The first time it happened, Hilde was six.
She had been out with some friends in the meadow, pairs of little feet sprinting through the tall grass that brushed kisses against their knees. She was the fastest, of course, having been way too full of energy since birth, even for a child. Her laughter rang through the air as she whipped her head around to see her playmates – a girl with gleaming eyes and blond ringlets, a boy with scruffy red hair and a smattering of freckles – struggling to chase after her.
“Too slow!” Hilde called out over her shoulder with a laugh. “You’ll never catch me!” She picked up her pace then, her heart banging against her chest. She would outrun them if it was the last thing she ever did. They were no match for her.
And sadly, she was no match for the thick tree root that lay hidden beneath a cluster of flowers.
She let out a yelp of pain as her ankle caught on the sturdy hunk of wood, and her arms flung themselves out in front of her as she proceeded to slam into the ground. Hard. She cringed as pain flashed through her arms and legs. Ow.
Clearly not expected her sudden downfall, her blonde companion raced over towards her, only to trip over her leg and faceplant into the ground just behind her. Well, wasn’t that just great?
She could feel the tears forming in her eyes, but she did not want to cry so that she could appear strong in front of her friends. Grass and dirt were not enough to break her, of course. She was a strong little girl. So she gritted her teeth and pushed herself up to sitting, not caring about the muck that was sure to stain her new dress horribly. She ran her hands through her knotted hair in an attempt to get some of the dirt off, then quickly abandoned the impossible task in favor of checking on her fellow fallen compatriot.
Hilde was astonished to see tears flowing out of those gleaming eyes, and she watched as the boy knelt in front of the blonde and wiped the dirt off of her face with his chubby hands, taking care to be gentle. He then gingerly reached up to her golden ringlets, stripping them of the muck as well.
Crawling towards the pair, Hilde held out a clump of her matted ebony hair and waved it in front of the boy’s face. “Help me too!”
His eyebrows furrowed in confusion as he paused his cleaning to glance at her. “Why? Your hair looks the same. You can’t even see anything. It’s no dirtier than before.”
She froze. Glanced down at her hair, which she had always thought was rather pretty, and glanced back up at him, only to see him attentively catering to her blonde friend. Her blonde friend, with shiny eyes and clean hair. The clean, golden hair deserved to have the filth scrubbed off of it.
But her? I mean, he had said it himself, hadn’t he?
It’s no dirtier than before.
Her hair was no different than the dirt on the ground -he meant- the colors are all the same. The thick black muck on the ground had ended up in her thick black hair. They were one and the same. So he would not wipe the dirt off of her hair because it made no difference, did it?
It’s no dirtier than before.
Hilde sat in front of them both, watching him care for her blonde friend with such sweetness that only children possessed, clutching her muddy hair in her little fist, and she felt the crack for the first time. Now, she let her own tears fall.
The next time she could recall, it was at the age of ten.
Her classroom was abuzz with excited chatter, all talking about the annual harvest festival that was coming up very soon. Hilde sat in front of her little wooden desk in her little wooden chair and concentrated on the page in front of her, on the pretty little picture she was trying to draw on it. She smiled as she listened to the conversations around her, the children’s joined enthusiasm sending sparks of delight through her veins. This was the most talked-about event of every year, and she was beyond excited to attend this year especially seeing as there would be a circus troupe performing this time. She had never been to the circus before.
A throat cleared beside her. She looked up from her artwork to find one of her classmates, a scrawny little boy with shaggy brown hair, staring down at her nervously.
“Yes?” she asked, setting her pencil down.
She heard his friends making noises of encouragement from behind him. The boy shifted his feet uncomfortably, tugging at the collar of his shirt. He looked incredibly queasy like he’d just downed a cup of spoiled milk. “Hi.”
She blinked up at him. “Hello.”
He stood awkwardly for a few more seconds, then seemed to come to a decision, clearing his throat and standing up tall (or as tall as he could be at ten years old). He looked her in the eyes and said, “Would you like to go to the harvest festival with me this year?”
She stared at him. A pleasant warmth began to fill her cheeks. “What?”
“I said” – the boy looked exasperated – “do you wanna be my date to the harvest festival?”
Be my date.
Be his date.
He wanted her to be his date.
He wanted her to be his date.
Hilde felt a rush of giddiness, and she bit her lip, trying and failing to contain her glee at being asked out. It had never happened to her before, and she already couldn’t wait to go home and tell her parents about it. She nodded delightedly at the boy in front of her, her suppressed smile giving way to a full grin. “Yes, I’d love to!”
He paused, looking stricken. She tilted her head at him in mild amusement. Why did he look so confused? She had given him a pretty clear answer.
He blinked down at her for a few seconds, eyes wide. She watched as a striking red began to slowly creep its way up to his neck and into his cheeks. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out for a while.
Eventually, he was able to stammer out, “W-wow. S-so I g-guess I’ll see you there, then…” His friends giggled and snickered behind him.
She beamed at him, delighted that his feelings for her were making him this shy. “See you there.”
He abruptly turned, then, and walked back to his circle of companions with stiff and uncomfortable moments. Resisting the urge to laugh herself, she turned back around and picked up her pencil, about to resume her drawing.
“This is all your fault, guys! She was supposed to say no. It was supposed to be a joke!”
Her hand froze. So did her smile.
“Sorry, dude, we just thought that bothering the loony girl would get a rise out of her. We thought it’d be obvious to her that it wasn’t serious. I mean, look at her.”
The smile melted off of her face.
“Ugh, I know…I think I’ll just try to avoid her during the festival and hope she thinks I’m sick or something.”
Quiet chuckles. “Good idea, that’ll rid you of her.”
Her eyes stung. Her hand shook, gripping the pencil so tightly that the tips of her fingers turned white. When she suddenly tasted metal, she realized that she’d bitten her lip raw and bloody. She could physically feel the rush of excitement leave her, like a glorious flame extinguished, leaving behind suffocating smoke and ash.
And she felt a new crack form, this one a little deeper.
The third time, it was her thirteenth birthday.
Hilde’s parents had booked a reservation at a fancy restaurant for the night, twenty seats total for her and her family and friends. Her mother had curled her hair into dark ringlets and applied a light red balm to her lips and cheeks. She’d even bought a new dress for the occasion, a royal purple that bloomed into a bouquet of silk from the waist down and made her feel like a true princess.
She had arrived at the restaurant last, wanting to be fashionably late for her own birthday. She skirted past the hurried waiters and waitresses to get to the private room in the back, where a long table surrounded by seventeen occupied plush chairs and three vacant ones. Her father nudged her in the direction of the head of the table, and she went slowly, taking the time to pleasantly greet each of her friends as she walked past them to take her seat.
Not five minutes later, a waitress with ruby red locks of hair came strolling in, quill and pad in hand. The young woman smiled amicably as she scanned the rows of chairs, scrutinizing the people in front of her until her eyes locked on a pretty little brunette with silken hair and full lips, who sat at the other head of the table. Her name was Margaret, and she was one of the birthday girl’s closest friends.
Said birthday girl watched as the waitress scooted around to Margaret’s chair and exclaimed, “Happy birthday, gorgeous! You can, of course, order first – what can I get for you?”
Margaret beamed at the redhead for a second before she realized the misunderstanding that had occurred, and she cleared her throat in embarrassment before saying shyly, “Thank you, ma’am, but it’s actually not my birthday.” Margaret pointed. “It’s hers.”
The woman turned, and Hilde could see the smile drop a little bit. Those brows furrow slightly. Hilde was a very observant girl, so it did not escape her notice when the waitress’s nose scrunched a bit when her lips thinned almost to nonexistence.
Hilde watched as the woman composed herself and walked around the table to reach her. Those startling blue eyes gave her a quick once-over, and then that pasted-on smile was back, not quite stretching up to the blue this time. “Sorry about that, sugar! What can I get you?”
Her chest felt a little hollow, but she made sure her tone dripped honey as she placed her order. The redhead responded in kind, and then Hilde watched as she made her way around the table. It was easy to see her face light up once more as she approached the beautiful Margaret, who blushed under the attention and darted nervous glances in Hilde’s direction every once in a while.
The birthday girl smiled cheerfully in response.
She gave her parents a playful wink when they moved anxious glances her way.
She grinned at her friends, pretending not to notice how their eyes flicked from her to the waitress and then back to her before becoming fascinated with the silverware.
She waited patiently for her food.
The food came.
They’d forgotten to add the crushed apple topping to her order.
Margaret’s came with extra chocolate drizzle, and it looked quite delicious.
Hilde’s face shone with happiness throughout the rest of the night because it was her birthday, and so it didn’t matter that she had cracked yet again.
The crack that appeared when she was eighteen was perhaps the most damaging one of them all, the one that struck her so deep that it managed to pierce her right in the gut.
Hilde remembered being astonished when he first approached her, this beautiful boy with coiled brown hair and eyes dipped in silver. Up until then in the academy, he had never bothered introducing himself to her – that should’ve been her first warning – but the attention he began pouring onto her since that day was addictive.
She’d become much warier of people at that age, trying to close herself off from others, keep her heart safe in a box where nothing could hurt it. But her wooden box could only do so much when the fire within it burned too passionately.
So she found herself absorbing his attention like a sponge, letting it seep into her mind and body until it consumed her. She reveled in his heated gazes, adored the way his hands caressed her skin, basked in the feeling of his lips worshipping her. Hilde cleaved her box in half and tore out the item within, handing it over to him on a platter, trusting him to take good care of it, begging him to take good care of it.
And then he’d tipped the platter over and let her heart shatter at her feet.
Agony is an understatement.
After almost six months of being together with him, final exams had finally come up. They’d both spent so much time with each other studying and “studying” over the past few weeks, and now Hilde and her lover were ready. They sat down with the others, took the test with the others, and unlike most of the others, passed the exam with flying colors. Hilde remembered running up to the large bulletin board right outside of their classroom and scanning the A+ list for their names. Spotting both of them, she recalled feeling giddy with glee, and she needed to find her lover right then and there because she wanted to give him the news personally and also why the hell wasn’t he already there?
She raced down the hallways in search of him, boots clicking against the polished marble floors. She’d seen him in arithmancy an hour earlier – surely he was still roaming around somewhere at school?
Then she turned a corner, and her heart stopped.
Her silver-eyed beauty was there. Had an arm braced against the locker, the other wrapped around the waist of a beautiful young girl with short blonde curls, and he was kissing her neck fervently. The girl’s head was thrown back in bliss as she clung to him like a lifeline. By the way they moved together – so in sync with each other – this couldn’t have been their first time exploring each other. There was a familiarity to their rhythm that made bile rise at the back of Hilde’s throat.
She stood frozen for a moment, watching them be in love.
Then she cleared her throat.
The pair instantly sprang apart when they realized who was standing there, and while Hilde’s ex-lover at least had the decency to look guilty, the girl was all upturned noses and simmering glares. She seemed to take a sick pleasure in telling Hilde everything, how she’d been with him basically since he’d strolled over to introduce himself to Hilde, how they’d carried on a steamy clandestine relationship for the past half a year, how he’d really only given Hilde any attention in the first place because he needed her impressive intelligence to get him an exam score worthy of getting into university. That was all he’d wanted in the end. Apparently, she wasn’t pretty enough to warrant anything else.
Every word sliced into Hilde’s skin, cutting deeper and deeper and bleeding her out. She could feel the final crack forming then, growing inch by inch until –
It became too big, and her cracked heart finally splintered into a million messy pieces. In place of the pain, an ache began to grow, wrapping around her body and nearly suffocating her.
And then crippling despair took its place, and it sucked the life out of her.
Now, Hilde stands in front of an ornate steel cauldron, watching the bright green liquid bubble and boil her beautiful creation. After months of scouring the shadiest parts of her village for the right ingredients, experimenting with a variety of combinations, carrying out multiple failed trials – she’s almost done. She’ll get it right this time. She can feel it.
There’s only one more step left. The most important one.
She swipes a ruby red charm up off the table and holds it up to her face, staring at it for a moment, carefully considering one more time. If she does this, there is no going back. The effects are irreversible. Is she truly ready to pay the price for the one thing that she has been denied her entire life?
She can still feel it in her chest, her pathetic little heart. Cracked and bleeding, but still beating faintly, chugging on. She almost admires how it still seems to try holding onto the last wisps of her humanity: her love for her family, her goal to be a potions teacher, and nurture brilliant young minds. If she stops right now, knocks her cauldron onto the floor, and runs out of the castle, she will still feel those things. She will still feel something.
But then, she will also feel everything. Every insult, every disgusted glance, every show of disrespect, every reduction to the status of “lesser than” because she simply isn’t pretty enough to warrant a modicum of respect, is she? She will have to carry that pain forever, allow it to intensify more and more until it destroyed her from the inside out.
Hilde would not let that happen.
She presses the charm to her chest, right above her heart, and closes her eyes, whispering the incantation with practiced crispness and ease. It is sucked into her body for a moment, and she can feel it poking and prodding at the shards of her heart that lay scattered in there. The charm obliterates them, one by one, and she can feel her lack of feeling growing steadily.
A tear slides across her cheek.
She ignores it, focusing on the expanding nothingness within her.
It drips from the point of her chin to the cold floor below.
A final moment of mourning as she rips the charm out of her body and drops it into the cauldron.
As the green liquid shimmers and changes into a sickly blood red, she stares at it, feeling nothing.
Her stomach churns as she makes her way up the ominous spiral staircase that she is sure led to her soon-to-be private chambers. After turning a few wrong corners and stumbling around for a bit, she finds it. She turns the metal handle swiftly and swings the door open.
There, right in front of her, past the bed, the nightstand, the bathroom door, and pretty much anything else that may be important for her later, is the mirror. The oval beauty has a frame of lustrous golden flowers. And despite the castle obviously having been abandoned a long time ago, it looks pristine in condition.
She stalks over to it, slowly, carefully. When she is close enough to see her reflection, she recognizes that her newfound beauty would have caused the old Hilde to explode with excitement.
But she is no longer the old Hilde.
Raising a thin hand, she places it delicately on the golden frame and leans closer, making sure she can be heard. A deep breath, and then she speaks the words: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”
And when her face remains in the reflection, staring at her with dead eyes, her lip curls upward in a breathtakingly empty smile.