It is almost midnight. It is fitting.  High up above, the wind drives the clouds racing across the sky. The silver moonlight flickers maddening upon the tallest tower, of a
darkened castle, where the wicked queen lives. She is about to die.
The wicked queen stared at herself in the mirror… She was beautiful; there was neither a wrinkle nor a blemish to indicate her age. Her rivals, those who had dared to be 'the fairest of them all' had long since faded and died. In the beginning she had been foolish, spending her time with such things as poisonous apples, when all she needed was time; with time everything faded.
She cussed.
Of course she knew that death was unavoidable, it came to everyone. Even the fact that she was about to be killed did not bother her; it was all part of being a wicked queen. Whether she was pushed into an oven by two ungrateful children or beheaded (as the case would be) by her faithful servant, was irrelevant. It was tradition. What aggravated her now and had done so for such a long time, was the fact that everything she had achieved and striven for would be forgotten. What was the point of it all? Why be a wicked queen if everything you did died with you? It made no sense. All those lonely nights sitting around a bubbling hot cauldron in the company of fat rats and hairy spiders, were they for nothing? She too could have chosen to dance with the handsome princes, laughing at their jokes while hoping one day, one of them would ride out to rescue her.
The queen sneered.
Rescue her? From whom? She had invented the idea. She had made being a wicked queen what it was: something more than tyrannical.  She had made them legendary. There was not a royal family for miles around that did not fear her. How many kings had lost a foolish son to a hungry stork? How many beautiful and innocent maidens had grown old and unwed, simply because they were too vain to let their hair grow long? No one seemed to appreciate the genius and complexity of her magic. If nothing else then the spell that made not one, but seven dwarfs sing deserved to get her remembered forever.
Undeterred she stared in and through the mirror, out into the future.
Two hundred years to be exact, where the cause of her demise would begin. For there, in a distant land, in another kingdom, a child would be born. A girl, whose destiny it seemed was to become the greatest, wicked queen of all. Now with but a hard boiled egg's worth of sand left in her life-timer, she called upon the spirit within the mirror. Something glittered in the corner of her room.
'Go away,' she hissed, more to herself than to the black-cloaked figure who stood there, whetting the edge of a scythe. She knew, of course, that he wasn't really there, but still, it irritated her. 'You're early. It's not my time yet. I've still got five minutes. Why don't you go and make yourself useful? You could cut the grass perhaps?' saying which she laughed, something she hadn't done in a long time.