Older than the Fairy Godmother herself, and far more powerful, the small, oval mirror hung on the wall in the only room of a crystalline tower at the edge of the world. It's ability to speak and look through the ages led many to believe that it was sentient. And indeed it was. Sentient and extremely dangerous. Silent, appearing harmless, it had watched from the very beginning. It watched, millions of years ago, as beings that defied imagination used technology identical to magic to harness a rouge planet and put it into orbit as a third moon. The mirror looked on with intense curiosity, one if it's only emotions, as the same beings retrieved an enormous crystal tower from the ravaged surface of the new moon. The insignificant looking mirror had watched through unseen eyes as kings rose and fell and nations became great and then became corrupt and imploded. Recently, at the orders of a woman who's very name the fairies refused to speak, the mirror had taken to looking after a young and very beautiful girl. Though the young princess didnt know it, from the first time the mirror saw her, it knew that she was far more important than it could ever imagine. Silently, the mirror had been observing the girl for almost a year. It was only now, as it watched a man clad in leather and furs advance on the girl with a wickedly sharp axe, that fear, another of it's few emotions, set in. Through unseen eyes watching from a pond with a surface like glass, the mirror saw the man spare the girl, driving the axe into a felled tree and fleeing from the forest clearing. The girl slouched with her back to the tree, chest heaving, eyes wild. Leaving the pond and returning to the tower at the end of the world, the mirror'a silky voice formed a single message:
"The Huntsman has failed. Snow White lives."
And, in a world where night was eternal and time was as irrelevant as a grain of sand, from an endless sleep the Queen awoke.
