The Hand Which Hides the Sun
Title: The Hand Which Hides the Sun
Story Continuity: The Lethean Glamour
Flavors: Gingerbread 1: once upon a time, Mango 9: your attention, please, Rhubarb 19: we have ways of making you talk
Topping/Extra: Hot Fudge (Helene, Largessa), Rainbow Sprinkles (for Hedda, Erling, Ingrid, and Dorothea), Cherry (story told as a mother telling a bedtime story), Malt (Sara: birthday: That was quite a show / Very entertaining / But it's over now / Go on and take a bow - Take a Bow, Glee cover)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Librarianism claims all stories have basis in truth. This may be true, but it's not a biography or a history lesson Hedda's telling tonight.
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - Oscar Wilde.
Tonight was the night, and Hedda had been dreading it since Ingrid had first asked to hear the tale following Lady Zahl's first visit. It had been a mistake to wait as long as she did; now it wasn't just Ingrid, but Erling and Dorothea, both so terribly young, still so obviously fond of her.
Tonight was the night. It had to be. They would need to hear Hedda tell it; it would be a pointless betrayal of trust for Erling or Dorothea to hear it from Lady Zahl, as Ingrid had, or gods forbid it if they heard from someone totally unrelated.
Tonight would be the night.
"Mama talks pretty, but I never understand what she means," Dorothea said. "There's...symbols, and such. Morals. And it's just, I'm nine."
"I'll translate if you like," said Ingrid. "I had to do three pages on fables last year to get into preparatory school, which means I'm the queen of figuring stuff out. And failing that, pretending to figure stuff out. I honestly have no idea what a fox would want with a grape when he could just kill a rabbit."
"Why would you wonder that?" Dorothea asked, voice pitched so that only certain dogs could truly appreciate the sound. "Bunnies are adorable!"
Ingrid wisely decided not to tell the girl just what had been in last night's risotto. Erling, being not so much stupid as kind of a jerk, opened his mouth to tell Dorothea for her, but Ingrid threw a pillow at his head.
"Ingrid," Hedda sighed, because this shit was just not what she'd signed up for. Ingrid shrugged inexpressively and said, "It's his pillow and his big thick skull that's been using it. I heard a rumor that stupid is communicable through dandruff, and what would I do if I caught his brand of stupid?"
"Well then, you'd be stupid enough not to care, wouldn't you," Hedda said. "Not that there's much wrong with that! I don't mind that you're a bit slow, Erling, you always get where you intend and that's all that counts."
Erling scowled, which could have meant any number of things, but was mostly what passed for his "when I grow up I'm going to destroy the world, I swear to Adanvari" face. Which, Hedda noticed, seemed to be his default blank expression. She really hoped she was reading him wrong.
Hedda sighed, knowing this was about as comfortable as her children would make themselves, and began: "There was a time when I was but a girl in this very village, and that was as long ago as you may joke and as short as I may imagine. The truth is that time has passed me, as He will one day for you, and though I've lived through interesting times I have forgotten more things than you will learn in all your schooling. Only the very strangest and most powerful memories remain, and as such I will always remember that it was both once upon a time and just the other day that there lived in Berge a girl named Helene Mossing, beautiful as a fairytale princess and cunning as its queen, who would have swallowed the sun to gain its longevity and brilliance. And in a way, that was precisely what she tried to do."
"There was a beautiful girl genius who lived in town some time ago, and she was crazier than the rat lady who shouts inapplicable sexist slurs at her son outside your primary," Ingrid said, and the confused glaze left Dorothea's eyes.
"People have passed the blame for her madness around like a celebrant fruitcake, because adults can be equally as irresponsible as they scold their sons and daughters for being, but most agree that it began on the girl's naming day. We do not name children right away in order to immunize them from the machinations of the shadowkin of the Unseelie. For so long now we've had so little to fear from names that sometimes we forget their power. Even gods are subject to the power of names, and it's one of the few things they're openly humble about."
"So when the Mossings named their first child Helene, the name of the vessel which killed the first god, naturally she more than lost any safety the delay had granted her. The gods sent just one of their own to deal with Helene; a half breed, part god and part human, weaker than any full god but twice as deadly. He came to the Mossings' cathedral as swiftly and grandly as a bolt of lightning, armed with his terrible quicksilver brain and stars many and strong enough to burn the life from twenty like him. He flaunted none of these weapons; he claimed that he had chased a demon fledge into the cathedral, and that she'd fled into the body of young Helene - he promised to see to the safety of the child, that he only wanted to expunge the demon, and the girl's parents believed him. And the demigod took Helene into his arms and felt for the lifelines inside her head, intending to slice them from her body to strangle her soul, when he touched upon her possibilities and noticed something which would benefit him and fulfill his duties."
"There's a moral here," Ingrid said to Dorothea. "Don't let strange men and/or gods hold your babies, because they might touch their intangible essences inappropriately."
"How do you touch intangible essences appropriately?" Dorothea said. Ingrid hummed contemplatively, ignoring Hedda's pointed coughing, and said, "I think there's some legal technicality that says you need to both be consenting adults thinking very seriously about marriage. It's kind of hard to arrest a god and remain person-shaped longer than a few seconds after saying "you have the right to silence," though."
"The halfling was the son of the Fate of Tuesday and a forgotten emperor of Belmorn, and so he was able to leave the parents with nothing but peace in the false security his performance had given them and their freshly-named daughter, while the young child Helene was left to cry over the twisted, unnatural shapes growing in her soul."
"Time passed, as swiftly and craftily as a thief at market; the child Helene grew into a young woman, and I was there alongside her, my big sister, and I watched with pride as the obnoxious little hellion grew into a much taller, shapelier obnoxious hellion. Her hair was dark as her mother's was brightly golden, her eyes large and blue and alight with good humor. She was an unshakable optimist, and though she was not as quick to love her fellows as she was herself, when she liked you, you'd never want for a smile or contentment. She was the finest actress to have ever worked Thestris Hall, though she quickly grew tired of drama and tragedy and, taking with her Vera Zahl, a beautiful and warm woman but not yet a lady of the dukedom, she began to innovate musical comedies. She and Vera often played off each other so well that it wasn't really a true surprise when they began regularly playing each other's romantic interests, and fewer still were surprised when it became common knowledge that the two had been lovers for longer than they had been performing opposite each other. Berge, of course, was aflame with shocked whispers whenever Vera and Helene walked around in public together, and yet everyone claimed they knew there had been something between the two, although Vera had seldom been to our town then. Berge has always and forever been the very soul of a small town, and we have sensational gossips enough to double as a major fuel source for transits to last us the next twenty years if we ever need to."
"Helene and Vera found it more amusing than anything else; they would loudly proclaim their love in the most overwrought ways possible, and just as loudly ask after the closest dark alley or bedding store."
"It was November when the Nouvelle Dramaturgie Review found out about Vera's mystic heritage, and work almost immediately vanished. Berge called it karma; Helene called it injustice, and refused to work unless Vera was likewise employed. They moved together to a small house several doors down from this very place, and Helene had returned a very quiet, still woman unless Vera was with her. She had stopped acting with Vera and had begun to act for her."
"Helene was depressed, but she didn't want Lady Zahl to know," Ingrid said, remembering herself. Erling, who realized with disgust that he'd actually been entranced, exhaled noisily and asked, "Well, why can't she just say that?"
"She likes the sound of her voice when she thinks she's being clever," Ingrid said. "Sounds like bells and zithers and angels all mixed together to her. I think she sounds more like a very smug crow, actually, but it takes all sorts. Or so I've been told."
Hedda decided to just be done with it and mentally arranged for Ingrid to draw laundry duty for the foreseeable future. "I'm telling a story here."
"Really?" said Ingrid, and then, "Well, you better get on with it, then."
"Thank you," Hedda said, overly gracious, and paused to collect herself.
"Helene took care of Vera, and...burned. She burned for the stage, for the rapt audience. Domesticity was an utterly repulsive thing that made her head spin and her teeth ache. She needed to excel, and to be acknowledged; she wasn't born to suffer mediocrity. Her days were spent looking for work for her and her Vera, intermittently shutting herself in with the Librarian sanctuary's forbidden collection, looking to invoke a deity who would listen and grant her and Vera immutable glory. And still she came home to her lover every night, to their countryside currant pie utopia hell, and when the lights dimmed every night Helene slept with a restless inferno hot and raging inside her, and it burned what it touched - nothing at all. She felt mad enough to tear apart the heavens to bleed the gods, and she was desperate enough to try it if only she could learn how."
"When Largessa, the master goddess of destiny, demanded that Helene bear her Mark, there was a mere gnat's sigh between the command to kneel snapping from Largessa and Helene falling to her knees."
"You know what I did to your Maestro of Brevikstad," Largessa said, honestly uncertain, for she'd not seen anyone submit eagerly. "What do you see when you look at me? Don't you shudder to think what I can do to you, how I can bend you into an abstract horror?"
"I see that your hand is outstretched," Helene said. "I know that very hand once stole the sun from our skies as punishment for changing history forever - what was only a bad headache for you. But I also know that the hand which hides the sun may also return it. I'll burn forever if you let me."
And Largessa, impressed, branded Helene with her power. She both succeeded and failed miserably. Helene's wires had been crossed the day she was named, and she was doomed for her parents' hubris."
"Moral: don't tick off or annoy the deities or they'll smite you or make you wish you were smote." Ingrid wondered if she could get away with calling them cosmic gangsters. It fit like a glove, as near as Ingrid could tell, but she did so immensely enjoy living. "The branding didn't fail, but the demi-god's meddling earlier screwed with the spell. Which means she became one of the shadowkin. It's the deliro that used to be human, right?"
"Why don't you let me tell the story?" Hedda said. "Largessa left Helene to her change alone, but didn't kill her; not everything that's broken is useless. Helene herself crawled home from where she was branded, and three days later made it to her ancestral home. Our father wouldn't claim or touch her, and our mother had died years before delivering a stillborn, and so I hosted her stay in that week. We're not mystic folk, like the Lady Zahl, and so transitioning into other forms feels the same for us as being ripped slowly in half and then being sewn back up without anesthesia."
"I can see everything," Helene muttered often. "I could cut you open and use your head like a sock puppet. On a stick. We did something like that in drama class once, Eli and I. I could see her, make her head the puppet. She's not actually using it, you know, and nobody I care about would mind. I could kill myself. It could save more lives than I can count right now. I could be a bigger hero than the Maestro of Brevikstad by merit of saved lives alone."
"You don't mean any of that," I told her, talking just so she wouldn't; Helene just smiled, dreamy and bright, and said, "You're so adorable when you're cliche. You couldn't ever not be. This could all go wrong in so many bizarre ways you probably haven't even thought of yet, but I love you here and now, Hedda."
"I needed to save her - she was my sister, and she was all I had when our mother died and I refused to speak to your grandfather - and I looked for a cure until it was too late. The gossips caught wind of what happened to Helene, and they were hungry for more. She was hounded by women who oozed false sympathy and returned to their circles with vicious delight, and though she asked after Vera, her lover never came by. I can't guess what she must have been thinking. I don't want to. But the day did come when she snapped - one day she was absently fending off a gossip hound from the Nouvelle Dramaturgie, the next she snapped back to reality, but it was like she was playing a character. This was not my sister's face; her eyes glinted, jagged and bright like a serrated knife, her grin wide and wound-like and terrible."
"You know, your choices are quite simple, miss," Helene said. "You can leave, and I'll hunt you down when I have the inclination, or you can stay and ask the same questions as the rest of town and I'll tear your face off with a rusty screwdriver and sell it to a taxidermist down in the Shambles."
"The reporter turned to leave, but Helene killed her anyway. She killed so many that Dag Beddor isn't even among the first ten names most people list off when naming her victims..."
"Dorothea and Erling are asleep, mom," Ingrid said. "I know the rest. Helene's the Laughing Ripper, isn't she?"
Hedda stood, and stretched, but turned as if she didn't hear Ingrid. "Good night, daughter. Dream easy."
"Did it really happen, mom?" Ingrid said, quietly. "Did it happen like you wrote in the books?"
Hedda winced, and though she had her doubts about the goddesses of the Word, Hedda had to love anything which allowed her to tell her daughter, "In each fiction there is truth, and in each truth lies fiction," and to then be completely in the right to say nothing more.
The most absolute truth of the story is this: both once upon a time and just the other day there was a girl named Helene Mossing, beautiful as a fairytale princess and cunning as its queen. She took the hand of Fate which hid the sun and she was scorched to the dregs of her, and her brilliance became blackened as all that was light and fair in her turned to ash, and though she tried to hold everything to her nothing stayed , though Hedda clung to the ghost of goodness she saw and the sister she'd grown with. But that was so very long ago, and Hedda, who for all her sweetness was terribly myopic, used her pen to cast the eyes of her village on the monster Helene was turning into for spare change, and the power of her words and the faith of the many suffocated the fire, turned it dark and turned it cold, and as the blood tie Helene most treasured soured and perished in its veins, it was the monster that Helene ultimately became.
Story Continuity: The Lethean Glamour
Flavors: Gingerbread 1: once upon a time, Mango 9: your attention, please, Rhubarb 19: we have ways of making you talk
Topping/Extra: Hot Fudge (Helene, Largessa), Rainbow Sprinkles (for Hedda, Erling, Ingrid, and Dorothea), Cherry (story told as a mother telling a bedtime story), Malt (Sara: birthday: That was quite a show / Very entertaining / But it's over now / Go on and take a bow - Take a Bow, Glee cover)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Librarianism claims all stories have basis in truth. This may be true, but it's not a biography or a history lesson Hedda's telling tonight.
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - Oscar Wilde.
Tonight was the night, and Hedda had been dreading it since Ingrid had first asked to hear the tale following Lady Zahl's first visit. It had been a mistake to wait as long as she did; now it wasn't just Ingrid, but Erling and Dorothea, both so terribly young, still so obviously fond of her.
Tonight was the night. It had to be. They would need to hear Hedda tell it; it would be a pointless betrayal of trust for Erling or Dorothea to hear it from Lady Zahl, as Ingrid had, or gods forbid it if they heard from someone totally unrelated.
Tonight would be the night.
"Mama talks pretty, but I never understand what she means," Dorothea said. "There's...symbols, and such. Morals. And it's just, I'm nine."
"I'll translate if you like," said Ingrid. "I had to do three pages on fables last year to get into preparatory school, which means I'm the queen of figuring stuff out. And failing that, pretending to figure stuff out. I honestly have no idea what a fox would want with a grape when he could just kill a rabbit."
"Why would you wonder that?" Dorothea asked, voice pitched so that only certain dogs could truly appreciate the sound. "Bunnies are adorable!"
Ingrid wisely decided not to tell the girl just what had been in last night's risotto. Erling, being not so much stupid as kind of a jerk, opened his mouth to tell Dorothea for her, but Ingrid threw a pillow at his head.
"Ingrid," Hedda sighed, because this shit was just not what she'd signed up for. Ingrid shrugged inexpressively and said, "It's his pillow and his big thick skull that's been using it. I heard a rumor that stupid is communicable through dandruff, and what would I do if I caught his brand of stupid?"
"Well then, you'd be stupid enough not to care, wouldn't you," Hedda said. "Not that there's much wrong with that! I don't mind that you're a bit slow, Erling, you always get where you intend and that's all that counts."
Erling scowled, which could have meant any number of things, but was mostly what passed for his "when I grow up I'm going to destroy the world, I swear to Adanvari" face. Which, Hedda noticed, seemed to be his default blank expression. She really hoped she was reading him wrong.
Hedda sighed, knowing this was about as comfortable as her children would make themselves, and began: "There was a time when I was but a girl in this very village, and that was as long ago as you may joke and as short as I may imagine. The truth is that time has passed me, as He will one day for you, and though I've lived through interesting times I have forgotten more things than you will learn in all your schooling. Only the very strangest and most powerful memories remain, and as such I will always remember that it was both once upon a time and just the other day that there lived in Berge a girl named Helene Mossing, beautiful as a fairytale princess and cunning as its queen, who would have swallowed the sun to gain its longevity and brilliance. And in a way, that was precisely what she tried to do."
"There was a beautiful girl genius who lived in town some time ago, and she was crazier than the rat lady who shouts inapplicable sexist slurs at her son outside your primary," Ingrid said, and the confused glaze left Dorothea's eyes.
"People have passed the blame for her madness around like a celebrant fruitcake, because adults can be equally as irresponsible as they scold their sons and daughters for being, but most agree that it began on the girl's naming day. We do not name children right away in order to immunize them from the machinations of the shadowkin of the Unseelie. For so long now we've had so little to fear from names that sometimes we forget their power. Even gods are subject to the power of names, and it's one of the few things they're openly humble about."
"So when the Mossings named their first child Helene, the name of the vessel which killed the first god, naturally she more than lost any safety the delay had granted her. The gods sent just one of their own to deal with Helene; a half breed, part god and part human, weaker than any full god but twice as deadly. He came to the Mossings' cathedral as swiftly and grandly as a bolt of lightning, armed with his terrible quicksilver brain and stars many and strong enough to burn the life from twenty like him. He flaunted none of these weapons; he claimed that he had chased a demon fledge into the cathedral, and that she'd fled into the body of young Helene - he promised to see to the safety of the child, that he only wanted to expunge the demon, and the girl's parents believed him. And the demigod took Helene into his arms and felt for the lifelines inside her head, intending to slice them from her body to strangle her soul, when he touched upon her possibilities and noticed something which would benefit him and fulfill his duties."
"There's a moral here," Ingrid said to Dorothea. "Don't let strange men and/or gods hold your babies, because they might touch their intangible essences inappropriately."
"How do you touch intangible essences appropriately?" Dorothea said. Ingrid hummed contemplatively, ignoring Hedda's pointed coughing, and said, "I think there's some legal technicality that says you need to both be consenting adults thinking very seriously about marriage. It's kind of hard to arrest a god and remain person-shaped longer than a few seconds after saying "you have the right to silence," though."
"The halfling was the son of the Fate of Tuesday and a forgotten emperor of Belmorn, and so he was able to leave the parents with nothing but peace in the false security his performance had given them and their freshly-named daughter, while the young child Helene was left to cry over the twisted, unnatural shapes growing in her soul."
"Time passed, as swiftly and craftily as a thief at market; the child Helene grew into a young woman, and I was there alongside her, my big sister, and I watched with pride as the obnoxious little hellion grew into a much taller, shapelier obnoxious hellion. Her hair was dark as her mother's was brightly golden, her eyes large and blue and alight with good humor. She was an unshakable optimist, and though she was not as quick to love her fellows as she was herself, when she liked you, you'd never want for a smile or contentment. She was the finest actress to have ever worked Thestris Hall, though she quickly grew tired of drama and tragedy and, taking with her Vera Zahl, a beautiful and warm woman but not yet a lady of the dukedom, she began to innovate musical comedies. She and Vera often played off each other so well that it wasn't really a true surprise when they began regularly playing each other's romantic interests, and fewer still were surprised when it became common knowledge that the two had been lovers for longer than they had been performing opposite each other. Berge, of course, was aflame with shocked whispers whenever Vera and Helene walked around in public together, and yet everyone claimed they knew there had been something between the two, although Vera had seldom been to our town then. Berge has always and forever been the very soul of a small town, and we have sensational gossips enough to double as a major fuel source for transits to last us the next twenty years if we ever need to."
"Helene and Vera found it more amusing than anything else; they would loudly proclaim their love in the most overwrought ways possible, and just as loudly ask after the closest dark alley or bedding store."
"It was November when the Nouvelle Dramaturgie Review found out about Vera's mystic heritage, and work almost immediately vanished. Berge called it karma; Helene called it injustice, and refused to work unless Vera was likewise employed. They moved together to a small house several doors down from this very place, and Helene had returned a very quiet, still woman unless Vera was with her. She had stopped acting with Vera and had begun to act for her."
"Helene was depressed, but she didn't want Lady Zahl to know," Ingrid said, remembering herself. Erling, who realized with disgust that he'd actually been entranced, exhaled noisily and asked, "Well, why can't she just say that?"
"She likes the sound of her voice when she thinks she's being clever," Ingrid said. "Sounds like bells and zithers and angels all mixed together to her. I think she sounds more like a very smug crow, actually, but it takes all sorts. Or so I've been told."
Hedda decided to just be done with it and mentally arranged for Ingrid to draw laundry duty for the foreseeable future. "I'm telling a story here."
"Really?" said Ingrid, and then, "Well, you better get on with it, then."
"Thank you," Hedda said, overly gracious, and paused to collect herself.
"Helene took care of Vera, and...burned. She burned for the stage, for the rapt audience. Domesticity was an utterly repulsive thing that made her head spin and her teeth ache. She needed to excel, and to be acknowledged; she wasn't born to suffer mediocrity. Her days were spent looking for work for her and her Vera, intermittently shutting herself in with the Librarian sanctuary's forbidden collection, looking to invoke a deity who would listen and grant her and Vera immutable glory. And still she came home to her lover every night, to their countryside currant pie utopia hell, and when the lights dimmed every night Helene slept with a restless inferno hot and raging inside her, and it burned what it touched - nothing at all. She felt mad enough to tear apart the heavens to bleed the gods, and she was desperate enough to try it if only she could learn how."
"When Largessa, the master goddess of destiny, demanded that Helene bear her Mark, there was a mere gnat's sigh between the command to kneel snapping from Largessa and Helene falling to her knees."
"You know what I did to your Maestro of Brevikstad," Largessa said, honestly uncertain, for she'd not seen anyone submit eagerly. "What do you see when you look at me? Don't you shudder to think what I can do to you, how I can bend you into an abstract horror?"
"I see that your hand is outstretched," Helene said. "I know that very hand once stole the sun from our skies as punishment for changing history forever - what was only a bad headache for you. But I also know that the hand which hides the sun may also return it. I'll burn forever if you let me."
And Largessa, impressed, branded Helene with her power. She both succeeded and failed miserably. Helene's wires had been crossed the day she was named, and she was doomed for her parents' hubris."
"Moral: don't tick off or annoy the deities or they'll smite you or make you wish you were smote." Ingrid wondered if she could get away with calling them cosmic gangsters. It fit like a glove, as near as Ingrid could tell, but she did so immensely enjoy living. "The branding didn't fail, but the demi-god's meddling earlier screwed with the spell. Which means she became one of the shadowkin. It's the deliro that used to be human, right?"
"Why don't you let me tell the story?" Hedda said. "Largessa left Helene to her change alone, but didn't kill her; not everything that's broken is useless. Helene herself crawled home from where she was branded, and three days later made it to her ancestral home. Our father wouldn't claim or touch her, and our mother had died years before delivering a stillborn, and so I hosted her stay in that week. We're not mystic folk, like the Lady Zahl, and so transitioning into other forms feels the same for us as being ripped slowly in half and then being sewn back up without anesthesia."
"I can see everything," Helene muttered often. "I could cut you open and use your head like a sock puppet. On a stick. We did something like that in drama class once, Eli and I. I could see her, make her head the puppet. She's not actually using it, you know, and nobody I care about would mind. I could kill myself. It could save more lives than I can count right now. I could be a bigger hero than the Maestro of Brevikstad by merit of saved lives alone."
"You don't mean any of that," I told her, talking just so she wouldn't; Helene just smiled, dreamy and bright, and said, "You're so adorable when you're cliche. You couldn't ever not be. This could all go wrong in so many bizarre ways you probably haven't even thought of yet, but I love you here and now, Hedda."
"I needed to save her - she was my sister, and she was all I had when our mother died and I refused to speak to your grandfather - and I looked for a cure until it was too late. The gossips caught wind of what happened to Helene, and they were hungry for more. She was hounded by women who oozed false sympathy and returned to their circles with vicious delight, and though she asked after Vera, her lover never came by. I can't guess what she must have been thinking. I don't want to. But the day did come when she snapped - one day she was absently fending off a gossip hound from the Nouvelle Dramaturgie, the next she snapped back to reality, but it was like she was playing a character. This was not my sister's face; her eyes glinted, jagged and bright like a serrated knife, her grin wide and wound-like and terrible."
"You know, your choices are quite simple, miss," Helene said. "You can leave, and I'll hunt you down when I have the inclination, or you can stay and ask the same questions as the rest of town and I'll tear your face off with a rusty screwdriver and sell it to a taxidermist down in the Shambles."
"The reporter turned to leave, but Helene killed her anyway. She killed so many that Dag Beddor isn't even among the first ten names most people list off when naming her victims..."
"Dorothea and Erling are asleep, mom," Ingrid said. "I know the rest. Helene's the Laughing Ripper, isn't she?"
Hedda stood, and stretched, but turned as if she didn't hear Ingrid. "Good night, daughter. Dream easy."
"Did it really happen, mom?" Ingrid said, quietly. "Did it happen like you wrote in the books?"
Hedda winced, and though she had her doubts about the goddesses of the Word, Hedda had to love anything which allowed her to tell her daughter, "In each fiction there is truth, and in each truth lies fiction," and to then be completely in the right to say nothing more.
The most absolute truth of the story is this: both once upon a time and just the other day there was a girl named Helene Mossing, beautiful as a fairytale princess and cunning as its queen. She took the hand of Fate which hid the sun and she was scorched to the dregs of her, and her brilliance became blackened as all that was light and fair in her turned to ash, and though she tried to hold everything to her nothing stayed , though Hedda clung to the ghost of goodness she saw and the sister she'd grown with. But that was so very long ago, and Hedda, who for all her sweetness was terribly myopic, used her pen to cast the eyes of her village on the monster Helene was turning into for spare change, and the power of her words and the faith of the many suffocated the fire, turned it dark and turned it cold, and as the blood tie Helene most treasured soured and perished in its veins, it was the monster that Helene ultimately became.