The body of a girl lies at the base of a tower so tall someone should have noticed it sooner, her hair so long you'd think it had never been cut. She will never see the world as she once dreamed.
Two children can't fall asleep their first night back home. Memories of candy, of traps, of cooking flesh, running, running, running through the woods. How can they ever be the same again?
A mangled body washes up on the shore. No one there recognizes the corpse of a young woman once loved by a prince, all too briefly. Her mouth mutilated, her legs scarred and broken, her hair a vibrant and beautiful red, her flesh bloated from drowning. In this state, no one would ever guess that the sea was once her home.
A bitter old witch cleans up the shards of a mirror, the emptiness in her chest still present even after everything she's done out of jealousy. Did the girl really have to die? It didn't make the witch feel any better. It only made her feel more wretched, and she seethes as she bites into an apple.
A wolf has been torn asunder mere minutes too late. Though it's barely begun digesting, the meat is barely recognizable as human, much less that of a little girl or her grandmother. The poacher knows whose house this is, but he doesn't know who to tell that their daughter and their mother are both dead.
A woman weeps over the body of a monster she had befriended, or maybe even loved. She'll never know for sure what she felt for it. She digs a grave in the rose garden, and prays that even a beast might be allowed into heaven.
A new queen insists on digging her stepsisters' graves herself. Her stepmother has been properly banished, but her sisters didn't last long, the wounds on their feet left to fester until infection claimed them. They were awful to her, but she understood them better than anyone else. She's the only one left who can truly mourn them.
The body of a knight is impaled by thorns so sharp they pierce through his armor, as if to punish him for daring to approach the fortress they're wreathed around. He was called here by something not seen for nearly a century, and it led him to his end. Somewhere inside, a dead woman dreams as an impossibly constant stream of blood flows from a single puncture at the tip of her finger, and the roots drink it up greedily.
