hello, all! It's my first fic, yay! Please read and review, constructive criticism are preferable to flames. Enjoy!
From the beginning, her whole life had been a mistake. Everywhere she went, trouble and misfortune followed, so much that she began to wonder if she might be jinxed, or cursed. But then again, if anyone had ever even tried to cast a spell on her, it would probably have gone wrong. She supposed it was simply fate, and maybe it was.
It had all started from the day, the hour, the moment she was born. Her mother had died, of course. With her last scrap of energy, she had whispered the child's name: Cendrillion. That might have been the only thing that had happened right to her – her naming. From then on everything had just gone downhill.
She had been born a noble girl, precious beloved only daughter of a rich merchant lord, and should have been pampered and brought up in luxury and wealth. But mistakes beget mistakes, and the shock of her beautiful mother's death caused her father to slowly waste away from grief. A few months before he died, though, he remarried, hoping at least that she would be well looked after after his death.
Of course, that had to go wrong too. Her new stepmother turned out to be everything that a stepmother should not be – mean, cruel, selfish, jealous, and so on. The misery could not be complete, however, without the arrival of two more stepsisters that were just like her stepmother, if not worse. It might have still been bearable if she had maintained her status as a noble – no one would have been able to harm her then. But what was the hope of that?
She was sentenced to being a servant in the house she had once been the heir of. Every day she washed and cleaned and scrubbed, and every night she slept by the cinders and dying ash of the kitchen fire. If people remembered that there had once been a true blood-heir to that household she might have been saved from the drudgery, but no, human memories failed easily and that never happened. Soon most people forgot that there had ever been more than two daughters there, and her memory was wiped away, like the cinders she had to wash from her body every morning.
And so it went on. Soon the days melted into weeks, and the weeks melted into months, and the months melted into years, until everything was the same. There was no beginning and no end, it was just an endless cycle of cooking and cleaning and scrubbing until her palms were raw and she could have fainted from exhaustion. Then there was a short period of rest a night by the dying cinders of the kitchen fire, then waking up again to the dawn of a new morning. And every morning she woke with new hope, hope that that day might be different, that salvation would come, that what was rightfully hers would be restored. But that day never came.
The great ballroom was aglitter. Couples danced, whirling with delight, and laughter and excitement filled the room.
Nothing could go wrong tonight. Not after she had been helped by the faery, not when this was her one and only chance to break the spell of the monotony of her days. Nothing will go wrong, she had told herself in the carriage fashioned from a pumpkin. And so far, nothing had, and she had thanked all the saints and spirits that had helped her on her way here.
The carriage hadn't tipped over. The spell hadn't stopped working halfway through. And now, she was standing just outside the great door of the ballroom, taking deep breaths and composing herself before she got in. Only one more thing could go wrong – she remembered the faery's warning.
"When the clock strikes twelve, you must flee from the castle at once, or all your riches will return to the rags from whence they came. Your carriage will return to being a pumpkin, your horses to rats. And then all your hope and joy will be lost to you forever."
"But how will the prince," – for the faery had promised her the attention of the prince himself, what an honour! – "find me again?" This she had asked, her anxiety that something would go wrong overtook her again. Fate had played her too many times to be complacent and unworried, would it play her again this time?
"Never fear," the faery had said with a careless laugh. "He will find you. Now go on and enjoy yourself. Be free!"
So there she was now, standing at the threshold of the castle ballroom.
She steps in quietly, suddenly shy, hoping that no one would notice her. But her hopes go awry as every head in the room turns to look at her.
But then she is dancing, dancing with the prince, just as the faery had promised. Whirling and spinning and twirling, around and around, in a world filled with sparkle and delight, so different from the world that she knows. Hand in hand, step by step, she and her prince lose themselves in each other's eyes. They speak, occasionally, but mostly they are silent, simply letting each other's presence sink into them.
"What is your name?"
"They call me Cendrillion, Cinders. Sometimes they just call me 'girl', or other, worse things."
They seem to dance for an eternity, never stopping, joined as one. She wouldn't mind if they never did stop. But all good things come to an end. Sometimes they return, sometimes they simply brush you once and never touch you again. You have to learn to enjoy them while they last, because you never know if you'll ever get to experience it again.
"How can I find you again, after this? You won't tell me anything about yourself."
"Don't worry. You'll find me. I know you will."
The clock strikes, the first time, loud and ringing, signaling the end of an old day and the beginning of a new one. The palace seems to reverberate with its sound, a tolling that comes from the belly of the earth. It is a great and terrible sound, majestic in nature but instilling fear for its sheer power. One by one the gongs ring out, once, then twice, then three times.
All the while she is running. She feels her hair streaming behind her, the rush of wind against her cheeks. Her glass slippers clatter on the tiled floor, and in the distance, she can hear voices shouting after her – the prince's, and others that she does not recognize. She is running blindly, not sure where she is going, just desperate to get away so that her prince will not see her in rags in tatters.
Don't worry. He'll find you again.
She is running down the steps of the palace – she can see her carriage waiting in the distance. Almost there.
She almost trips on the stairs, but manages to keep her balance.
Just three more steps.
Her glass slipper loosens.
In the nick of time, she slips her foot back into the beautiful glass slipper and carries on running, until she reaches the carriage.
"Where is she? I have to find her! She said I'd be able to find her!"
"Your Highness…"
"She must have left something behind, some way for me to track her down!"
But the walkway of the palace is empty. There is nothing around – not on the steps, not at the door. There is practically no sign that a girl named Cendrillion ever walked those stairs.
"Cendrillion!"
A last desperate call in the silent night, but there is no answer.
She sat by the cinders, the slowly dying out cinders, waiting. In her hands were a pair of glass slippers, whole and perfect, not even a scratch on them from what they'd been through. A pair of them. They were the only part of what the faery had given her that had not disappeared like mist when the sun came out.
She didn't know what had happened. She might never know. But she knew then, sitting there by the dying embers, that her once chance at freedom was gone forever.
It had gone wrong again.