Here's a twist for you: there's no snake for now. The darkness is silent, the fables (bless their didactic little hearts) take an intermission and sleep once more with Aesop, and only birds fly beneath the stars. Just for a while, leave the fairy tale behind.
That's where she lived, after all. The little girl born in Greece to an ordinary family, growing up in an ordinary town, going to an ordinary school, to eventually die an ordinary death. Can you imagine such a world? For her there were no such things as lovely abominations to kiss you with blooded lips. Her ancestors were peasants, or scholars, or merchants, or soldiers. The Lamia was a tale for children and classics students, not an innumerably ancient bloodline that filled her with terrible fire.
She had only four once-upon-a-times, and perhaps they didn't matter. You can be sure they died when she did.
Then again, perhaps that makes them all the more precious.
Once upon a time, a little girl looked up into the sky and shivered.
She was five, then, running about and picking up terrible language habits from her older sisters. Her teeth were tiny and white and ordinary, and the sweetest thing she could imagine wasn't AB negative, but baklava with raspberry ice cream and extra honey. She giggled and cursed with far too much acumen for such a tender age, and sometimes she would correct cartoon characters' grammar if she was in a bad mood.
Her father took her out one night, and they laid side-by-side on the grass to watch the sky. Lights began to flash in the sky, and her father smiled and pointed at them.
"Do you see that, kopelia mou?" He asked with a grin. "Do you know what they are?"
"No, papakis. Are they fireworks?"
Her father chuckled. "No, Zoe. They're meteors, rocks that float in space far beyond the atmosphere. When the Earth comes near them, they fall into the air and burn away. The fire creates the light."
The little girl had never heard of anything so ridiculous as burning rocks that flew through the air. "If Mama finds out you've been lying to me again, you'll be sleeping on the couch. Rocks don't fly, silly. Everyone knows that."
"You're right, dear. They don't. But floating in space is much different from falling. Most of the time, the Earth is very tiny and the meteors are too far away to fall to Earth. It's only when they come too close that they fall and burn."
The little girl thought long and hard about her father's words. She had never heard of something so far away that it couldn't fall, and the Earth had always seemed far too grand to be tiny.
When she looked up at the night again, she didn't see the meteors, or the moon, or the stars. Her eyes found only the blackness of the void, and she knew that the universe was empty.
(—her eyes, like the space between stars—)
Once upon a time, before a goddess kissed the bone fragments from her spine, a little girl was alone.
For a long while, she felt like a little snake— her legs were newly gone, her chair poked into her back and she could only move with jerky, awkward spurts that wore her out in minutes. She feared cars, even as she relied on them to take her places she would easily walk before. Her family cared for her, as was only right, but she hated them for it despite herself. She hated the pitying looks from the librarians as she nestled into her favorite corner to read. She hated that the clerk at the market watched her with guilty fascination, as though she were a hospital advertisement instead of a customer buying fish with her mother.
Most of all, though, she hated the way it would never end. She knew that she would have to fight all-too-hard to be seen as herself, as a budding linguist and top student, as an ordinary girl with an extraordinarily large crush on Wesley from Star Trek (and then later Counselor Troi, once she'd gotten a bit more taste.) In the dark of her room, alone at last, she let herself weep to think about the things she would need to do to be seen as herself.
Oh, how she envied the ones who could walk! Not because they could stand, but because no one would look down at them with pity because of a quirk of their nerves.
Eventually, she would learn to enjoy throwing herself into greater and greater contortions. Eventually, she would forget she ever disliked it at all.
Still, all the oblivion in the world could not erase that once upon a time, a little girl wept in the darkness.
(—her legs were strong and swift, so swift—)
Once upon a time, a little girl's world ended.
Her world was hard and empty, and there was no place in it for goddesses with blood on their lips. She had learned to laugh at the void until the planets would shake from their orbits, because if the world had no meaning she would pick her own and fill it with energy until it was the only thing in the universe. She could fill her world with light and humor and computers and Klingons and languages, and that would suffice.
She never imagined that the darkness would laugh back.
All at once, black eyes stared into her and scorned the walls of humor and silicon around her soul; a voice as lovely as night itself whispered in her ear promises of grandeur and divinity. A woman— no, a being as beautiful as the sunset reached out to her with one pale hand, fingers strong enough to crush throat but extended instead in an offer.
Come away with me, and I will pull you from your fortress and into the sky. Once you could walk, little one, but with me you might fly.
Do not judge her too harshly. Her world had come apart— how was she to remember that even if a goddess walked the earth, there was nothing in the sky but a void? She had envied the powerful for so very long, even as the flame of her passion was burning itself to nothing.
She took the hand in the darkness, and her heart beat its last.
It's ironic, really, that she had to die to burn with power and life. Especially when the burning consumes her forever, so her skin is the chill of ashes even as she shone.
(—God have mercy, the blood—)
Once upon a time, a little snake stopped being a little snake, just for a while. Once upon a time, she became a little girl like she was once before. That little girl had never died, not really— her heart had stopped beating, but she was still the same underneath ferocious strength and hunger.
The little girl watched helplessly as a goddess killed innocent people, or at least as innocent as vampires could be. They couldn't fight back, she knew— and even if they had, they were no match for a goddess anointed with blood, who had carved her way through history with a smile sharper than her teeth.
By the time the little girl struggled to her feet and entered the room, half their number had been killed and the only trace of their murderer was an open window. Their blood was cold and dead as it stained the floorboards, but the little girl fell to her knees in it nonetheless. For a moment, her tears for strangers mingled with their blood.
She realized that she was thirsty.
(—I can't stop, they're dead and I talked to them and why can't I stop?)
Once upon a time, a little girl died in truth.
In her place, a little snake rose up with bloody lips.
