Cinderella probably should have been at least slightly suspicious when she saw that the invitation to Prince Charming’s royal ball was addressed specifically to her, a lowly servant girl never allowed out of her stepmother’s sight, and not to her glamorous stepsisters, who had been repeatedly sending letters to every kingdom in which they heavily exaggerated their wealth and status and begged to be invited to any and all royal events, but she was far too ecstatic to analyze the situation very thoroughly.
She was also extremely overwhelmed because the ball was being held that very night, All Hallows’ Eve, and she had nothing even remotely appropriate to wear. Trying to remain optimistic, Cinderella changed into her slightly less torn-up rags, posed confidently in the mirror, and then broke down bawling.
Her stepmother rudely barged into the attic and said, “Quit crying, useless girl. Your tears won’t bake my pumpkin pie for you!”
Cinderella had forgotten that her stepmother’s quarter-birthday party was scheduled for that night and that she had been tasked with preparing enough food to feed approximately three hundred people even though only twenty-six had been invited. She reluctantly trudged down from the attic and out to the pumpkin patch.
She recalled that her stepmother had specifically requested that the pie be made from the largest, grandest pumpkin in the patch. Fortunately, there was a single pumpkin that was clearly larger and grander than all the others. Unfortunately, that pumpkin was the absolute farthest from the kitchen, so Cinderella would have to carry it a great distance.
Cinderella got a knife from the kitchen and got to work severing the pumpkin’s stem. While doing so, she resumed sobbing about the ball. Unbeknownst to her, a single tear landed on the invitation, which she had been clutching with her left hand.
“Why are you weeping, beautiful girl?” asked a voice.
Cinderella looked all around and identified the source of the voice as a nine-inch-tall woman with bright purple wings that looked exactly like a butterfly’s except somehow more beautiful. Many people in that time and place would immediately identify such a woman as a dangerous witch, but Cinderella trusted her wholeheartedly because her voice was kinder than any that she had heard since the death of her father nine years earlier.
“I got invited to Prince Charming’s ball, but it’s tonight, and I don’t have anything to wear!” Cinderella tried her best to explain through tears.
“Well, we can definitely fix that!” said the woman. She waved a glimmering stick all around Cinderella while speaking in a foreign language (possibly Latin), and Cinderella’s clothing transformed into a ball gown and slippers a million times more beautiful than the prettiest outfit she had ever seen. The woman added, “By the way, I’m Hyacinth, your fairy godmother!”
“I didn’t know that I had a fairy godmother!” Cinderella exclaimed. Sounding a bit dissatisfied, she added, “Why did you wait twenty-two years to show up?”
“I was only assigned to you about forty-five seconds ago,” Hyacinth explained.
Cinderella smiled slightly and then once again broke down into tears, for she had the perfect outfit to wear to the ball but no way to get there.
As though reading her mind, Hyacinth waved her stick around the pumpkin that Cinderella was going to bake into the pie, and it instantaneously transformed into a grand, bejeweled carriage fit for a princess. She then pointed her stick in the direction of the village cemetery and uttered a rather long chant. A minute later, two beautiful mares came galloping from that direction with a handsome coachman straggling behind.
The coachman attached the horses onto the carriage and had them pull it out of the pumpkin patch before he climbed into his seat.
“Oh, I’d so love to go,” said Cinderella, “but my stepmother will torment me if she finds out I was gone!”
“We can fix that as well!” said Hyacinth. She once again waved her stick around Cinderella and uttered some more words, and a duplicate Cinderella wearing the same rags that the original Cinderella had been wearing a few minutes earlier appeared. Without saying a word, the duplicate grabbed the knife that was still in Cinderella’s hand and made a beeline for the next largest and grandest pumpkin in the patch.
“Well, that settles that,” said Hyacinth. “Goodbye for now!” She vanished into thin air.
Cinderella hopped into the carriage, and she was on her way to the ball.
Now, had she traveled more or studied the geography of the area, Cinderella would have known that it would take seventeen hours to reach Charmington with the fastest of horses. Alas, she was completely ignorant of this, so she was not skeptical in the slightest when she arrived at the Charming Palace just over thirty minutes after she left.
The exterior of the palace was truly breathtaking, but Cinderella paid it no attention as she excitedly hurried inside.
Cinderella had no idea what a royal ball should look like, but what she saw seemed completely wrong. The room was extravagantly decorated yet poorly lit and rather unclean, and it reeked of decay. The two thousand or so attendees, all clothed in rags of similar quality to the ones that Cinderella typically wore, were all half-heartedly performing the same five dance moves repeatedly without even attempting to match the music.
In the midst of this stood a very handsome and very uncomfortable-looking man whom Cinderella immediately identified as Prince Charming. As she made her way toward him, the face of a dancer caught her eye.
This dancer looked exactly like Cinderella’s mother, who had succumbed to a disease that had been running rampant some seventeen years earlier. Dancing next to her was a man who looked exactly like Cinderella’s father.
Cinderella ran over to them and tried to hug them, but they continued dancing as though she wasn’t there. Eventually, she gave up and walked over to Prince Charming.
“Good evening, Your Highness,” they both said at once, followed by, “Huh?”
“Are you not Prince Charming?” asked Cinderella.
“What? Of course not!” said the man. “I’m Edward, son of Edward. Are you not Princess Charming, in whose name the ball is being hosted?”
“I didn’t know that there was a Princess Charming! I was informed that this was Prince Charming’s ball,” explained Cinderella. She added, “I’m Eleanor, daughter of William, but everyone in my village calls me Cinderella because I’m… often covered in cinders.”
Before either of them had a chance to contemplate the situation, a loud voice called, “May I have your attention, everyone!” Cinderella recognized the voice as Hyacinth’s.
All of the dancers immediately stood as straight as soldiers and faced towards one end of the ballroom, where Cinderella could make out the silhouette of a large, imposing woman.
“We have gathered here on this 31st day of October, Anno Domini one thousand thirteen, for a truly momentous occasion: the crowning of your king and queen!” said Hyacinth’s voice. “I have endeavored for centuries to find candidates of suitable power, and tonight is the only night this millennium during which the ceremony can take place!”
Cinderella and Edward exchanged terrified glances. The woman made her way toward them, and as she did, all of the attendees continuously turned to face her.
“I know that you two must have many questions,” she told Cinderella and Edward, “but we have not the time for thorough explanations right now. All I can tell you now is that with your combined power, every corpse that ever lived shall rise again tonight!”
The woman had two crowns attached to hooks on her skirt. She took one off and put it on Edward’s head before he could react. His eyes glowed bright purple, and he stood up completely straight before grabbing the other crown from the skirt and meandering towards Cinderella.
Cinderella knew that she did not want that crown on her head. She began to run but was immediately blocked by a wall of attendees, which she now realized were reanimated corpses. In a moment of panic, she flung herself at Edward, knocking the crown out of his hands and the other crown off of his head. As he collapsed, he managed to grab the crown that had been on his head and throw it onto the woman’s head.
The woman seemed shocked, then dazed. She sat down and examined the stone floor, tracing its pattern with her finger. Cinderella placed the second crown on the woman’s head as well, and she began sobbing uncontrollably and then lost consciousness.
“Are you alright?” Cinderella asked Edward as she helped him up.
“I think so,” he said, “but that was the most terrifying year of my life.”
“But it was only a few seconds!” exclaimed Cinderella.
Edward shrugged, and the two of them pushed through the undead attendees to the door. As they shuffled down the stairs, they each lost one shoe. (Legend has it that whoever can fit their foot perfectly into one of the shoes is destined to wear one of the crowns, but the shoes have been kept under tight security at the Charmington Heritage Museum since 1877.)
Cinderella’s carriage was still parked outside, but it now looked like a moldy wheeled pumpkin with seats inside, and its beautiful horses and coachman now looked like reanimated corpses. Edward climbed inside, and Cinderella sat next to the coachman. With some difficulty, she was able to get the horses to move, and some distant onlookers would later report having seen a horse-drawn pumpkin head to the north.
As the narrator, I sincerely wish that I could tell you what ultimately happened to dear Edward son of Edward and Eleanor daughter of William, but alas, time is the inevitable destroyer of all knowledge, and their fates have been lost to the centuries. The part of the story that I was able to tell you was constructed almost exclusively from the jumbled testimonies of a woman who was convicted of multiple crimes after being found stumbling around outside an abandoned castle containing two thousand human bodies while wearing two presumably stolen crowns on November 1, 1313.
