Queen Of Glass

Prologue

Certain countries, like certain people, are renowned for their talents. These talents are the skills by which they make themselves known to the world, and they are the way that they are remembered by history.
Adarlan was famous for its glassware. It was said that they could construct anything out of glass (a bed, a coffin, a hill) and have it be as strong as iron. At one point, glass shoes were all the fashion across the globe, though why anyone would want to walk (or dance) in such shoes was beyond the genius of all the learned men and women in the world at that age.
A beautiful, large, and rich country, Adarlan was naturally very powerful. Its army could not be matched, and it was years ahead of any nation by means of industry and technology. After some time, the rest of the world could not meet Adarlan's high prices, and Adarlan began to lose its wealth.
Which is probably why Adarlan began to seek to conquer other countries. They started with the best of intentions: gentle urgings in councils with foreign nations to catch up so that the world would be a better and more civilized place, promising aid and money if needed. The other territories were slow to respond and their people were not ready for the sudden change that would be imposed upon them by their leaders.
So, Adarlan began to advance more aggressively on its neighbors, encouraging the demolition of worker's guilds and the rise of the working class as a whole. In less than a year, it had conquered its bordering countries-befouling them with the spread of the installment of mass-production and slave-camps. For many years it tried to conquer the countries that lay across the sea, but they were unable to make any territorial advances.
But there were other things involved in the conquests, other unspeakable evils that will be known much later on. Be content with ideas of economics and technology as being key factors in the war that the King of Adarlan waged against the world, for there will come a time when you wished that you did not know the full truth.
What does any of this have to do with fairy godmothers and pumpkins turning into carriages? Everything. Over time, the story of the cinder-girl has been warped, misplaced, and some parts have been downright cut out to make the fairy story that we are all quite familiar with today.
The original story was hardly magical in the sense of what we've come to expect to be typical for fairytales. There were no magic pumpkins or transforming mice or beautiful dresses made out of a mere swish of the wand. But there was magic—oh, yes, there was plenty of magic.
Also, the original legend was more a tale of political alliances and betrayals than a timeless love story (though, don't get me wrong, there was a great deal of love involved), but there is obviously a lack of appeal to mass audiences for a story such as that, so bards undoubtedly had to change a few (and in the end, quite a lot of) things to enhance its luster and enrapture their audiences.
The cinder girl that we meet at the ball is the girl whom the prince fell in love with, but in fact, not the true Cinderella.
The woman was a character who, save for her debut at the ball, has dropped out of the story entirely—the complications in her character and the circumstances under which she went to the ball were far too complex to be told or remembered by mouth, and by the time that the story was written down on paper, her part in the story had been forgotten. Even her name—the name that came to wield so much power—has been disconnected from the original tale entirely. But to give her one name is to dishonor her memory. To define her simply by one of the names that she bore in her lifetime would be to only judge a person by what one of their features looked like. After all, what power does a name truly have? Is it a shallow thing that we use only to identify each other and our world, or is it capable of holding its own power and character? But I am getting ahead of myself.
By now, only the royal families of Adarlan and Trasien know the real tale of the cinder-girl; and it is after these many years of service to the royal court that I have been permitted to record the story of Adarlan's greatest queen, who never bore the title of Cinderella, but in fact was quite a slave herself before her fairytale began.