Grimhilde, holding a glass of wine in one hand and an apple in the other, swept lightly down the spiral staircase, thunder growling at each step. She arrived at a door just as a flash of lightning struck. On the other side of this door was the one room in her castle she hadn't been in since her parents had kicked her out. Her old magic room.
This small room had become dank and cobwebby from disuse. Old skulls she had used to play her friends littered the floor and tables. Many witch's creatures probably inhabited, including spiders that had made a few homes and frogs attracted by the dampness of the room.
The only thing that seemed out of place was the large raven on one of the desks. It was the same one she had sent out to deliver her letter to Matilda. As the thunder rolled, the bird dove into a skull.
Getting to work, Grimhilde swept over to her ancient cauldron she had sneaked into her room early in her teenage years. A spellbook laid open on a table, and she turned to the page she needed. Then she found it. A transformation potion.
She took up a spoon and searched the cabinets for ingredients. For the Shape-Shifting Potion, she would need lacewing flies, leeches, powdered bicorn horn, knotgrass, fluxweed harvested at full moon, shredded boomslang skin, and a hair, in this case, of her mother. In normal cases, this potion would take a month to craft, but Grimhilde had proved that she was no normal witch. She simply crushed some things, said a few words, and used a time gap spell to create her new look.
Grimhilde poured the contents of her cauldron into her wine, which turned a sick shade of green. She raised the cup to the sky to give it the magical energy from the lightning it needed. Gathering her nerves, she guzzled the glass in one gulp. Immediately, she dropped the cup as her back arched and she let out a retching sound. The room around her seemed to spin and shake, and colors blended and shifted across the room. She felt like she was rapidly going insane. Then… it stopped.
Grimhilde stood up as straight as she and looked at her reflection in a large piece of the wine glass. She'd grown a big, bumpy nose; white, straw-like hair; sunken eyes; and several warts and wrinkles. As she opened her mouth to lick her raisined lips, all but about five teeth fell to the floor. Her royal robes had been replaced by beggar's black clothing.
Looking back at her battered spellbook, the hag flipped the pages until she’d found what she was looking for: the Sleeping Death.
The idea behind Grimhilde’s plan was this: Matilda would need a king with whom to rule her soon-to-be kingdom. The only way to break the Sleeping Death was by “true love’s kiss” - a term Grimhilde had made up to mean a kiss from the guy you obsess over. She had created this potion to see if said guy, one Gregor Eisenburg, liked her back. She woke up two days after she’d taken the potion herself to find that it wore off after time and that Gregor hadn’t even known she’d existed. Anyways, for this potion, she would use the apple she’d brought with her as the medium for the potion.
She began a new cauldron and mixed some items together (what they were she couldn’t say; she’d gotten them from someone in Mantua, Italy) and tied the stem of the apple to a string. Then she dipped the apple into the Sleeping Death and allowed it to soak up the potion, and she whispered the name of Prince Charming over the cauldron. The potion swirled around the apple, turning it green, then yellow, then black. She pulled the fruit from the Sleeping Death. The potion clung to it and dripped off of it, forming the shape of a skull on the surface. When the fluid had been removed from the apple, the black skin gradually reddened until the entire apple was deeply rouged. Grimhilde smiled satisfiedly. This would work quite well, she thought.
She looked at the black bird, still hiding in its skull. She expained, “In order for the potion to work completely, the witch needs to perform an act of wrongdoing that reverses the work another creature did. I need you to fill a pitcher with water and set it at the bottom of the steps leading to the docks.” At this, the raven flew out of the room.
The queen, or rather, at this point, the former queen, inhaled deeply. She knew that she would not be coming out of tonight alive. And not in the sense that sentimental authors use for main characters they don’t want to kill, but still want to make readers think the character was actually in danger. By the end of the night, Grimhilde would be physically, completely, irrevocably dead. And, unlike most dying characters, her life did not flash before her eyes in these final moments before the point of no return. She did not visualize her few memories of her parents’ faces; nor did she flip through her spellbooks one last time; nor did she even think of her only friend in the world, Matilda. No, what she felt was acceptance. She was dying. And that was alright.
She placed her apple into a basket of other apples. She made sure to put the poisoned apple on the top of the stack so that she would remember which one to give to Matilda. Grimhilde took up the basket and hobbled out a side door into the chilly night air.
She followed a promenade to a small flight of stairs, at the bottom of which she found a pitcher of water by a skeleton coming from a set of bars, probably someone who had tried to escape years ago, when her parents had still been in power. Grimhilde kicked the pitcher over and cackled, “Have a drink!” She would have to practice her old lady talk on the ride over to Matilda’s.
Having fulfilled the action required to make the potion reach its full potential, she could now depart for the dwarves’. She continued walking to her private docks and climbed into her least conspicuous vessel: a simple, unadorned rowboat with a single wooden seat. As she made herself as comfortable as the splinters in the bench would allow her to be, she picked up the ore from the bottom boards and set sail for the last night of her life.
