The Dark Fairy's Confession
by Jenna Glover
"Why did you do it? Were you really so angry?"
"I wasn't angry."
"Then why curse the girl?"
"Because she asked me to."
Magic is complicated. It exists in the same way the space between waking and sleeping does, when you're perched on a precipice of impossibility, and there is not just the dream ahead of you, but the power to achieve it. Magic is freedom.
She understood that, maybe even better than I. Being born magic means being born into the dream. I have always been free, and therefore I did not understand freedom. She may have been born into wealth and status and privilege, but she was not born free, nor was she born with the power to make herself free. But I was, and she understood that, too.
She came to me, impossibly, in the realms of magic, passing through as all mortals do at the end of their life. You understand what it is like there. Time is meaningless. The mortal world's linear path becomes broken and branched, allowing past, present, and future to exist as one. You can meet anyone from anywhen, and that day I met her.
She was a fully grown woman when she came to me, mature in years, golden hair gone grey, but still beautiful as you ensured she would be. I did not recognize her. It had been ages since I walked the mortal world, long before Princesses existed. But she smiled at me, as though we had been friends for a century, and I knew we had been, would be.
She told me everything. How she was defined by others before she was even born. Daughter. Princess. Wife. Mother. Did anyone ask her if she wanted to be these things? Even you and your sisters sought to mold her at her christening with your so-called blessings. Beauty. Wit. Goodness. She didn't even get to choose to be good. Can you imagine?
