Snow White and Rose Red

[Selah]

So! I'm trying a new method of shaking a story out of my head into existence - a method with neither rhyme nor reason, but a good deal better than perpetually dreaming in a state of paralysis. I've built my castles in the air - all that I must needs do is set the foundation beneath them.

Many thanks and many more cheerios,
Selah

Prose
Across from the Baker's Shop - Snow White's POV

If you have built a palace from wishes and the shapes you see in the clouds, and set this palace in place of the little room-for-rent above the baker's shop across from your own home, and imagined that one day luck would find you and take your hand and guide you up the shop’s back stairs and into that room, that castle, that fairy palace you have dreamt about since you were very little and came only to your mother's knee; if you have done all these things – built and placed and dreamt of your castle - and can see its every room and feel the softness of its pile rugs and smell the freshness of its novelty – a scent that is like the world after it has been washed in rain and dried in spring wind, a scent so intoxicating that it must be consumed if a body will live to see another day – ah, if you have done all this, then what sense is there in setting a floor beneath that palace? People will say that there must always be a foundation, for a house cannot stand upon air. Even shifting sand is better than air.

... to be con't and made into something reasonable...

Outline
Snow White and Rose Red— Two sisters live close until the dwarves and the bears come to break them apart. The red sister thrives while the white sister fades.

- Tasks (Scarborough Fair)
- Kelpies (fear the enemy)
- Greedy dwarves (Vino)
- Strong bears (Martin)
- White ladies, red ladies
- Snow White and Rose Red

One is Snow White and the other Rose Red, and they live in a forest with their strange, faery mother. Snow White is beauty and lives on fear; Rose Red is wild, impulsive, and hideous, with her misshapen body and wandering eye. Rose Red is the reason Snow White continues in this world.

Snow White dwells in a world of romance, filled with wicked stepmothers bearing her mother’s own face, seven dwarves assembled from the people who speak kindly to her, and ruled by a red faery with a wandering eye. Rose Red dwells among her fierce and deadly bears, questing and battling and outwitting greedy dwarves, and when she is not otherwise engaged, rescuing the white faery who must ask for salvation. The red faery is a goddess, a giant; the white faery is the mouse a bear must take care to never trample, to recall as a creeping speck beneath his strong paws; do not crush it! Watch out for it.

The dwarves and the bears – these thigng finally come in the end, and it is here the sisters are split. Red Rose blooms with adventure, and Snow White wilts with fear and all the sadness, hatred, jealousy, and sickness it brings. Snow White will cling to her romance as she stumbles into the world she denied; static and paralyzed, she will slam the door in the face of her ever-moving sister, before she falls back against it, slides down it, buries her face in her hands, and wails for all she has lost to terror.

She will never wail again.

...

She supposes the romantic things—a cottage upon the briny coast, with summer woods shading the yard; a husband to laugh her name and sweep her into his arms and kiss her heartily, until she cannot breathe, until his smell fills her nose and robs her of every other scent and sensation; a parade of cloudless days touched with winter and drunk on spring—she supposes these things are all she ever desires.