Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

Just follow that one road the whole time!... I hope they don't get lost, I'm so bad at giving directions.

The melody faded like a rainbow after a storm, or like winds calming down at last; and what was left was calm, and possibility, and relief.

And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.

She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her own way.

Oh now that's a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future

The thing about a mirror is this: The one who stares into it is condemned to consider the world from her own perspective.