Cinderella Dressed in Ashes

18 Rainbow’s End

Although Shew believed Cerené was the Phoenix, the knowledge didn’t answer all of her questions yet.

Who was the Phoenix, really? Why did she have to look for her?

At least, the dream made much more sense now. This dream wasn’t about the Queen wanting to kill her. Loki used the Phoenix Incubator because Carmilla wanted to take Shew back to her relationship with Cerené, thinking Cerené would lead her to the Phoenix.

What was the point in reminding Shew she had a dear friend in her childhood called Cerené, and why didn’t she remember that part of her childhood?

She had figured out Cerené was Cinderella. That wasn’t the hard part. A girl covered in ashes, lived with a stepmother and stepsisters, slept in a dark room next to cinders, and had one precious glass shoe she couldn’t live without. It had to be her, only she wasn’t the kind you’d expect to read about in a picture book in the Waking World. Cerené was the real flesh and blood Cinderella. She had a feeling that whatever she’d learned about Cerené was trivial.

Cerené wasn’t the kind of girl who dreamed of attending the king’s ball and meeting the prince. She was not waiting for a Godmother to dress her in the most beautiful dress and send her a pumpkin coach. She was a young girl who had surpassed all the evil bestowed upon her by enjoying the one thing she did best, the Forbidden Art.

The Art was Cinderella’s getaway, the computer game boys played escaping into their own imaginary world, the embroidery medieval woman excelled at as they wove threads into canvasses of beauty. The Art was Cerené’s drug that took the pain away. It was her hope to live another day; it was the glass shoe she’d left behind, the way Hansel and Gretel left their breadcrumbs, so happiness could retrace her steps and find her one day.

Still, Shew wondered who saved her each time she was about to die. Was it Cerené? Was Cerené capable of creating fire? If so, why didn’t she tell Shew about it? If Cerené could create fire they wouldn’t have had to go to the furnace in Candy House. It couldn’t be Cerené.

Shew thought of Bianca again. There was no other explanation. Bianca was the person in the hood who chased Shew. She was Cerené’s guardian angel, and she burned whoever hurt her daughter.

However, that would only explain what happened near Candy House, Bianca saving her daughter from Baba Yaga and burning the place down, but who burned the Wall of Thorns? The wall was no threat to Cerené. Was it possible that Bianca protected Shew, maybe because she wanted Shew to take care of her daughter?

There were too many questions leading nowhere. The one thing that made sense was that Cerené was one of the Lost Seven Shew had split her heart with, which was also a useless piece of information.

Shew had no recollection of how she split her heart or how she did it. She knew she split her heart because of a solitary memory of the day Carmilla cursed her and trapped her in the Schloss after failing to find the Lost Seven. Carmilla had been asking her about the Lost Seven and how she managed to split her heart with them, not knowing that Shew didn’t remember doing so in the first place. Shew had no explanation why parts of her memory were lost.

Now, at the Rainbow’s End, Shew watched Cerené play with her blowpipe at the reservoir, which was a lake of pure light, shimmering with the main seven colors of a rainbow. This was the place Cerené had promised to take her to see from the beginning, the place they’d gone through hell and back to reach, the only place where the Forbidden Art could be colored. And it was beautiful.

Cerené had showed Shew how she dipped molten glass into the colored lake of light. All she had to do was pick the color she desired. Cerené loved a mesh of colors so most creations came out the color of rainbows.

She also created a huge butterfly with flapping fiery wings, but then killed it when she was out of breath. Cerené’s most amazing creation was smaller butterflies she blew from her pipe, fluttering their wings into the world, as if the blowpipe had been their cocoons. The Butterflies had a long lifespan, not demanding Cerené’s continuous breathing because they were such light creatures. It took them about ten minutes, fluttering freely in the lake before their light dimmed and they turned to stone and fell into the lake.

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 someone 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.