Her ghost-thin fingers delicately brushed away the dust of the shattered glass. Cobwebs were strung like washing line across the fragile, gilded edges of the upright looking glass, and they seemed to flinch away from her touch. Distantly, across the marshes and the rocks, a breeze picked up; the wicked pines howling in pure terror at the creaks in their old bones. They complained, but any sane mind would be more concerned for the young girl; ribs as skeletal as the lines in her corset; skin as pale as the whites in her eyes.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, in the shattered pieces that lied like veterans of misuse and neglect, the depths of hell stared right back into her astonished gaze. Disbelief; doubt; fear; the emotions flicked uncertainly through her expression like the pages of an open book.

‘It is simply not possible.’ Her mind told her.

‘Wicked, wonderful thing.’ Her heart screamed.