There once were twelve princesses, who so frightened their father by wearing out the soles of their slippers each night in their locked room that he offered princes a kingdom for the secret and death for any prince, who failed to learn the truth.

Quite simply they danced every night with magic princes in a magic palace by a magic lake in a magic forest that they reached by a fairly normal staircase under a trap door in their room. Where the trapdoor or the forest or the lake or the palace came from wasn't a question the king bothered to ask before he boarded the trapdoor up and married the oldest princess off to the old soldier who had sussed out the situation. But then, that king was a great hero, two-thirds divine however that worked. He thought he had been blessed to live twelve lifetimes. That’s not quite what the Queen of the House of Dust had meant when she’d come to give the valley of the two rivers twelve blessings.

What those twelve blessings did, or how they loved, that’s a story that goes beyond the truth of tattered soles.

Crystal Carroll