The Snow Queen

The First Story tells us about a special mirror and what happened when it got broken into many little pieces.

Let me tell you the beginning of this story because, by the time we finish it, we will learn a lot about a really mean and mischievous creature called a hobgoblin. He was one of the worst ones around because he was a real demon. One day, when he was feeling very playful, he created a special mirror. This mirror had a magical ability: it could make everything good and beautiful that it reflected appear very tiny, almost disappearing. But at the same time, it made all the things that were not valuable or bad look even bigger and worse than they really were. When the mirror was used, it made the most beautiful views look like mushy spinach, and the people’s appearances became very strange. They seemed to be standing upside down and had no bodies. Their faces were so twisted that no one could recognize them, and even a single freckle on the face appeared to cover the entire nose and mouth. The demon found this very funny. Whenever someone had a kind or good thought, the mirror would show it in a wrong way, and the demon would laugh at his clever creation. Everyone who attended the demon’s school, because yes, he had a school, started spreading stories about the amazing things they had seen. They said that thanks to the mirror, people could finally see the true appearance of the world and humanity. They carried the mirror with them wherever they went, and soon enough, there wasn’t a single place or group of people that hadn’t been observed through this twisted mirror. They were so curious that they even wanted to fly up to heaven with the mirror to see the angels. But the higher they went, the slipperier the mirror became, and they could hardly hold on to it. Eventually, it slipped from their hands, fell to the ground, and shattered into millions of tiny pieces. However, this made things even worse because now the broken fragments of the mirror caused more sadness and trouble than before. Some of the pieces were as tiny as a grain of sand, and they flew all around the world, reaching every country. Sometimes, these tiny little pieces would accidentally fly into someone’s eye without them even knowing it. From that moment on, their vision became distorted, or they could only see the negative side of things. Even though the fragments were very small, they still had the same power as the whole mirror. In a few cases, some people even had a fragment of the mirror inside their hearts, and that was really scary because their hearts turned cold, as cold as a lump of ice. Some of the broken pieces were big enough to be used as window panes, but it would have been really sad to look at our friends through them because everything would appear distorted. Other pieces were turned into glasses, but wearing them was terrible because people couldn't see things correctly or fairly. The wicked demon found all of this very funny and laughed so hard that it made his sides shake. He was delighted to see the trouble he had caused. There were still many small fragments of glass floating in the air, and now I will tell you what happened with one of them.