Mirror Mirror [ONC 2021 Version]

✨Try Something New✨

Chapter 1

In a patched house, under a thatched roof, a lopsided chimney blew grey smoke against the midnight-blue sky dusted with glimmering, glinting stars. Two small windows flickered gold. A wonky door hung on its rusty hinges, unable to stop the icy draft sneaking in, threatening the small fire burning in the odd hearth. Occasionally, a flurry of excitement and muffled voices snuck out of the abode like whispers into the silent night.

Here lived a small family the others called the "Silvertongues". No one knew their real name, nor where they came from, or even how long they'd lived there, in that tiny house, on that tiny road that went nowhere just beyond their village—forever a gaudy eyesore.

One day, it was an overgrown field, littered with nothing but weeds. Nothing special. Nothing worthy. Then the next, the earth burst forth with a clap of loud thunder and a rumble that shook the beds, chairs, or the ground beneath drowsy villagers, lulled to sleep by something strange in the air at the stroke of midnight.

In the light of the next day, there it was as if it had always been, and always shall be—in its perpetual state of crumble—the Silvertongues' distinct round cottage no villagers ever remembered being without. Over many seasons and many moons, many deaths and many blooms, the truth was simply forgotten—that this strange house, with its strange facade, and its strange clay wall had magically appeared one night and with it, brought the family with their stranger, yet wondrous talent. The gift of the tale. For no one spun a tale as well as they. The Silver-tongues.

Their house resembled a small, round cottage. A cottage with no rooms and no privy, not even a place to call a kitchen, nor offer any privacy.

The Silvertongues were a poor family, as poor as they come. Their house leaked in the rain and fumed in the heat. Their bodies shivered with chills in winter, and the yellow flowers of a most despised weed pushed through their clay and cow-dung patched walls on the outskirts of a small village named Elsevier. But they needed very little.

These wordsmiths cared only for three things in their lives: family, enough food to fill their belly one time a day, and their long-standing family business of telling tales. They were the story weavers and the storytellers. The finest this world had seen—some so good they could speak things into existence with carefully chosen words. A few villagers said angels resided on their tongues, speaking beautiful things through them. Some murmured, "it's a gift bestowed upon them by fairies and magic". Others still called them frauds or witches and shunned them; others spat things too mean to mention. And some even looked upon them with nothing but pity, tossing them bread, burnt, or soured milk in the name of charity.

All except one. A girl named Nessa.

A ten-year-old child once abandoned at the Silver-tongue's door when she was all but two years and one week. A scrawny child then, and a scrawny child now. Scraggy, with pocked and freckled cheeks; dark eyes surrounded by darker circles; and an unevenly cut fringe that fell across her small forehead in a zigzag.

She called the Silver-tongues "family" for they were the only family she'd ever known, strange and wondrous as they were. She did not remember the ones who brought her into this world, nor did she care to go look for them. They weren't her family.

And it was Nessa dashing as fast as she could to the other side of the fire by the hearth now, as their eighty-four-year-old, hunch-backed, and nearly toothless granny shuffled along the floor to her old rocking chair, in service of their nightly ritual.

Nessa dropped herself on one of the floor cushions fashioned out of recycled garments the villagers had thrown away in their garbage just as Granny reached her chair, clapping her knotty hands together to signal to the smaller kids, of which there were three, and to the bigger kids, of which there were also three. "Gather round, my darlings. It is time."