Chapter the second:
Mirror, Mirror
Once the maidservant had run screaming down the corridor and into the kitchen to announce that the royal children had disappeared, the palace became a harem of panicking men and women.
When the King found out what had happened he immediately took control of the situation. He did not want to see his only children go the way of his wife. He sent out thousands of search parties, helped by the town's people who did not want anything to happen to their future rulers.
However after six months searching turned up nothing the King began to fall apart and it was only at the urge of Madame Undine, who was heavily pregnant at the time and prone to fits of sentimentality, that he continued the search and even joined it himself.
At the end of a year and a day the search was called off. The country was thrown uneasy times, since most of its people did not want to see Madame Undine's girl child on the throne. The King, meanwhile, had fallen into a pit of despair, as clichéd as that sounds. Not very stabile mentally after the death of his wife, whom he had only realised after her death was the love of his life, he took the one small step into madness. Ironically, Madame Undine then put him away in the western most towers where he had locked his wife and children up all those years ago.
She visited him every day but it was not long before he started to hallucinate and became increasingly more deluded.
Now it is time to rewind a bit: the new Queen had a mirror, which was given to her by her sweetheart, the Prince of Barbaria. It was a way they could communicate across vast distances. Madame Undine had come to Duffland specifically to seduce the King, marry him, poison him and then marry her sweetheart, the Prince. Unfortunately for her she developed affection for the King and postponed the poisoning of the King.
The mirror had a personality all of its own which, unbeknownst to Madame Undine and her Prince, thrived on disaster, death and despair. It tried to create as much mischief as it could by twisting the minds of the Prince and Madame Undine, so that they would have no compunction to kill.
The Prince, unlike Madame Undine, had a mind ripe for that kind of twisting. His parents, neither of them particularly dumb, could see onto what path he was heading and decided to make his younger brother heir to the throne. The mirror had convinced him that he could get his own kingdom if he manipulated his once beloved Madame Undine into seducing the King and handing him the kingdom of Duffland for his very own.
Madame Undine, on the other hand, was very hard for the mirror to manipulate. She was a pure good soul, for all the sins she had committed. So the mirror decided to take another route and drove her mad. It wrested her child from her and threw her into the beyond, helped her to miscarry when she fell pregnant again (for all his madness the King was still very virile) and told her that the Prince was dallying with her rival, Lady Margaret (which was true, he wasn't very faithful, and anyway the mirror could only speak the truth). By doing these three things, coupled with tiny seemingly insignificant things, it was able to drive her mad.