Cinderella Dressed in Ashes tgd-2

by Cameron Jace

  In her awe, Shew called Cerené the God of Small Things. She was able to create life through her pipe, only it was a short-lived life. The Gods must have chosen Cerené for a reason. But for some other reasons, decided they wouldn’t allow how to create a full life.

  Shew smiled, watching Cerené run with her blowpipe under the rainbow. She wondered if all Gods were like her, creators of magnificent things, yet as lost as Cerené. What if the Gods created the entire world by using their imaginations to overcome their pain?

  While Shew was watching Cerené play, she heard girls singing a nursery rhyme in the distance. They were tapping their feet and jumping rope somewhere behind the trees. Shew thought they sounded like the creepy girls Loki had told her he’d heard in Sorrow. They were singing a new song:

  Cinderella dressed in ashes,

  one glass slipper and some matches,

  burned the world all down in ember,

  ash to ash and sin to cinder.

  Shew closed her eyes, wishing the voices would go away. She’d never known who the girls were. She feared their rhymes, though, and thought they always foretold a sinister future.

  Instead, she watched Cerené happily play in the reservoir, remembering how they had gotten here after Candy House had melted.

  Cerené had shown Shew the way to Rainbow’s End. They had walked in silence for about an hour. Cerené had gotten her single glass slipper and now walked normally. Baba Yaga had escaped, and Shew dared not ask about what had happened while she was knocked out. Splash had told her to look for the Phoenix, and here she was, walking side by side with her. Hell, the Phoenix was Shew’s best friend.

  They had passed by the small village of Furry Tell, but Cerené demanded they shouldn’t stop there.

  A match made in Hell—I mean Heaven—I must say.

  “What are you doing, Joy,” Cerené said, standing in the middle of the reservoir blowing her pipe and mixing the molten with the Rainbow’s colors.

  “I’m coming,” Shew said, waking up from the recent memory. She walked over and stepped into the lake of light. It felt ticklish at first, like she was standing in a mist.

  Rainbow’s End was actually a rainbow’s end. Shew didn’t know where the other rainbow’s end was, but she was sure they had one end of the rainbow in Sorrow. If that didn’t say enough about their kingdom, then she didn’t know what would.

  For a moment, Shew pitied her own mother, Bloody Mary, and Night Sorrow. Whoever had surrendered to the hate and darkness in their souls could not have laid eyes on Rainbow’s End. How could succumb to darkness once you saw this place. She looked up at the arching rainbow curving away in the sky beyond the midnight trees. The rainbow was visible in the dark.

  Cerené had melted her mix with the fire that had been burning Candy House and continued blowing it all the way to Rainbow’s End. It broke Shew’s heart that her friend was closer to death with each breath she blew, but there was no reasoning against the happiness in Cerené’s eyes, even when it meant being one step closer to death.

  Cerené breathed to keep the fire alive so she could mix it with the rainbow from the lake. It was the only way to color her magic glass art. She said that ordinary glassblowers in the world used quartz and other natural colored stones—Shew knew nothing of these stones. But Cerené explained that she was no ordinary glassblower. She was a Keeper of the Art.

  Now, all the huge glass flowers she created were colored like butterfly wings. She’d breathed a glass castle for them, which they spent some time inside, but it didn’t last long after the fire died. Cerené had even blown a small rocking boat, which floated upon the Lake of Light—Shew didn’t question how—but that fire died too. When all her molten fires ended, Cerené wasn’t going to go back to get fire from the furnace in Candy House, not today.

  If only Cerené could create fire, her powers would have been complete, and would have created her own wonderland to live in.

  “Do you have any idea why you have been given that talent?” Shew asked while they sat on top of a hill next to the Rainbow’s End. Cerené had played all she wanted and was exhausted. Where they sat, the rainbow was an arm’s length away.

  “It’s magic, not talent,” Cerené said. “But I don’t know why. Must there be a reason for magic? Its fun, and I love it.”

  “Were you cursed when you born or something?” Shew said playfully. “I know I was cursed.”

  “You were?” Cerené wondered.

  “It’s a long story. I’d rather have to make my own choices than walk in the footsteps of a destiny I was made to fulfill.”

  “So you’re not just a lunatic vampire like your mother?”

  Shew laughed, “No, there is actually a logical reason for my existence.”

  “I wish I knew of the reason of my existence,” Cerené said absently. “But I don’t care. I am having fun,” she snapped.

  “You think we’re good friends, Cerené?” Shew said with caution.

  “Friends forever,” Cerené giggled.

  “So could I ask you something without you being upset?” Shew said.

  “Something like what?” Cerené was as reluctant as Shew.

  They locked eyes for a while, the moment freezing and time stopping. Shew thought it was finally the right time she’d ask Cerené for some clarifications without her getting upset. She inhaled deeply, and tried to ask Cerené as gently as possible.

  “Like where you’re from for instance? I promise I will listen without judgment. I’m not going to question your answers like I did in the Field of Dreams.”

  “I was born on Murano Island,” Cerené said casually. She’d been feeling much better since she’d arrived at Rainbow’s End. She felt safe here, the place where her art took its optimum form.

  “Murano? Never heard of it. Where is it?”

  “Near Venice,” Cerené said without elaborating.

  “That’s where?” Shew knew it was in Italy—another thing she’d learned from one of her victim’s phones in the castle. She still wanted to hear it from Cerené.

  “Italia,” Cerené’s eyes widened. “It’s practically an island,” she lowered her head to whisper something to Shew. “It’s shaped like a shoe,” she made an invisible shoe with her fingers.

  “Oh, really?” Shew said, trying to solve some of the puzzle, and figure out what Carmilla had to do with this.

  “They say a prince lost a poor girl he loved, but found her through the glass slipper she left behind,” the story seemed to mean the world to Cerené. “The gods honored their love by shaping Italia after a shoe.”

  “That’s a fabulous story,” Shew pretended she hadn’t heard it before. “Any idea who the prince or the girl is?”

  “It’s a fairy tale, Shew. Be reasonable,” Cerené said. “Sometimes you strike me as naïve.”

  “So you speak Italian?” Shew changed the subject.

  Embarrassed, Cerené shook her head no, “I don’t know how.”

  “You’re an immigrant, right?”

  “You make it sound like an insult,” Cerené’s eyebrows narrowed.

  “Not at all,” Shew said. “I think everyone in Sorrow is an immigrant, except my father and mother. How did you come to Sorrow then, and with whom?”

  “I really don’t remember. I must have been very young. I have some memories of the ship I came on though.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I remember hiding underneath fish on a smaller boat for days so they wouldn’t find me,” Cerené said. “I must have had someone with me, but I don’t know who, because I was very young.”

  “You remember why you were hiding?”

  “I am probably an illegal immigrant,” Cerené’s lips twitched, just slightly. “I do remember the ship’s name for some reason though.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Jolly Roger, that’s its name. There was a man with a hook instead of a hand on it, but that’s all.”

  “That’s a rather a detailed memory for so
meone who doesn’t remember much,” Shew remarked.

  “Like I said, I must have been very young. You know when we first met, I’d been here for a year or so,” Cerené said.

  Shew tried not to look surprised, but everything around her seemed connected. How was it that Cerené had traveled on the Jolly Roger, and why didn’t she have any other memories of her journey?

  Jolly Roger was the name of the ship Shew and Loki embarked on in the Jawigi Dreamory. It was the pirate ship that attached Angel and Carmilla’s ship in the middle of the ocean when they were escaping Night Sorrow.

  Shew didn’t comment on the Jolly Roger. She preferred to hear Cerené’s story.

  “Once I arrived in Sorrow, I was sold as a slave to…” Cerené lowered her eyes, and looked like she didn’t want to say. “Some family you know.”

  “Does your family live in the forest?”

  “It’s not my family,” Cerené gritted her teeth, looking at Shew. “I have to live with them or I won’t be allowed to stay in Sorrow as an immigrant. They threaten to expose me as being an illegal immigrant if I don’t do as they say. You know what’s ironic about this? Not that I am afraid they’d deport me, but that I don’t know where to go if they do.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to go back to Murano Island?”

  “I should want to, but my gut instinct tells me not to,” Cerené said. “I don’t know why I get that feeling.”

  “I see,” Shew nodded, making sure to ask her questions slowly, watching Cerené’s temper. She wasn’t going to ask her again how it was possible to know her mother while she was too young to remember her. “Can you tell me about…?”

  “Bianca?” Cerené smiled unexpectedly. “She taught me how to become a glassblower.”

  “She was a glassblower herself?”

  “The best, she’s my mentor,” Cerené laced her fingers together. “She could create over a hundred glass artifacts in one day. She had the rarest talents and breathing methods. She knew every stone, every ingredient and mix. She knew of metals that no one had ever heard of. I once saw her turn iron into glass.”

  “Wow,” Shew said. “She must have been extremely respected and appreciated.”

  Cerené’s lips twitched again. She curled her fingers together, “Not really,” she said. “You see, my mother originally lived in Venice, a famous city for its lagoons and glassblowing among other things. But as much as glassblowing was a wonderful art, it was also a threat to the locals.”

  “A threat?”

  “Like I showed you, it needs a lot of fire. Houses in Venice were made of wood. Once in a while the glassblowers lit a house on fire, accidentally.”

  “So the locals considered a glassblower a danger to their houses?”

  “Not just that,” Cerené seemed reluctant. “Venetians thought of fire as a bad thing and that it came from the deepest pits of hell. Burning someone’s house was a serious sin because fire was loathed. It is true that they had plenty of water to extinguish the fire since the city floated on it, but in contrast, it had a significant meaning to the Venetians. God had created them a nation of water. Fire was their enemy. They feared it and all kinds of superstitions were attached to it.”

  “I see,” Shew said. “So your mother’s art wasn’t appreciated.”

  “It’s ironic because glass was one of Venice’s most profitable incomes—very few understood that fire was an essential part of making it. Visitors came from all over the world to see and buy our glass,” Cerené explained.

  “I assume the Venetian authorities prohibited anyone from exposing the secrets of making that kind of beautiful glass art,” Shew said.

  “Yes, that’s true. But how do you know?”

  “Because there is always big talk about glass in the Schloss,” Shew said. “My mother spent a lot of money to import glass from all over the world. It’s very expensive and rarely as good as Venetian art, which is almost impossible to acquire. In addition, glass in general is very precious in Sorrow. You must know that.”

  “I know,” Cerené nodded in a way that led Shew to think she knew much more than just that.

  “So how did your mother cope with the conflict of people in Venice hating and loving glassblowers at the same time?” Shew asked.

  “At some point, priests accused glassblowers of communing with the dark side. They said that only an evil art would need that amount of fire to be created,” Cerené said. “They believed that the fire that lit Hell helped in creating fabulous art. So, to some extremists, glass was the art of the devil.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “This whole life is absurd,” Cerené sighed. “They were concerned that the production of glass in Venice had increased immensely, especially my mother’s and some of her friends.”

  “You just said your mother could create more than a hundred glass artifacts per day,” Shew said.

  “And it didn’t cross your mind why?” Cerené said. “As amazing as her talent was, she couldn’t produce that amount of fire needed in a single day. It was impossible.”

  “How did she do it then?”

  “Well, the Venetians extremists explanation was that she had access to a volcano that fed Hell itself,” Cerené said.

  “Let’s skip the ignorant beliefs,” Shew said. “I want to know how your mother really did it.”

  It took Cerené a moment to permit the words to come out of her throat, “My mother wasn’t just any glassblower. She was a…”

  Shew held her breath. She suddenly thought she knew the answer.

  “A Phoenix,” Cerené said, her eyes darted away from Shew’s as if it was a sin.

  Shew exhaled. She knew this was going to be the answer. The same way she and her mother were vampires in different ways, Cerené and her mother were Phoenixes in their own individual ways. She still needed to know what a Phoenix did exactly.

  “A phoenix is originally a bird that rises from the ashes after it burns,” Shew said. “I don’t quite understand what your mother was.”

  “A Firebringer, some call her a Firemage,” Cerené said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Well, the right description of a Phoenix, especially when you’re a glassblower, is artists with the breathing talent to make glass, but few of them also have a certain power.”

  “Which is?”

  “They could create fire at will,” Cerené said.

  19

  Pandora’s Box

  “Bianca could create fire at will?” Shew asked. “That’s why she could produce so much glass, I guess.”

  “It’s a gift from the Creators,” Cerené said.

  “The same Creators who’d shaped Italy after a shoe?”

  Cerené nodded, “It’s a very rare gift among glassblowers. I heard only seven women in the world had this power among the ages. Three of them were in Venice. My mother was one of them, and I don’t know anything about the other two.”

  It was on the tip of Shew’s tongue; asking Cerené if she had any idea if her mother had burned the Wall of Thorns and Candy House. She was just grateful Cerené opened up to her without a temper, and she wouldn’t risk changing that at the moment.

  “Unfortunately, the story doesn’t stop here,” Cerené said. “To the extremists, who influenced the church, creating fire was considered an act of witchcraft. Venice was very skeptical—and secretive—about the art of making glass, and a rumor began to spread. It warned of witches who had the ability to create fire from hell, and were soon going to burn the city. The locals believed it, and decided to burn the witches.”

  “But why would they? Nothing burned but houses. Why would they foretell the burning of Venice?”

  “Teatro Le Fenice, Venice’s most famous opera house, burned the day after,” Cerené said.

  “Le Fenice? I haven’t heard about it.”

  “It’s very famous. Check out the history books. The Venetian Carnival took place all around it later,” Cerené said.

  “I assume the city went
rogue,” Shew said.

  “The hunt for the witching glassblowers began, and all glassblowers in Venice suffered a great deal of humiliation, and were burned at the stake for years. I’m sure you’ve heard about falsely accused witches being burned at the stake.”

  “Ignorance and stupidity, the true apocalypses of the world,” Shew commented. She had heard all about the burning of witches in Lohr where her father was originally from.

  “Eventually, the governors of Venice decided to solve the matter,” Cerené said, sounding bored. Although she was bursting with knowledge, it meant the least to her. Unlike Shew, all Cerené wanted was to make Art.

  “They decided to catch all glassblowers and send them to the Island of Murano. It was the best thing to do to stop the killing and save the secretive art from spreading all over the world.”

  “And that’s how you came to be born in Murano,” Shew said.

  “My mother was pregnant when she was banned to Murano,” Cerené said. “She told me someone advised her to name me Cinder before she was deported.”

  “Why Cinder?”

  “My mother’s life could have been summed up with the word ‘cinder’,” Cerené said. “She was always covered in ashes from the cinders and the fire she created—or the things she accidentally burned. My mother had even decided to call me Cinderella to make it sound more girlish.”

  “Then why is your name Cerené?” Shew asked, knowing the answer already.

  “Cerené means cinder in Italian,” Cerené said. “I also dream sometimes that my name is Ember. I don’t know why, but I like Cerené best.”

  “Ember is a derivative of cinder, ashes, and fire,” Shew commented. “So when did your mother die in Murano?”

  “Sometime after she gave birth to me,” Cerené said. “I don’t remember much in Murano, just that that single image of the ship taking me away.”