“I don’t understand, Mother!” whined Anastasia. “I don’t understand it at all!”

  “It was her,” Mother said coldly, her voice vibrating with suppressed rage. “The girl at the ball. It was Cinderella!”

  “But how could that be!?” continued Anastasia, her sluggish brain obviously struggling to process the math. “Her dress! Oh, and how did she even get there!?”

  “She was getting help, obviously,” said Mother. “Probably from one of the other noble houses, some rival of mine. She probably contacted them. They gave her a ride, and supplied the dress. I don’t know what she promised them... but it paid off, obviously.”

  “The audacity!” cried Anastasia. “After everything we’ve done for her! How could she, Mother?”

  “As if you wouldn’t jump on an opportunity like that!” Mother scolded her. “Enough of that. She is gone, probably for good. And good riddance. She was a clumsy servant at best.”

  I stayed quiet through all of this, my brain starting to fill with dark, poisonous thoughts again. That ball. How I had suffered through it. All the grueling effort we made to make a good impression, and all the while, Cinderella must have been laughing to herself.

  I remembered smiling at the Prince when Mother presented us, and how he had rolled his eyes as if we were clowns in a circus. Not a moment later, he noticed Cinderella. She wasn't even looking at him, yet he trotted over to her like a lovestruck dog, leaving us utterly humiliated in his wake.

  In that moment, I wanted Cinderella to hurt.

  “What will we do now, Mother?” Anastasia continued whining endlessly. “Who will mend my clothes, wash my shoes? Oh, and clean the house, and make breakfast?”

  “I will... hire a servant,” murmured Mother, looking thoughtful. “It will need to be someone cheap...”

  “Oh, and scrub the floors, and do the laundry,” continued Anastasia. “Even feeding the chickens! Who will do it now!?”

  “YOU DO IT!” Mother snapped at her. “You lazy, brainless, spoiled brat of a daughter! If I’m not mistaken, Cinderella probably missed the feeding this morning in all the commotion. You can start now!”

  “But I can’t, Mother,” cried Anastasia, tears welling in her eyes. “I’m not... ” sniff “...a servant girl...”

  “Oh, just shut it!” I shouted. “I will feed the stupid chickens!”

  I just needed any excuse to get out of that room. If I spent another minute with my sister's insufferable whining, I swore I was going to strangle her.

  I stormed out into the garden, looking for the chicken coop, when I heard a terrible noise. It sounded like wet wheezing and a deep, rattling gurgle.

  I looked toward the source, and there I saw him. Lucifer.

  He was lying on the cobblestones at the base of the tall stone tower where Cinderella’s room was.

  And he was... something was very wrong with him.

  When I looked closer, my stomach lurched. I saw thick, dark blood pouring out of his mouth. It was pooling from his stomach, too, and one of his hind legs looked clearly deformed and twisted at a sickening angle. I gasped. A jagged shard of bone pierced through the skin of his back.

  It was horrifying to look at. My eyes immediately filled with tears. “Oh, Lucifer!”

  I looked up. He must have fallen from the high window. It was a massive drop, even for a cat. And Lucifer was a very fat cat.

  “Mother! Mother!” I shouted. “Mother, it's Lucifer!”

  Mother and Anastasia came hurrying out to the yard.

  “Oh no!” shouted Anastasia, covering her mouth. “He looks horrible! What happened to him!?”

  Lucifer kept wheezing and gurgling, more blood spilling past his teeth.

  “I think he fell.” I pointed up at the high window.

  Mother looked down at him in heavy silence. Then she crouched down and petted his head gently.

  “Poor old friend,” she said softly. “You were with us a long time.”

  “What do you mean, Mother?” I asked, panic rising in my throat. “Is he... is he going to...?”

  “Yes, my dear,” Mother said flatly. “Lucifer is dying. He was... he was a part of our family. More than Cinderella ever was. It truly saddens me to lose him.”

  “Isn’t there anything we can do?” cried Anastasia, the tears returning to her eyes.

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  “No,” Mother said. “In his state, the best we can do is help him cross over to the other side.”

  “But we couldn’t!” I said, my voice cracking. I didn’t like many things in this world, truly. But Lucifer was one of the few things I actually cared about. As fat and stupid and mean as he was, I grew up with him.

  “Look at him,” Mother said impatiently. “He is far beyond help, and he is suffering, greatly so. It is cruel to let him linger in this agony.”

  Mother then stood up and walked away, returning a moment later holding a large, heavy rock.

  “He lived a long life for a cat,” she reasoned coldly.

  Then I saw something strange.

  Lucifer's eyes locked onto the rock. He opened them wide. It was exactly as if he understood what was about to happen. Then, he tried... to move, I think.

  He looked panicked, hysterical, like he was desperately trying to escape death. His broken limbs weren't working, but he was thrashing, trying to crawl away! I wasn't imagining it! This... this was wrong.

  “Look at how he suffers,” Mother said, entirely misreading Lucifer's desperate muscle twitching.

  “NO!” I shouted, throwing myself to the ground and shielding Lucifer with my own body. “He doesn’t want it! STOP!”

  “Move aside, you fool!” Mother ordered. “Stop acting like a child. You are doing a disservice to the poor creature!”

  But I looked him dead in the eye, and I somehow knew. He knew what she was going to do, and he didn’t want this!

  I carefully scooped his broken body off the ground, ignoring the blood soaking into my dress, and ran away with him to my room.

  I quickly folded some soft blankets and laid him gently in the corner of my bedroom.

  “Get better!” I whispered to him, and patted the trembling cat gently.

  Looking at his mangled state… I didn’t really think he would get better. He was still wheezing and gurgling blood. But… at least he didn’t look like he was suffering quite as horribly in the soft blankets.

  “At least be comfortable…” I murmured to him. “That's all I can do for you.”

  I never really felt this much for the old cat. He was just… always there, fat and lazy Lucifer. But for some reason, for him to die like this... it was just too sad. And I couldn’t carry any more sadness today. I was at my breaking point.

  So I just sat there on the floor and stroked his fur.

  I sat there a long time, my focus slowly sliding away from Lucifer's ruined body and settling heavily onto my own miserable existence.

  I couldn't help but wonder who would sit on the floor and stroke my hair when I finally collapsed. No one, a bitter voice in my head answered.

  Then I noticed the mirror hanging on the wall just above him.

  I didn’t want to, but I look into it anyway.

  It's never a good idea to look in the mirror when you're in a dark, self-hating mood.

  Ugly. Ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly.

  I ripped the mirror off the wall and hurled it violently onto the floor, shattering the glass into jagged shards.

  “I’m sorry, Lucifer,” I wept, my vision blurring with hot tears. “I just can’t... I can’t stand myself.”

  Lucifer just kept wheezing and gurgling in response.

  “You've got it way worse,” I said apologetically. “You are probably dying, after all, just like Mother said. But you know what?” I sniffed, wiping the hot tears from my face.

  “It doesn’t look that bad to me right now!” I cried. “If I happened to fall from that high window... it maybe wouldn't be so bad. Well, I hope you make it. You did nothing wrong, Lucifer.”

  He suddenly looked up at me with those yellow cat eyes. He struggled for every breath, but he kept staring at me, almost like he understood my pain. But he was just a cat, and it was silly of me to think so.

  I crawled into my bed and cried myself to sleep.

  When I finally woke up, it was pitch dark outside. Already evening, or perhaps deep into the night. I had no way to know.

  I suddenly remembered Lucifer and immediately jumped out of bed to check on him.

  He was... alive.

  And he wasn’t wheezing or gurgling anymore. Well, maybe just a very faint, quiet wheeze. He was still covered in dried blood, and his leg was still horribly misshapen, but his breathing seemed steady.

  “Are you feeling better, Lucifer?” I asked in a small, hopeful voice. “Are you really going to pull through?”

  He didn’t answer, because he was a cat. I reached down and gave him a gentle rub on the top of his head.

  And this time, he didn’t hiss at me.

  He looked up at me with big, bright eyes.

  Then, he smiled.

  He smiled like a cat should never do. Cats couldn’t smile at all actually, and certainly not like this. His smile was wide, full of sharp teeth, some broken, still covered in dried blood.

  Then his eyes... his green eyes suddenly shone, brightly!

  I was suddenly terrified. The blood in my veins ran ice-cold. Something was very, very wrong with Lucifer.

  Then he slapped my face. Hard. With fully extended, razor-sharp claws.

  I felt a blinding, sharp pain tear across my cheek. I felt the deep cuts, the hot bleeding, but then came more... more pain, a deep, sickening disorientation. The whole room started spinning out of control.

  Then, it all turned pitch black.

  I felt weightless for a second, until my body slammed into something hard and cold beneath me.

  I forced my eyes open and found myself lying flat on a pristine, white marble floor.

  I looked around, scrambling to my knees. The marble floor was actually a sprawling road that stretched endlessly into infinity. Beyond the edges of the white stone was absolutely nothing—just a suffocating, empty black void.

  But that wasn't the worst of it. To my utter horror, standing upon the white marble were skeletons. Hundreds, thousands of them, arranged on the road in neat, endless rows that faded into the dark horizon.

  I felt weirdly calm. I should have been screaming in terror at this point. But none of it felt real…

  I stood up from the floor and looked closely at the nearest skeleton. He was terrifying, but there wasn’t exactly anything else to look at in this void.

  As I stepped closer, a horrible stench of decay hit me. The bones of the skeleton were drenched in fresh blood, but the crimson liquid wasn't just dripping—it was searing, hissing, and boiling against the white bone, as if heated by a blazing, invisible fire.

  Despite the absolute horror of it all, I stepped even closer. I felt a bizarre calmness and a morbid curiosity toward the nightmare standing in front of me.

  Suddenly, the skeleton's head snapped toward me. Its empty eye sockets flared with shining blue light.

  In one blindingly quick motion, he reached out and grabbed my arms. His bony hands burned like roaring fire. I thrash wildly to get away, but his grip was like iron...

  Then, it opened its jaw and screamed.

  “RRAAKKKHHAAAA!”

  The scream wasn't just a sound; it was a physical force. I felt a heavy, dense energy tear through my skin and sink deep into my bones. It filled my veins with molten agony, burning me alive from the inside out. The pain was excruciating, absolute fire consuming my soul.

  I threw my head back to scream, but no sound came out of my throat.

  Then, everything finally, truly, went black.

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